Art & Art History

Nicholas Miller is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Art History. His primary areas of specialization are modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on African American art, twentieth-century painting, and the historiography of the African diaspora. Motivated by these academic allegiances, he approaches the history of art from a transnational perspective attuned to the dynamic interchange of artists, and ideas and objects. In his current research project, Unknowable Weapons: African American Painting, Diasporic Objects, and the Making of Modern Art, 1927-1977, he provides a social, cultural, and formal history of African American painting that tracks the interplay between these themes. By exploring the use of primitivism in the works of painters Palmer Hayden, William H. Johnson, Thelma Johnson Streat, and Jeff Donaldson, he reveals the provisional and often asymmetrical nature of African diasporic cultural exchange. His writing has appeared in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and caa.reviews and his research has been supported by Northwestern University, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.