Alumna Lesley Wolff (PhD ’18) has published the new volume Nourish and Resist: Food and Feminisms in Contemporary Global Caribbean Art along with  co-editor Dr. Hannah Ryan (St. Olaf College). In this interdisciplinary and comparative volume, published by Yale University Press and available via the Art & Architecture ePortal, scholars and artists engage with foodways through decolonial and intersectional feminist lenses. The critical essays, interviews, original photo essays, and testimonies of this volume address the resonance of feminisms, the global Caribbean, tropical visuality, cookery, and consumption in contemporary art. The volume explores the work of myriad artists and makers such as María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Renluka Maharaj, Annalee Davis, Victoria Ravelo, Rachelle Mozman Solano, and Tania Bruguera. In addition to two chapters co-authored by Wolff, fellow FSU Art History alumna Jennifer Baez (PhD ’21) contributed a chapter that examines the creative practice of artist Joiri Minaya and its intersections with botanical knowledge.

Wolff invites interested readers to reach out (lwolff@ut.edu) for access to the digital book or for further information about this project.

This project is an extension of Wolff’s work on the visuality of foodways, which she first pursued in her graduate studies under the guidance of Dr. Michael Carrasco. Wolff’s single-authored book on the topic, entitled Culinary Palettes: Heritage as Food in Postrevolutionary Mexican Art, will be published by the University of Texas Press in Spring 2025. Currently, Wolff is Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Art and Design at the University of Tampa. For more about Wolff’s research: www.lesleywolff.com.

Alumna Emily Thames (PhD ’22) has published a new article, “‘‘Made by the Son of a Black’: José Campeche as Artist and Free Person of Color in Late Eighteenth-Century Puerto Rico.” Stemming from her dissertation on José Campeche, this essay examines the role of race in the artist’s life and career in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Puerto Rico. As she states in her introduction, “Campeche lived both as an artist and as a free man of color within a racialized colonial society, and as such, inquiries regarding how race affected Campeche’s life and artistic practice, and particularly how his immersion in the community of free people of color in San Juan possibly impacted the manner in which he was trained and worked, allow for a more comprehensive understanding of his art production.”

Thames’ article is featured in a special issue of the journal Arts, “Black Artists in the Atlantic World,” which she is co-editing with her dissertation advisor, Dr. Paul Niell. The special issue focuses on black artists in the Atlantic World, ca. 1500-1900 CE, and will bring together essays from scholars of art history, architectural history, and archaeology to engage in a comparative conversation about the realities of black artists and their lived experience of race across the varied geographies of the Atlantic World. There are currently four essays published, with six more anticipated by summer 2024. Contributors to the special issue will also include Art History professors Mora Beauchamp-Byrd and Brendan Weaver.