DEPARTMENT OF ART HISTORY

Antawan I. Byrd is an assistant professor of art history and a faculty affiliate of Northwestern’s Program of African Studies. As an art historian, Byrd’s research is grounded in Pan-Africanism, a long-standing political and cultural project that imagines global solidarities among peoples of African descent while confronting the enduring legacies of slavery and colonialism. His work asks what it would mean to write art history with these sociopolitical commitments in view, tracing how such aspirations, whether unified or fractured, have shaped artistic and everyday cultural practices across Africa and the African diaspora. Within this framework, he focuses on modern and contemporary art of the long twentieth century, with particular attention to the intersections of sound, visual culture, and politics. 

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 sixties and 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.

As a curator, Byrd has extensive experience collaborating with living artists and interpreting historical collections at institutions ranging from independent art spaces to encyclopedic museums. As an associate curator of photography and media at the Art Institute of Chicago, Byrd recently co-edited the Art Institute of Chicago Field Guide to Photography and Media (2023) and curated Mimi Cherono Ng’ok: Closer to the Earth, Closer to My Own Body (2021). He co-curated The People Shall Govern: Medu Art Ensemble and the Anti-Apartheid Poster (2019). The publication for the latter, which Byrd co-edited, was ranked among the “Best Art Books of 2020” by the New York Times. At Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art, he co-curated Kader Attia: Reflecting Memory (2016). Byrd was a curator for the second edition of the Lagos Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019) and an associate curator for the tenth edition of the Bamako Encounters, Biennial of African Photography (2015). From 2009 to 2011, he was a Fulbright fellow and curatorial assistant at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. 

Byrd’s research has been supported by an Andrew Mellon-COSI Fellowship and a Mellon-CLIR Pre-Doctoral dissertation fellowship. He is a recipient of the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation Exhibition Award (2021) and the Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (2017). 

He is currently curating (with Adom Getachew, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and Matthew Witkovsky) a survey exhibition on the art and cultural dimensions of Pan-Africanism from the 1920s to the present. The exhibition will open at the Art Institute of Chicago in December 2024, and subsequently travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona, and KANAL-Centre Pompidou, Brussels.

Program Area: Africa, Photography, Global Modern and Contemporary, 

Regional Specialization: Africa, African Diaspora