Bridget R. Cooks

Beinecke Short-term Fellow

03/18/2023–06/17/2023

Bridget R. Cooks is a scholar and curator focused on the art of African Americans. She is professor of African American studies and art history at the University of California, Irvine where she teaches courses on Black artists, Black visual culture, museum criticism, and feminist theory. Cooks is the author of the book Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). Her work as a scholar and curator has been awarded and supported by the Ford Foundation, Southern Poverty Law Center, Getty Research Institute, California Humanities, the James A. Porter & David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History, and the Henry Luce Foundation. Her articles and essays can be found across interdisciplinary academic publications and art exhibition catalogues. At the Clark, Cooks will work on a project that explores how visual images used on the covers of jazz albums and Black-author fiction express the tension between enslavement and a concomitant freedom drive that is the condition of Black being.