Keisha Oliver

Clark Fellow

07/17/2023–08/25/2023

Keisha Oliver is assistant professor of art and design and the inaugural head of the Visual Arts and Design Department at the University of The Bahamas. She is currently pursuing a dual-title PhD in Art Education and African American and Diaspora Studies at Pennsylvania State University. At Penn State, she is also leading an African Art project for the Palmer Museum of Art. Her research and curatorial practice investigate Indigenous identity and cultural preservation across the African Diaspora, with a focus on the intersection of cultural formations and nation building in the post-colonial Caribbean. Oliver contributed to the first co-authored text dedicated to contemporary Caribbean Art, A to Z Caribbean Art. During her Fall 2021 Clark fellowship she began research on “Lost Voices in Bahamian Visual Culture,” an archival project that documented marginalized art histories of the 1950s. She returns to the Clark to develop an archival digital collection of Bahamian socio-political history that centers cultural modernity within the country's post-independence years.