Dr. Huey Copeland, an associate professor of art history and the Arthur Andersen Teaching and Research Professor at Northwestern University, has advanced scholarship in contemporary and modern art of the African diaspora like few others.
As an affiliated faculty member in African-American studies, art theory and practice, critical theory, gender and sexuality studies and performance studies at the school, the award-winning scholar has positioned his work at the intersections of class, race, gender and sexuality in Western visual culture.
“I do think that art often represents and refracts that which we most deeply value in our culture,” says Copeland. “And it also shows us those spots of trouble or vexing or disinterest as they have materialized themselves within individual fields. Art has the potential to reframe that experience and help us think differently not only about what but how it is we see.”
On April 26, the High Museum of Art will award Copeland the 2019 David C. Driskell Prize – which comes with $25,000 – for outstanding contributions to African-American art history. The coveted accolade adds to his lengthy list of grants, fellowships, awards and appointments, including from the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center for American Modernism and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
A native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Copeland loved painting, theater and museum visits at an early age. He fell in love with the humanities while attending a magnet middle and high school, later earning a bachelor’s degree in art history and comparative literature at the University of Michigan.
Copeland actually entered his undergraduate studies with more interest in physics and theater. But after freshman-year courses exposed him to art and art history, his interest turned into excitement and he went on to New York City internships at Metro Pictures art gallery and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Phillip Morris.
Before finishing his bachelor’s degree, Copeland realized he wanted a career in academia. He went directly to graduate school, earning master’s and Ph.D. degrees in art history from the University of California at Berkeley. He chose that school, he says, because it was home to several social and art historians he greatly admired, all of whom later served on his dissertation committee.
