JACQUELINE FRANCIS

View OUT/LOOK Issue #14 at the Lesbian Poetry Archive.

Earlier this spring, I read about Edward Albee’s estate rejecting an Oregon theater company’s plan to cast a black actor in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” In the weeks that followed, I picked up issue number 14, only to find the account of Albee’s Outwrite ’91 keynote address, which includes this challenge: “the responsibility of the recipient [of writing]. . .is to be willing to have that mirror held up and to look at it clearly, and to be willing to change….” (page 23).

Outlook: No Fear,
2017

Outlook: No Fear, 2017

Mixed media sculpture
16 1/4 x 12 1/4 x 5 1/4 in. (closed)
31 1/4 x 12 1/4 x 5 1/4 in. (open)
Metal library catalogue card drawers (2) with alphabetical cards and xerox copies (color and black and white) of the pages of Outlook issue number 14 (Fall 1991)

JACQUELINE FRANCIS

Jacqueline Francis teaches US art history and researches critical questions about minority identities and identifications represented in visual culture. She is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012) and a co-editor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011). Her essays are forthcoming in The Image of the Black in Western Art (Volume 5), Procession: The Art of Norman Lewis, The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, and American Art. From 2012-14, Francis was on the Executive Committee of the College Art Association. She also serves on the board of the Queer Cultural Center, a resource and site for LGBT artistic expression in San Francisco. She has lectured at Columbia University, Harvard University, the National Gallery of Art, and at scholarly conferences in the US, Europe, the Caribbean, and Japan. In 2016, Francis was awarded a Fellowship at the Cesar Chavez Institute in the College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, where she holds the title Robert A. Corrigan Visiting Professor in Social Justice. She is co-curator, with Kathy Zarur, of the exhibition Where Is Here at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; the show presents the work of contemporary artists of African descent who are interested in claiming, re-making, and describing places where they have lived and traveled.