Dr. Kellie Jones. Photos by Daniel Jackson for Embassy: Interactive.

2025 Distinguished Critic Lecture

Kellie Jones

Body / Knowledge

Dec 1, 2025, 6:30–8:00pm ET

In-person and livestreamed
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, The New School
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor, New York

Art historian and curator Dr. Kellie Jones delivers the 19th annual AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, presented in partnership with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. In this lecture, Jones reflects on the theoretical legacy and cultural production of Black women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, raising questions of intellectual lineage and material knowledge.

Scholar Brittney Cooper has argued that the best way to honor Black women’s intellectual and cultural production is not simply to admire and revere them but to dive into and sit with their work. And while we may not always agree with these figures, we need to trust them and take their theoretical imaginations seriously.

Jones extends this framing of trust, of sitting with the work, to a discussion of knowledge as a material entity, as something tangible. She engages with Cooper’s idea of “embodied discourse,” Black women centering the experiences of Black (primarily working class) women, as the basis of social thought. Intersecting identities (of gender and blackness) are not viewed as a burden but as energizing forces that open up possibilities for greater social and public responsibility and engagement, as well as hope. 

Historically, women’s thought has been overlooked. Yet it often does come into view later, often as organic intelligence or ascribed to others. Referencing scholars such as Julia Bryan-Wilson, Lisa Farrington, Linda Nochlin, and Deborah Willis, Jones asks: What would the long arc of art history look like through the lens of women’s lives? In this light, how does what we know now and how we know it differ today? In what ways does that take into our future? 

Dr. Kellie Jones is Hans Hofmann Professor of Modern Art in the Department of Art History & Archaeology and a Professor in the Department African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. Her research interests include African American and African Diaspora artists, Latinx and Latin American Artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory.

A member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Jones was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2016. Her writings have appeared in a multitude of exhibition catalogues and journals.  She is the author of two books published by Duke University Press, EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (2017). Her newest book is October Files: David Hammons (The MIT Press 2025). Dr. Jones has also worked as a curator for over four decades and has numerous major national and international exhibitions to her credit.