Dissertation Title: Against Cultural Dependency: Aesthetics and Economics in the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta), 1966-1981
Advisor: Lopez-Duran, Maria Fabiola
Adrienne Rooney is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at Rice University studying twentieth-century art and (visual) culture in the Americas, with a focus on the Circum-Caribbean. She has received graduate certificates in African and African American Studies and Critical and Cultural Theory. Her dissertation, the first book-length academic study of the Caribbean Festival of Arts (Carifesta)—an initiative that has embodied Caribbean integration more fully than political or economic efforts—attends to the conceptualization of this monumental, multilingual, ongoing festival and the (visual) culture foregrounded in its first four iterations in Guyana, Jamaica, Cuba, and Barbados. With the support of extensive archival research and contemporaneous theories by, among others, Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, and Sylvia Wynter, it weaves a story of the festival, a meeting place for artists from Brazil to Curaçao, from Saint Lucia to Suriname, from Venezuela to Haiti, in the heady, long 1970s.
She has shared her work in a variety of ways, including through presentations at the annual conferences of the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) and College Art Association (CAA), talks at the Paul Mellon Centre, the Tate, and Oxford University, and published criticism and scholarship in caa.reviews and the Journal of African American Studies, among others. She is a resident of “Atlantic Worlds: Visual Cultures of Colonialism, Slavery, and Racism” a two-year remote residency program by the journal British Art Studies and the Terra Foundation for American Art (2021-2023). She was co-organizer of the three-day international symposium "The Inaugural Caribbean Festival of Arts as Prism: 20th Century Festivals in the Multilingual Caribbean" (August 2022). Adrienne is also co-organizer, with Dr. Fabiola López-Durán, of the Racial Geography Project, an initiative of the Rice University Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice. Prior to Rice, she was a curatorial assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2012–2015).
She is Co-organizer, with Dr. Fabiola López-Durán, of the Racial Geography Project, an initiative of the Rice University Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice.
Publications
“The Battle of Algiers and Colonial Analogy in the Panther 21,” Journal of African American Studies. Volume 23, Issue 4 (December 2019): 455-475.
“Material Futures / Adrienne Rooney on Lubaina Himid at the New Museum, New York,” Texte zur Kunst, Issue No. 116. 12/2019.
Exhibition Review: Mapa Wiya (Your Map’s Not Needed): Australian Aboriginal Art from the Fondation Opale, Menil Collection, Houston, TX, caa.reviews. 12/2019.
Book review: Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, eds. Tatiana Flores and Michelle Ann Stephens. caa.reviews 8/2019.