We are excited to announce that Dr. Nikki A. Greene ’89 will be the alumni speaker at this year’s A Taste of Newark to be held on Wednesday, November 2nd at NJPAC! Nikki is the Assistant Professor of the Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora in the Art Department at Wellesley College, currently on sabbathical to write a book. She currently holds the Richard D. Cohen Fellowship at the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University and also the Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship for the 2016-2017 academic year.
Before her arrival at Wellesley College in 2011, she held the Barra Foundation Fellowship in the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Samuel S. Fels Fund Fellowship for two summers in Philadelphia. She also taught at Swarthmore College, Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, Moore College of Art and Design, and Rutgers University at Camden.
Nikki graduated from Link Community School in 1989; she was School President! She earned a Wight Foundation scholarship to attend the Taft School, which provided her the opportunity to spend her junior year of high school in Barcelona, Spain on the School Year Abroad program.
After graduating from Taft in 1993, she went on to earn a BA with honors in Art History from Wesleyan University (1997), and her Masters (2003) and PhD (2010) in Art History from the University of Delaware. She is on sabbatical from Wellesley College to complete her book manuscript, Rhythms of Glue, Grease, Grime and Glitter: The Body in African American Art. The book features David Hammons, Renée Stout, Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos- Pons, and considers the intersection between the body, African American identity, and the musical possibilities of the visual.
Nikki has presented lectures and conducted research around the world, including in Chile, England, Cuba, Italy, and Mexico, along with many locations throughout the United States. In January 2013, she gave a series of lectures on African Art at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. Most recently she was in Johannesburg, South Africa to participate in the Black Portraitures III Conference, organized by NYU, Harvard, the Studio Museum in Harlem, among other entities, and where she will present, “Azúcar negra: The Sugar Works of María Magdalena Campos-Pons & Kara Walker.”
She lives with her husband, Simeon, and their two children Mia (9) and Xavier (6) in Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Although she has a colloquium paper to deliver on the morning of A Taste of Newark (November 2nd) , titled “‘The Flow of Is’: Of Funk and Art History,” for the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University, she could not turn down the opportunity to support Link Community Charter School at its annual fundraiser.
Photo by Richard Howard.
