Education
- PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2014
- MA, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2008
- BA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005
Biography
Matthew Rarey is a historian of the art and visual culture of the Black Atlantic world. His work investigates the role of works produced by and about Africans and their descendants as they moved back and forth between Africa, the Americas (especially Brazil) and Europe from the sixteenth century to the present day. Rarey has particular interests in assemblage, detritus, and ephemeral arts, arguing that these play a key role in the development of the African-inspired religions while also providing new frameworks for understanding how one can represent, or memorialize, slavery. Binding together these threads, his current book manuscript investigates the accumulative history of so-called “Mandinga” pouches: protective amulets with cross-cultural origins in West Africa that took on new forms and histories as they spread to Brazil and Portugal between 1660 and 1835.
At Oberlin, Rarey teaches introductory courses on African arts as well as intermediate and advanced classes on African diaspora religious arts; artistic theories of blackness; curatorial studies; and the visual culture of slavery. All his courses critically engage intersecting theories of archives, race, sexuality, and colonization. Rarey is also eager to involve students in curatorial and research projects: in 2016, he led a group of fifteen advanced undergraduates as they re-installed the Arts of Africa at the Allen Memorial Art Museum.
- Insignificant Things: Assemblage, Occlusion, and the Art of Survival in the Black Atlantic. Book manuscript in progress.
- “Dirt, Concrete, and the Substance of Memory in Slavery’s Dungeon.” In Sensiotics: Theory and Practice in African Art, ed. Moyo Okediji. Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria: Obafemi Awolowo University Press, 2020 (invited and in preparation).
- “Leave No Mark.” In The Black Modernism Seminars (CASVA Seminar Papers, Volume 4), ed. Steven Nelson and Huey Copeland. Washington: National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 2020.
- “Assemblage, Occlusion, and the Art of Survival in the Black Atlantic.” African Arts 51:4 (Winter 2018): 20-33.
- “Counterwitnessing the Visual Culture of Brazilian Slavery.” In African Heritage and Memories of Slavery in Brazil and the South Atlantic World, ed. Ana Lucia Araujo. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2015: 71-108.
- “Camera Lucida Mexicana: Travel, Visual Technologies, and Contested Objectivities.” Visuality’s Romantic Genealogies volume of Romantic Circles Praxis Series, ed. Theresa M. Kelley and Jill H. Casid (December 2014).
- “Virtual Materiality: Collectors and Collection in the Brazilian Music Blogosphere,” with Lindsay Fullerton. Communication, Culture, and Critique 5:1 (March 2012): 1-19.
Notes
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Matthew Rarey Gives Two Invited Lectures
March 12, 2019Matthew Rarey, assistant professor of art history, gave two invited lectures, both derived from his current book manuscript. On February 26, he delivered "Leave No Mark: Blackness Inviolate" at the Department of Religion, Amherst College. On March 6, he delivered "Pouches, Archives, and the Art of Survival" at the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University, where he is currently in residence as a visiting scholar for the 2018-2019 academic year.
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Matthew Rarey Publishes
December 5, 2018Assistant Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey's article, "Assemblage, Occlusion, and the Art of Survival in the Black Atlantic" was published in the winter 2018 issue of African Arts.
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Matthew Rarey Invited to Seminar Series
October 24, 2018Matthew Rarey, assistant professor of art history, is one of a select group of scholars invited to participate in "Black Modernisms," a two-part seminar series taking place in October 2018 and April 2019 at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The seminars are part of CASVA's new initiative to support research on African-American and African art.
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Matthew Rarey Delivers Lecture
October 19, 2018Matthew Rarey, assistant professor of art history, delivered an invited lecture, "Glimpsing the Flight from Enslavement" at DePaul University in Chicago on October 18. The lecture was sponsored by the university's Department of the History of Art and Architecture, the Department of African and Black Diaspora Studies, and the Center for Black Diaspora.
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Matthew Rarey Awarded NEH Fellowship
September 27, 2018Matthew Rarey, assistant professor of art history, was awarded a 2018-2019 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for his book project, Insignificant Things: Assemblage, Occlusion, and the Art of Survival in the Black Atlantic. Professor Rarey is spending his fellowship year as a visiting scholar in the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University.
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Matthew Rarey Gives Invited Lecture
September 25, 2018Matthew Rarey, assistant professor of art history, delivered his lecture, "Questions of Value and Bondage at a Hotel in London, March 1865" at the Center for Visual Culture at Bryn Mawr College. The lecture, which is based on an in-progress article, discusses Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 1866 painting, The Beloved, in the context of 19th century theories of race and sexuality, as well as transnational abolitionist dialogues.
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Matthew Rarey Presents
April 10, 2018Assistant Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey presented new work on the memorialization of the slave trade in Ghana in his presentation "Dirt, Concrete, and the Substance of Memory in Slavery's Dungeon" at Honoring Ancestors in Africa: Art and Actions held on April 6-7 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison .
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Matthew Rarey Participates in African Art History Discussion
March 30, 2018Assistant Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey was one of a select group of invited participants to "The Future of African Art: A State of the Field Convening" at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, March 22-24. The gathering brought together curators, professors, independent scholars, and collectors of African art from three continents to discuss future directions and challenges in the study of African art history.