04. Select Publications
2025
Scenes of ‘No Place’ Essay, Cosmo Whyte, The Chicago Arts Club, Chicago, IL.
Published on the occasion of Cosmo Whyte: The Mother's Tongue, Pressed to the Grinding Stone, January 23 - April 2, 2025 at The Arts Club of Chicago. The essay review's artist Cosmo Whyte's artistic vision and installation practice, and includes a discussion of several provocative comparative artworks.
2017
Harlem: Found Ways Exhibition Catalog, Editor and Author
Published to accompany an exhibition held at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & American Art, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, May 24-July 15, 2017. Includes foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and essays by Vera Ingrid Grant, Dawoud Bey, Camara Dia Holloway, and Amar Singh [Dawoud Bey, Abigail DeVille, Glenn Ligon, Howard Tangye, Nari Ward, Kehinde Wiley and the Studio Museum in Harlem's Postcard Project / editor, Vera Ingrid Grant.]
2016
Art of Jazz: FORM/PERFORMANCE/NOTES, Editor and Author
This catalogue documents the exhibition Art of Jazz, a collaborative installation at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art with one section (“Form”) installed at the Harvard Art Museum. The book explores the intersection of the visual arts and jazz music, and presents a visual feast of full color plates of artworks, preceded by a series of essays.
Visual artists represented in “Form” include Matisse, Jackson Pollock, Romare Bearden, and Stuart Davis. “Performance” includes art by Hugh Bell, Carl Van Vechten, and Romare Bearden; additional album cover art by Joseph Albers, Ben Shahn, Andy Warhol, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers; and posters and photographs of Josephine Baker and Lena Horne. “Notes” includes art by Cullen Washington, Norman Lewis, Walter Davis, Lina Viktor, Petite Noir, Ming Smith, Richard Yarde, Christopher Myers, Whitfield Lovell, and Jason Moran.
2015
“The Persuasions of Montford,” Exhibition Catalogue, BCA Mills Gallery, Boston, MA
Montford is known for his confrontational work and ongoing engagement with racial stereotypes and social alienations. In his artworks he shares his personal landscape of civil unruliness and insistent social persuasions and integrates his own racial confrontations into his visual constructions. Examples include the hangman’s nooses and various commercial memorabilia featuring racist caricatures of black folks that began appearing in his work and video performances in the early 1990s. The full retrospective exhibition at the Boston Center for the Arts was curated by Vera Ingrid Grant.
“White Shame/Black Agency: Race as a Weapon in Post-World War I Diplomacy” in African Americans in American Foreign Policy, (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, Feb 2015)
Chapter 5: This chapter examines the role of race in the transformation of the former German enemy into an American friend that took place in the Rhineland occupation zone between 1918 and 1923. It proposes that in the crucible of the occupation zone, dissimilar and heightened American and German understandings and practices of race converged with usual postwar indignities of brutality, revenge, and survival. What emerged was a transformed global pattern of racial perspectives and reconciled alliances. W. E. B. Du Bois named this reorganization of racial discourse “the discovery of personal whiteness among the world's peoples.” The chapter proposes that another stream of interactions bound Germans and Americans together: they grappled with their perceptions of interior “racialized” enemies, deepened their crafting of white supremacy, and expressed similar interior visions while at work on their world visions.
2014
“E2 in Ordinary Joy (The Pigozzi Collection), volume editor; and author: Extraction/Exhibition Dynamics,” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press)
Luminós/C/ity.Ordinary Joy: From the Pigozzi Contemporary African Art Collection celebrates the inaugural exhibition of the same name at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at the Hutchins Center in Fall 2014. The works discussed range from photography of the 1940s to video produced some seventy years later, and together the essays reflect upon and explore the exhibition as "a critical thesis on the contemporary condition of the continent, one which sees the city as a device to explore the complexities and nuances of urban life." A considered part of the full exhibition experience, the catalog offers the reader entry into these cityscapes and the brilliant light of ordinary joy. Exhibition: Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, Cambridge, USA (Fall 2014).
“Visual Culture and the Occupation of the Rhineland” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. 5, The Twentieth Century, ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Feb 2014)
Chapter 3/Excerpt: “Most popular images of Africans in twentieth-century Germany followed the pattern in other countries, placing them in humorous contexts mocking their supposedly childlike or savage nature ...”
2013
Book review, Tina Campt’s Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe, College Art Association, Feb 2013.
Vera Grant
Curator. Writer. Arts Consultant. 2025
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