About Catherine
New York, NY
Catherine Quan Damman (CBA ’25) is the Linda Nochlin Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, where she teaches and advises graduate work on feminist and queer approaches to global modern and contemporary art. She is completing her first monograph, Performance: A Deceptive History, which received a 2022–2023 ACLS Fellowship. She is a contributing editor at BOMB and a former frequent contributor to Artforum.
Project: “Picturing Black Physicality” considers how a multigenerational cohort of Black artists mounted forceful rejoinders to modernism’s visual invocations of dance, which historically lay flush with the very terms that plague racist constructions of bodies, physicality, and their presumed expressivity. Across the twentieth century such artists—among them Jacob Lawrence, Barkley Hendricks, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar—make images of both Blackness and dancing anew.
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