Jacqueline francis

Former Chair, Graduate Visual & Critical Studies Program
Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture Program

About

Jacqueline Francis, Ph.D., is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012) and co-editor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011). With Mary Ann Calo, Francis is working on a new book about African-American artists’ participation in federally funded art programs of the 1930s and their impact on the emergent, US art market of the 1940s. Recently, she has published articles on contemporary artists Olivia Mole, Joan Jonas, Andrea Fraser, and (with Tina Takemoto) David Hammons, and on the hot topic of Fair Use. Forthcoming are essays on Romare Bearden (The Museum of Modern Art), Mickalane Thomas (Seattle Art Museum), and Kerry James Marshall (Kunst und Politik, Jahrbuck der Guernica-Gesellschaft).

During the 2016-17 academic year, Francis was the Robert A. Corrigan Professor in Social Justice in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University. In the spring of 2017, she delivered the Richard D. Cohen Lectures at Harvard University and her talks will be published by Yale University Press. She has lectured at other universities, museums, and scholarly meetings, including those held at the National Gallery of Art, King's College London, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier III, Yale University, and the University of Okayama, Japan.

Francis presently serves on the Advisory Boards of Panorama: Art and Visual Culture of the United States, Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, and San Francisco’s Luggage Store Gallery. She is the Board President of the Queer Cultural Center (QCC), a multidisciplinary resource and advocacy site for LGBT artistic expression in San Francisco. She is former member of the College Art Association’s Board of Directors (2009-14).

With Kathy Zarur, Francis co-curated the art exhibition Where Is Here for the Museum of the African Diaspora (October 2016-May 2017). A member of the 3.9 Art Collective, Francis creates the occasional visual art object. She has exhibited work in group shows at Southern Exposure Gallery (2016) and the Katz-Snyder Gallery of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (2017); and she will be in the group show Outlook and the Birth of the Queer at the GLBT History Museum in October 2017. She is a recipient of a 2017-18 Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission and she is working on a collection of short stories.

BA, Dartmouth College; MA, University of Wisconsin; PhD, Emory University

Office Hours: Wednesdays, 12:00-1:00 pm