Erica Moiah James is an art historian, curator, and associate professor based at The University of Miami. Her research centers on indigenous, modern, and contemporary art of the Caribbean, Americas, and African Diaspora. Select publications include Decolonizing Time: Nineteenth Century Haitian Portraiture and the Critique of Anachronism in Caribbean Art (Nka, 2019); "La luz de las cosas / The Light of Things" (El Museo del Barrio and N.A.M.E. Books, 2023) on the work of Cuban artist Juan Francisco Elso; “Prismatic Blackness: Art, Being and Aesthetics in the Global Caribbean,” Image of The Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art (Harvard University Press, 2024); and After Caliban: Caribbean Art in a Global Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2025).
Portrait of a young woman (2025)
In this special miniseries of In the Foreground, Erica Moiah James discusses the pastel Portrait of a Young Woman in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM), and reflects on what it means to search for the name of a historical individual in the archive. What tools might she, as a contemporary art historian, use to uncover the possible history and life of the woman shown, who remains unnamed? In her search, Erica makes a claim that this work is both necessary and that it begins to do reparative justice within a discipline that has all too frequently settled for assuming absence in the archive instead of doing the essential historical work to illuminate Black lives.
In the Foreground is available on iTunes, Spotify, and anywhere else you may listen to podcasts.
Episode 1: Curating History and Race with Judith Mann
Episode 2: Fashion and the Construction of Race with Amelia Rauser
Episode 3: Connoisseurship and the Work of Naming with Oliver Wunsch
Episode 4: Creole in the Archive with Roshini Kempadoo
