Romi Crawford (Ph.D.) is a 2020–21 Lunder Institute senior fellow and worked on a monographic publication on Lunder Institute Distinguished Visiting Artist and Director of Artist Initiatives Theaster Gates. It considers the wide scope and dimensionality of his artistic practice, with a focus on the under-examined narratives of “extreme collaboration” intrinsic to Gates’s work as it relates to building and land procurement. As part of her fellowship, Crawford hosted a public program centered around a Gates work in the Colby Museum’s collection and her research. She also participated in a recorded conversation with Gates that will become part of the Lunder Institute’s Vocal Archive, an initiative that records contemporary artists speaking about their works in the Colby Museum’s collection.
Crawford is Professor of Visual and Critical Studies and Liberal Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Through her research and writing, Crawford explores areas of race and ethnicity as they relate to American visual culture (including art, film, and photography). She is co-author of The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Additional publications include “Do For Self: The AACM and the Chicago Style” in Support Networks (University of Chicago Press, 2014); “Ebony and Jet on Our Mind” in Speaking of People (The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2014); Theaster Gates Black Archive (Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2017); “Reading Between the Photographs: Serious Sociality in the Kamoinge Photographic Workshop” in Working Together, Louis Draper and The Kamoinge Workshop (Virginia Museum of Fine Art, 2020), and Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect (Green Lantern Press, 2020). She was the co-curator of the 2017 Open Engagement conference in Chicago and founder of the Museum of Vernacular Arts and Knowledge (MOVAK), a project-based platform for art-making that is out of sync with museum and gallery values. She was previously Curator and Director of the Education Department at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She received a B.A. from Oberlin College and A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in English Language in Literature from the University of Chicago.