Biography
With an emphasis on artists’ encounters across cultural and geographical borders, socially engaged artistic practice, and intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and representation, Melanie Herzog teaches, publishes, and lectures widely on North American art and visual culture, particularly African American art, and art and visual culture of the African diaspora. She holds an M.F.A. in ceramics and a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Her publications include Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico (2000), Milton Rogovin: The Making of a Social Documentary Photographer (2006), “Imaging History, Memory, and the Raced and Gendered Body: The Legacy of Elizabeth Catlett,” in The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World (2012), “`My Art Speaks for Both My Peoples’: Elizabeth Catlett in Mexico,” in The Art of Solidarity: Visual and Performative Politics in Cold War Latin America (2018), “Chinese in America: Flo Oy Wong, Suturing Gaps in the Weave,” in Contemporary Citizenship, Art, and Visual Culture: Making and Being Made (2018), “African American Artists and Mexico,” in The Routledge Companion to African American Art History (2020), and “William Kentridge: See for Yourself,” (2022). Her essay “‘Thinking About Women’: Form, Substance, and Radical Politics” will be published in the companion publication for the exhibition Elizabeth Catlett: A Revolutionary Black Artist and All That It Implies, opening in Fall 2024 at the Brooklyn Museum.