NEYSA HOPE WELLINGTON

WRITTEN BY NICOLE EMSER MARCEL

Griots are conventionally defined as West African storytellers, those who hold histories and knowledge meant to be shared orally. Art historian Candace M. Keller likens contemporary African portrait photographers to visual griots, linking the role of photographers to artists and historians who develop an archive of images documenting not only the personal, but also the social and historical. Neysa Hope Wellington describes herself as a visual griot in Keller’s sense, focusing her practice on creating spaces of dialogue and collaboration between the diaspora and Africa. A trip to Ghana in the summer of 2021 sparked an evolution in Wellington’s work, expanding her practice from portrait photography to incorporate research, film, and performance.

A central theme running throughout Wellington’s work is the documentation of the Black experience, with a focus on Black women. In her exploration of Black womanhood, Wellington often turns the camera on herself, exploring her own bonds forged through maternal lineage and a broadly defined concept of sisterhood. Wellington’s portraits of herself and her family are just one component of her work, which relies on a community-based research practice known as photovoice, to explore the relationship between self and society and the societal and familial impact on identity formation. Using photovoice as a guiding principle allows Wellington to empower her subjects to participate as co-researchers in the project, prompting them to engage in reflection with her, rather than by her. Wellington further investigates familial dynamics through interviews she conducts with women in her communities, in which she interrogates the ideas of bonds through womanhood and notions of home. Her concept of home is not limited to the immediately physical; rather Wellington expands the idea of home to encompass those we have experienced in our past, as well as those we experience only through ancestral memory or those we hope to experience in the future. Through these multidisciplinary works, Wellington performs her role as a visual griot, documenting and creating an archive of Black women’s stories, relationships, and identities, explored through the lens of multiple and simultaneously experienced representations and perceptions of home

IN HER EXPLORATION OF BLACK WOMANHOOD, WELLINGTON OFTEN TURNS THE CAMERA ON HERSELF, EXPLORING HER OWN BONDS FORGED THROUGH MATERNAL LINEAGE AND A BROADLY DEFINED CONCEPT OF SISTERHOOD.

Contributing Authors

Flavia Barbarini

Flavia Barbarini is a PhD candidate in Art History who previously worked as a curatorial assistant in the Department of Drawings at the Castello Sforzesco Museums in Milan, Italy. She earned her BA from the University of Bologna and her MA in Art History from the University of Padua. Her current research is dedicated to the history of collecting drawings and the art market in 16th century Italy.

Quinn Russell Brown

Quinn Russell Brown is a first-year PhD student in Art History who researches 19th and 20th century American figurative art. He is also a photographer working in portraiture, and his portraits have been featured in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, TIME, and Wired, in addition to being shown at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Danielle Cooke

Danielle Cooke is a first-year MA student studying Latin American and Latinx art. Her research centers on the intricate relationships between diaspora, postcolonialism, femininity, religion, and queerness. She earned her BA in Art History and Spanish from Cleveland State University, where she embraced the opportunity to study abroad in both France and Spain and participated in the university’s Archaeological Field School. Before arriving at Temple, she also worked and interned at the Cleveland Museum of Art for several years.

Natalie Cruz

Natalie Cruz is a first-year MA student studying modern and contemporary S.W.A.N.A. (South West Asian/North African) art. She earned her BA in Art History from Pacific University Oregon. Her capstone thesis, Memory in Diaspora: The Armenian Genocide and Cultural Resilience in Art, discussed the persistence of Armenian cultural memory in diaspora despite the trauma of the Armenian genocide. She is continuing this research on Armenians and other S.W.A.N.A. people in the diaspora.

Annemarie Maag-Tanchak

Annemarie Maag-Tanchak is an Art History MA student on the Arts Management track. Her areas of study include the history of graphic design, German and American art and design of the Cold War, and the effects and future of digital technology. Her arts administrative work is concerned with the relationship between the arts and corporate philanthropy. She holds a BA in Art History from Binghamton University, SUNY (2019) with minors in Graphic Design and German.

Li Machado

Li Machado is a third-year PhD student specializing in Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Art. Their current research focuses on networks of queer sociability and desire in Chicanx communities in Los Angeles. They previously earned a BA in Art History from the University of La Verne, studying Brazilian modernist painting, and an MA in the same field from University of Oregon, where their thesis addressed the visual culture of the 1978 World Cup in Argentina.

Liam Maher

Liam Maher is a Temple University Fellow and doctoral student in Art History studying Contemporary Latin American & Latinx Art. His research interests include intersections of queerness, Catholicism, and anticoloniality in art from Brazil, Haiti, and the United States. He received his MA in Art History from the University of Oregon and BA in Art History and political science from the University of Notre Dame.

Molly Mapstone

Molly Mapstone is interested in materials new to the history of art. Her writings consider contemporary art through theories of materiality, process, visual culture, and social art history. Her master’s thesis at the Winterthur Program, The Materiality and Art History of Glitter, examined the origins of glitter and its power to convey meaning. She received her BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison while working at the Chazen Museum of Art, where she curated exhibitions of works on paper.

Nicole Emser Marcel

Nicole Emser Marcel is a second-year PhD student studying modern and contemporary art of the Caribbean. Her research interests include iconoclasm, geography, feminist theory, and religion. She holds an MA in Art History from American University and a BA in History from Xavier University. She previously taught at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis and worked at the National Women’s History Museum in Washington, DC.

María de Lourdes Mariño

María de Lourdes Mariño is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art from Latin America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas from 1900 to the present. She holds an MPA in Nonprofit Management focused on art and culture institutions, and is currently a second-year Art History PhD student. Before attending Tyler, she was a professor at ISA, Universidad de las Artes and an independent art curator in Havana, Cuba.

Lauren M. McCardel

Lauren M. McCardel is a PhD student focusing on 19th century art, design and material culture. Her research interests concern the social functions of art and architecture, exploring themes related to gender, labor, authorship and trauma. She holds an MFA in Architectural History from Savannah College of Art and Design and a BA in Art History from Messiah University.

Ryan J. Mitchell

Ryan Mitchell is a PhD student working on the Islamic art and architecture of the eastern Mediterranean. In 2021, Ryan completed a U.S. Student Fulbright Grant to Turkey, where he studied the architecture of late Ottoman-era schools in Istanbul and held an assistantship at the Istanbul Research Institute. He worked for several years in business development in New York after receiving his undergraduate degree from the Ohio State University in English Literature and History of Art.

Joanna Platt

Joanna Platt is a PhD student specializing in modern and contemporary Art History. With a background in bronze casting and fabrication, Platt balances an active studio practice with research into the representation of labor and the economics of art and production, especially regarding issues of class and social status. She earned a BFA from Mason Gross School of Art, Rutgers University and an MFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and is an assistant professor at Camden County College.

Noah Randolph

Noah Randolph is a PhD student specializing in modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with current research focused on the relationship between historical memory and memorialization in the Americas. His past experience includes positions at the Speed Art Museum, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He received his BA in Art History from the University of Louisville followed by his MA from Temple University.

Emily Schollenberger

Emily Schollenberger is a fourthyear PhD student whose research interests include collective memory, the archive, trauma and colonial photography. She earned her BA in Art with a concentration in Art History from Covenant College, where her thesis focused on affect in Anselm Kiefer’s paintings. She interned at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC and worked as a museum educator at the Creative Discovery Museum in Chattanooga, TN before moving to Philadelphia.

Alexandra Schoolman

Alexandra Schoolman is a first-year PhD student whose research interests include human and environmental rights, Latin American conceptual art, and social practice. She graduated magna cum laude from Brandeis University, majoring in Hispanic Studies and minoring in Art History. She earned her MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History with distinction from the University of Glasgow. Her thesis focused on memory and historical legacy in the work of young Latin American artists. She was previously exhibitions manager of the Latin American art gallery Henrique Faria in New York City.

Ashley Stahl

Ashley Stahl is a second-year MA student in Art History on the Arts Management track. Her interests and areas of study include modern and contemporary art, public art and cultural identity, environmental art, and institutional critique. She holds a BFA in Art History with a minor in Painting from Moore College of Art and Design (2009). Her professional experience includes curatorial project management at Whitestone Gallery and philanthropic fundraising at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University. She currently serves on the Development Committee at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists and as a visiting board member at the Delaware River Waterfront Corporation.

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