Huey Copeland

Huey Copeland’s work interrogates African/Diasporic, American and European artistic praxis from the late 18th-century to the present with an emphasis on articulations of blackness in the Western visual field. In his interdisciplinary research, Copeland focuses on the intersections of race and gender, subject and object, the aesthetic and its others from a black feminist perspective that reveals the biases and elisions of the discipline. Rather than assume the redemptive power of art, he aims to push history against the grain in exploring the constitutive relationship between the capture of black life and the production of cultural property in the modern transatlantic world.

An editor of OCTOBER, Copeland has published in numerous periodicals as well as in international exhibition catalogues and essay collections. His research interests are further reflected by his course offerings, which range from an introductory survey focused on Euro-American modernisms and their global entanglements to the graduate seminar “Visual Study after Intersectionality.” In addition, Copeland has served as primary advisor for dissertations on topics ranging from early 21st-century Chinese art’s literal and figurative haunting by socialist realist aesthetics to the intersection of the racial and the ecological in 19th-century Francophone Caribbean visual culture.

Alongside his work as a teacher, critic, editor, scholar, and administrator, Copeland has co-curated exhibitions such as Interstellar Low Ways (with Anthony Elms), and co-organized international conferences like “Afro-Pessimist Aesthetics” (with Sampada Aranke). Prior to arriving at Pitt, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania.