AF/AM/50: Fireside Chat with David C. Driskell H’89 and Julie McGee ’82

DAVID C. DRISKELL was educated in the public schools of North Carolina and earned his undergraduate degree in art at Howard University and a master of fine arts degree from the Catholic University of America. He pursued postgraduate study in art history at The Netherlands Institute for the History of Art in The Hague and has studied independently African and African American cultures in Europe, Africa, and South America. He is also the recipient of thirteen honorary doctoral degrees in art. David began his teaching career at Talladega College in 1955. He has taught at Howard and Fisk Universities and served as visiting professor of art at Bowdoin, the University of Michigan, Queens College, and Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. He joined the art department faculty at the University of Maryland in 1977 and served as its chairman from 1978 to 1983. After leaving the chair, David maintained an active career in the arts as teacher, curator, administrator, and art consultant until his retirement in 1998. He serves on the boards of several nationally known art institutions and organizations, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the American Federation of Arts, among others. David is cited as one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject of African American art. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award in Art from Howard University in 1981 and The Catholic University of America in 1996. He has contributed significantly to scholarship in the history of art on the role of the black artist in American society, authored five exhibition books on the subject, coauthored four others, and published more than forty catalogues from exhibitions he has curated. David has lectured in many colleges, universities, and museums across North America, Europe, Africa, and South America. In 1998, the University of Maryland founded the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora. David received the National Humanities Medal from President Clinton in 2000. David and his wife, Thelma, maintain residences in Hyattsville, Maryland; Falmouth, Maine; and New York City.

JULIE MCGEE ’82 is an art historian and curator specializing in African diaspora art history and contemporary South African art. She joined the University Museums of the University of Delaware as curator of African American art in 2008 after a dozen years on the faculty of Bowdoin College and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She has curated exhibitions for the David C. Driskell Center, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, and Guga S’Thebe Community Arts Centre in Langa (Cape Town), South Africa. With Vuyile C. Voyiya, Julie coproduced the documentary film The Luggage Is Still Labeled: Blackness in South African Art. In 2011–2012, she held the Dorothy Kayser Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History at the University of Memphis. She was a 2019 Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, at The National Gallery, Washington, DC, where she devoted her research to the American artist Sam Middleton (1927–2015) and transnational art history. Julie’s extensive scholarship on David Driskell includes the monograph David C. Driskell: Artist and Scholar (2006), curatorial essays, artist interviews, and analyses of David’s writings. She is the lead curator for David’s 2021 retrospective exhibition. Julie is associate professor of Africana studies and art history and director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center at the University of Delaware.

Introduction by DANA BYRD, assistant professor of art history.