Monica Blackmun Visonà

Assistant Professor

Office: 307 Fine Arts Building

Telephone: (859) 257-1398

Email: m.b.visona@uky.edu

Education: University of California, Santa Barbara, Ph.D.

Dr. Blackmun Visonà has traveled extensively in Africa, and she has conducted fieldwork in Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, and Senegal. As an undergraduate at Stanford University she studied the art of Europe and ancient China, and her graduate work included courses in the art of the Pacific Islands, Native North America, and the ancient Mediterranean. This broad background led her to develop courses surveying World Art, and she has served as a consultant on “non-western art” to publishers of art history and art appreciation textbooks (including Gardner’s Art Through the Ages, Gilbert’s Living with Art and Artforms). Dr. Blackmun Visonà is the principal author of the critically acclaimed survey A History of Art in Africa (Abrams/Prentice Hall 2000), and will be preparing a second edition during Fall 2005. Her research for the chapters on the art of Northern Africa, Eastern Africa, the Nile Valley and the Bend of the Niger led to her interest in the arts of African Islam, and she has studied the archaeological record of many African sites. The book’s discussion of contemporary arts draws upon her research into the theoretical issues raised by the critical reception of works by living African artists. Because this book is focused upon the art history of the African continent rather than upon the objects now residing in European collections, it includes arts which are discussed as architecture, performance and installations. During 2004-2005, Dr. Blackmun Visonà was a Senior Fellow at the National Museum of African Art of the Smithsonian Institution. There she prepared her doctoral and post-doctoral research on the arts of the Lagoon peoples of southeastern Côte d’Ivoire for publication as a monograph. Her articles on the art history of these groups, who are distantly related to both the Baule and Asante, have appeared in scholarly journals such as African Arts. She is organizing a related exhibition on “Divinely Inspired African Artists: The Arts of the Lagoon Peoples and their Neighbors”, which will be accompanied by a collection of scholarly essays. She is also preparing a traveling exhibition of architectural studies by African and non-African photographers (“Interior/Exterior: Photographs of African Architecture”).