A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography
Advance registration is required.
This is event is being held online. After registering, connection information will be emailed to you.
Join us for an Art at Noon featuring a lecture that dovetails with the recent publication of A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography, the first book on the celebrated twentieth century African American photographer in decades. Through a reconsideration of Van Der Zee’s expansive oeuvre, Boone challenges distinctions between art photography and the kind of output common to commercial photography studios. Such an approach recasts our understanding not only of this canonical figure but of photography’s central role within the arc of quotidian Black life of the Harlem Renaissance era and beyond.
Image: James Van Der Zee, Florence Mills, singer & comedienne, 1927, Vintage gelatin silver print, 9 1/2 x 7 3/4 in., Museum Purchase, 2019.29.7.
The Art At Noon lectures are supported by the Behrend Family in memory of Rose Susan Hirschhorn Behrend, a former docent at the Academy and a great supporter of its education programs.
Emilie Boone is an assistant professor of African American/African Diaspora Arts in the Department of Art History at New York University. She researches and teaches the art and visual culture of the African Diaspora with a focus on vernacular photography and global encounters. She is the author of A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography (Duke University Press, 2023) which received a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, was honored as a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Awards John Leonard Prize, and was shortlisted for the MAAH Stone Book Award.
Her scholarship appears in Art Journal, American Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal, African Arts, and History of Photography. Additional essays are included in the first comprehensive publications on the history of Haitian photography and African Canadian art history, as well as museum catalogs by UCLA and the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received fellowships and grants from the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Fulbright.
Boone’s curatorial projects include an installation of photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art inspired by Wangechi Mutu’s sculptures, the creation of CUNY New York City College of Technology’s “Vernacular Photographs of Black Women Archive” from the Peter J. Cohen Collection, and multiyear contributions to The Ghetto Biennale, Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
In her current research, one project considers a historiographic reappraisal of Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s important 1986 survey Viewfinders: Black Women Photographers. She is also working on her second manuscript about the history of photography in Haiti, a project that examines how one island can illuminate the nature of photography’s sweeping force on various interlocutors across time. An article relating to this manuscript, “When Images in Haiti Fail: The Photograph of Charlemagne Péralte,” was published in 2022 and received the Art Journal Award. The advancement of this second manuscript project received support from The Clark Art Institute, The Andy Warhol Foundation, and the Perez Art Museum Miami Caribbean Cultural Institute.
Before joining NYU, Boone served as a faculty member at CUNY New York City College of Technology and as an elected faculty member to the Art History Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. She teaches three undergraduate courses each academic year in the Department of Art History and, through an associate appointment, one graduate course at the Institute of Fine Arts. For summer j-terms 2024 and 2025, she expanded her teaching to NYU Abu Dhabi. Boone’s pedagogy is influenced by her research; in courses, such as “Shifting Perspectives in African American Art” and “Centering Photography of the African Diaspora,” students consider the most pressing questions in art history.