CAA News Today

On February 17, 2022, Kirsten P. Buick was featured as the Distinguished Scholar at CAA’s 110th Annual Conference. The Distinguished Scholar session highlighted her career and provided an opportunity for dialogue between and among colleagues. Moderated by Annual Conference Chair, Theresa Avila, the session also featured presentations by a few of Buick’s students, including Shana Klein, Abbey Hepner, Annette M. Rodriguez, and Emmanuel Ortega. Watch the session in full below!

Established in 2001, the Distinguished Scholar Session illuminates and celebrates the contributions of senior art historians. The Annual Conference Committee identifies the distinguished scholar each year and each session typically brings together the distinguished scholar and a group of colleagues. The honoree’s involvement is fundamental to the series as a way of demonstrating a living tradition that gives voice to the continuities and ruptures that have shaped art-historical scholarship from the twentieth century into the new millennium.

We are inviting nominations for next year’s Distinguished Scholar at CAA’s 2023 Annual Conference in New York. Nominate individuals here!

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On her career, Buick explains:

“I identify as a scholar of the visual and material culture of the first British Empire, and the British diaspora in the US, Caribbean, and India. My teaching encompasses topics such as surveys of British Colonial and U.S. Art, American Landscape representation, African American Art, Pro- and Anti-Abolitionist Images in the Atlantic World; and seminars such as Photographing Jim Crow, 1890-1965, Patronizing Women: Taste and Collecting in the 19th and 20th Centuries, and The Victorian Nude: Representing Women, Men, Intersex, and Children. My research and teaching interests encompass histories of science, medicine, religion, as well as monuments, and the use of public space. Increasingly, I am interested in the racialization of mobility—what I characterize as critical mobility studies. I publish primarily in the realm of the history of African American art and its roots in US cultural formations. My first book, “Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject,” is a good example of how I wed my teaching and publication imperatives together with my challenge to art history and visual studies to be more and to do better. Ultimately, teaching is my passion; and I tell my students that job # 1 is surviving the damage, and job # 2 is to never concede the center.” 

Kirsten Pai Buick is a professor of art history at the University of New Mexico. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Michigan and was a SAAM Predoctoral Fellow and a Charles Gaius Bolin Fellow at Williams College. Buick is a recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize for African American Art and has published extensively on African American art, including her book Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Duke Univ. Press, 2010). Her second book, In Authenticity: “Kara Walker” and the Eidetics of Racism, is in progress.