Alexandra M. Thomas

Aly Thomas is a PhD candidate in African American Studies and History of Art, with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. Interdisciplinary in nature, her research focuses are: global modern and contemporary art; African and African diaspora visual culture; feminist and queer theory. Aly’s dissertation, “Afrekete’s Touch: Black Queer Feminist Errantry and Global African Art,” engages the movement of artwork by Black women and queer artists across media and geographic boundaries. 

She curated the exhibition, “Homecoming: Domesticity and Kinship in Global African Art,” which is on view at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, from July 2023 through May 2024. Previously, she curated the exhibition, “Paul Camacho: El Ritmo y La Unidad,” at MoCA Westport. 

She has taught and worked at several institutions, including Brandeis University, Yale School of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Hood Museum of Art, UMass Amherst, Fairfield University, Guggenheim, and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Her art criticism has appeared in many print magazines, web-based publications, and exhibition catalogs, detailed on her updated C.V. that can be found here

In fall 2024, Aly will join Fordham University’s Art History department as assistant professor of global contemporary art history.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

Exhibition Review of African Arts — Global Conversations at the Brooklyn Museum, African Arts (2022). 

“Black Radical Imagination,” co-authored with Clara I. Díaz, Tiera Lee, Andrea Lewis, Anthony Reid, Amiri Tulloch, Studio Magazine, Studio Museum Harlem (2022). 

Book Review of Media Primitivism: Technological Art in Africa, Media-N, Journal of the New Media Caucus (2022). 

“Coding: Braiding: Transmission: On the Aesthetic Life of Dark Sousveillance,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (2021).