DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Antawan I. Byrd teaches modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on practices in Africa and the African diaspora. A faculty affiliate of Northwestern’s Program of African Studies, his research interests include black popular culture, curatorial studies, photography and lens-based media, vernacular print culture, sound studies, and theories and practices of Pan-Africanism.

Byrd is currently at work on Being Seen Listening: Art, Pan-Africanism, and the Sound Politics of the Sixties, a book-length study of how visual artists and broader publics across Africa and the African diaspora made listening visible during the decolonial and civil-rights struggles of the long 1960s, as well as in subsequent reflections on that decade. Anchored in art history and informed by sound studies, media studies, and political theory, the project advances “being seen listening” as a core theoretical contribution to the study of representation and as a framework for reconsidering the convergence of art and politics during and since the mid-twentieth century.

He co-curated Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica (2024–2026), a major survey exhibition examining Pan-Africanism’s cultural influence throughout the long twentieth century. The exhibition opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in December 2024, traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona in November 2025, and was subsequently presented at the Barbican Art Centre in London in June 2026. At the Art Institute of Chicago, Byrd curated Mimi Cherono Ng’ok: Closer to the Earth, Closer to My Own Body (2021) and co-curated The People Shall Govern! Medu Art Ensemble and the Anti-Apartheid Poster (2019). He was a curator for the 2nd Lagos Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019) and Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory at Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art (2017). In 2015, he served as an associate curator for the 10th Bamako Encounters: Biennale of African Photography.

In 2017, Byrd received the Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association. From 2009 to 2011, he was a Fulbright Fellow and curatorial assistant at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, where he currently serves on the board of advisors. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of Chicago’s Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Program Area: Africa, African Diaspora, Global Modern and Contemporary

Specializations: Curatorial Studies, Histories of Photography, Sound Art, Pan-Africanism 

Recent Undergraduate Lectures:

• Introduction to Contemporary Art

 Recent Undergraduate Seminars:

• The Art of Listening
• Contemporary African Art
• Photography and Africa
• Black Portraiture

 Recent Graduate Seminars:

• Pan-Africanism: Histories, Aesthetics, and Politics (co-taught with Adom Getachew)
• Black Printed Matters
• Museum Studies: The Art & Culture of Pan-Africanism

Selected Publications:

Contributor, Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa, eds. Martino Stierli and Ikem Okoye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2026).

Project A Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, co-edited with Adom Getachew, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and Matthew Witkovsky, and contributor (New Haven: Yale University Press; Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2025).

Contributor, Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos, ed. Oluremi C. Onabanjo (New York: CARA; Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books, 2022).

The Art Institute of Chicago Field Guide to Photography and Media, co-edited with Elizabeth Siegel, and contributor (New Haven: Yale University Press; Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2023).

The People Shall Govern! Medu Art Ensemble and the Anti-Apartheid Poster, 1979-1985, co-edited with Felicia Mings, and contributor (New Haven: Yale University Press; Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2020).