Adrienne Childs

University of Maryland, College Park

July–August 2010

Adrienne L. Childs is curator at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Art and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland. She specializes in exoticism, race, and representation in eighteenth and nineteenth-century European fine and decorative arts, as well as twentieth-century art by African Americans. Recent publications include the book Margo Humphrey and the article “Sugarboxes and Blackamoors: Ornamental Blackness in Early Meissen Porcelain,” forthcoming in The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth Century Porcelain. She is currently co-editing a volume of essays entitled The Spectacle of Blackness: Representing Blacks in European Visual Culture of the Long Nineteenth-Century and writing the essay, “Henry O. Tanner and Fin-de-Siècle Orientalism” for the upcoming Henry Tanner retrospective exhibition catalog. Her project at the Clark Institute will focus on her book project, Ornamental Blackness: Black Bodies in European Decorative Arts 1700-1900.