About ACRAH

The Association for Critical Race Art History (ACRAH) is a professional organization that promotes art historical scholarship from a critical race perspective.

CRITICAL RACE ART HISTORY is a scholarly commitment to the investigation of race in art and visual culture. This critical approach asserts that notions of difference have always mattered in visual culture and that such concepts now consolidated under the rubric of race play a fundamental role in modern life. Critical race art history seeks to reveal how such concepts consolidated under the rubric of race are vectors of history and central in contemporary life. Critical race art historians study the ways that visual representation advances projects of racialization and attendant efforts to marshal power.

ACRAH offers a forum for such committed considerations of race in relationship to art and visual culture.

• The intellectual and geo-political scope of critical race art history is necessarily broad since racial ideologies have long shaped attitudes about artistic creativity, determined access to formalized instruction, governed artistic choices regarding content and form, and informed the criteria of value, taste, and beauty upon which aesthetic judgments are based. This field of inquiry strategically employs a range of methodologies including formalism, social and cultural history, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, for they address artistic practices, contexts of artistic production, and the visualized motifs that make the meta-language of race operational.

• We embrace intellectual and institutional partnerships with groups pursuing scholarship in related fields of art history and disciplines such as American studies, race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, Diaspora studies, and modernist studies.