Lucia Olubunmi R. Momoh

Lucia Olubunmi R. Momoh (she/they) is a PhD student in Yale’s combined PhD program in African American Studies and the History of Art. She studies art of the Black Atlantic, with a focus on the US South and the Caribbean. Her research centers African Diasporic perspectives in Western art history and investigates the relationship between constructs of race and the formation of national and imperial identities in the Americas during the nineteenth century. Momoh is interested in how institutions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have upheld these volatile caste systems and how art embodies the potential to dismantle them.

Momoh also has an independent curatorial practice that supports and engages with modern and contemporary artist whose work investigates and reveals the complex realities of and urgent threats to life and love in this dimension. Before coming to Yale, Momoh held curatorial positions with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Prospect.5 Yesterday we said tomorrow, the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. She has written for exhibition catalogs and publications such as burnaway, 64 Parishes, and The Iron Lattice.

The daughter of a Yoruba (Nigerian) father and a Sicilian-American mother, Momoh grew up with her five siblings in Northern California. She received her BA in Art History and French from the University of Oregon and her MA in Art History from Tulane University.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

“’I’d rather get out of jail than get 1,000,000 dollars’: Nic[o] Brierre Aziz at Antenna Gallery, New Orleans,” burnaway (April 4, 2023)

“Object Care: a tale of erasure, restitution, and possible resolution,” 64 Parishes (Fall 2022)

“Re-Natured: Chanell Stone’s Natura Negra Series,” on-off.site (January 2021)