Arts Division
Professor, History of Art & Visual Culture
Faculty
Porter College Academic
Porter D215
Porter D215
Mondays 10:00am to 12:00pm
Porter Faculty Services
Derek Conrad Murray is an interdisciplinary theorist specializing in the history, theory, and criticism of contemporary art and visual culture. He works in contemporary aesthetic and cultural theory with particular attention to technocultural engagements with identity and representation. He has contributed to leading magazines and journals such as Radical History Review, American Art, Art in America, Parachute, Art Journal, Third Text, Consumption Markets & Culture, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, where he currently serves as Associate Editor. Murray served on the Editorial Board of Art Journal (CAA) and is currently on the Editorial Advisory Boards of Third Text and Visual Studies, the official journal of the International Visual Sociology Association. He is the author of Mapplethorpe and the Flower: Radical Sexuality and the Limits of Control (Bloomsbury, 2020), Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights (I.B. Tauris, UK, 2016), and an edited volume Visual Culture Approaches to the Selfie (Routledge Press, 2020).
Murray is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal.
Meet new Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal
Education and Training:
PhD, History of Art, Cornell University
MA, History of Art, Cornell University
Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, Multidisciplinary Approaches to Visually-Based Research, Identity and the Ethics of Representation, Media Studies, Film and Culture.
“On the Perils of Enjoying One’s Wound: Atlanta and Contemporary African-American Satire” in Greater Atlanta: African American Satire since Obama eds. Derek C. Maus and James D. Donahue (University of Mississippi Press, 2023)
“Why is it So Hard to Look the Other in the Eye?,” in Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework, eds. Jane Chin Davidson and Amelia Jones (New Jersey: Wiley Blackwell, 2023.
“The Cost of that Revealing” in special issue “The Visual Archives of Sex.” Derek Conrad Murray interviewed by Alexis L. Boylan. in Radical History Review, eds. Heike Baur, Melina Pappademos, Katie Sutton, & Jennifer Tucker, Issue 142., 2022.
"Blackness on Display: On Racial Fetishism and the Right to Opacity" in Reshaping the Field: Art of the African Diasporas on Display (London: Afterall Exhibition Histories/ARTBOOK | D.A.P. 2022).
“On Reciprocity: Expanding the Dialogue Between Disciplines” in Visual Studies, Special Issue on Visual Studies Now. Issue 36.3. Fall 2021. (Fall 2021
"On Darrel Ellis and the Poetics of Opacity,” in Darrell Ellis, eds Kyle Croft and Lara Mimosa Montes (NY: Visual AIDS, 2021), 10-21. (Nov 2021)
"On Photographic Ubiquity in the Age of Online Self-Imaging” in Ubiquity: Photography's Multitudes, eds. Kyle Parry and Jacob W. Lewis (Leuven University Press).
“The Blackest Blackness: Slavery and the Satire of Kara Walker,” in Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination, University of Washington Press (Edited by Ilka Saal and Betrand Ashe, University of Washington Press, 2020), 21-42. (Jan 2020)
“Queer Aesthetics in the History of African-American Art” for the Routledge Companion to African-American Art (Routledge Press, 2020), 406-417.
Roundtable Participation: “Institutionalizing Methods: Art History and Performance and Visual Studies,” in Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value, eds. C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020), pp. 241-260.
"Post-Black Art and the Resurrection of African-American Satire" in Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights, edited by Derek C. Maus and James J. Donahue (University Press of Mississippi).
“Selfie Consumerism in a Narcissistic Age" in Consumption Markets & Culture Journal, June 2018, olume 23, 2020 - Issue 1.
"Notes to Self: The Visual Culture of "Selfies" in the Age of Social Media," in Consumption Markets & Culture Journal (Special Issue: Communicating Identity/Consuming Difference), ed. Jonathan Schroeder (Routledge Press, July 2015)
"Mickalene Thomas: Afro-Kitsch and the Queering of Blackness," in American Art (Special issue on Post-Identity), Spring 2014, Vol. 28, No. 1.
