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Madeleine Harrison is Associate Lecturer in American Art and Photography. She researches American visual culture from the twentieth century, especially the inter-war period, and focuses on art’s entanglements with racial politics. Maddy has published work and given public lectures on style, genre, and reception in Harlem Renaissance visual culture, and her current projects explore African American artists of this period and their unstraightforward relationships to modernism.
Maddy received her PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2021, following an MA at the Courtauld and undergraduate study at the University of Bristol. Her doctoral research focused on the American artist Aaron Douglas (1899-1979): against prevailing scholarly readings of Douglas’s work as primarily influenced by European modernist artists, her research located Douglas’s practice as actively intervening in specifically US-American visual and literary histories of racialised representation. This doctoral research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and by the Terra Foundation for American Art, including via an Immersion Semesters grant to study art history and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Maddy was 2022–23 Terra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Her current research project focuses on the politics of style in the interwar African American art world; her broader research and teaching spans nineteenth- to twenty-first century US-American art and visual culture, with a focus on African American artists. Before coming to UCL, Maddy taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
For more information, visit Maddy's RPS profile.
Research
Maddy’s research focuses on the entanglements of visual culture and racial politics in the US-American twentieth century, with a particular interest in the inter-war period. Interdisciplinary in nature, her work overlaps with history, American studies, African American studies, and cultural studies to think through social, economic, political, and other cultural forces that exert themselves on Black artistic production and its reception. To that end, she looks mostly at painting and photography to explore how Black artists have worked with, against, and in complex relation to the US’s predominantly white visual worlds, art markets, and critical discourses. Her writing draws attention to choices of style, genre, and subject matter in Black artists’ works that appear unusual, unexpected, or out of step with the era’s trends and preferences to tease out undiscovered and unacknowledged practices of criticality, fugitivity, and refusal. Her current research project focuses on inter-war Black artists’ employments of passé and outdated artistic modes, against the grain of modernist innovation; it argues that artists’ practices have always exceeded the frameworks erected by discourses of “Black art,” even in this originary moment for said discourses.
Maddy’s research also engages critical race art historiography to explore the implicit and explicit biases in the way art historians, art journalists, art critics and other art writers describe, analyse, historicise, and interpret racially minoritised artists’ works. A current research direction probes the art histories of the Harlem Renaissance to explore why the field’s focus has remained fixed for decades on only a very small number of modernist paintings.
Specialisms
Modern and contemporary US-American art and visual culture; the politics of style and genre; decolonial and critical race art histories; inter-war African American painting and photography; historiographies and critical histories of African American art
Selected Publications
Articles and book chapters:
“The Harmon Foundation’s White Cube: White Liberal Narrative in Historically Black University Museums, 1937-8,” in progress
“The Sociological Imagination of Aaron Douglas’s Fisk University Murals,” in progress, pending submission in December 2024
“Palmer Hayden’s Submerged Seascapes; or, a Case Study in “Black Art” Discourse,” submitted to Archives of American Art in July 2024
“Aaron Douglas,” in African Modernism in America, 1947-67, ed. Perrin Lathrop (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), winner: Curatorial Award for Excellence, Association of Art Museum Curators, 2023; Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions, College Art Association, 2024
Reviews:
“Glenn Ligon: All Over The Place,” exhibition review, Burlington Contemporary, forthcoming 2025
Teaching and Supervision
In 2024–5 Maddy is teaching the undergraduate modules On Property: Photography, Land, and Labour in America (HART0196) and the thematic seminar Race and Representation (HART0144).
