Matthew Rarey

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey's book Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2023), was named one of three finalists for the 2024 Outstanding First Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora. The prize "honors a single-authored book focused on Africa and/or the African diaspora submitted by or on behalf of a scholar, activist, and/or artist who has not previously published a single-authored monograph."

On December 2, Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey delivered the Distinguished Alumni Lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Art History, where he earned his PhD in 2014. Rarey's lecture, "Renaming the Fetish in the Eighteenth-Century African Atlantic," was simulcast on Zoom and is publicly available on the Department's YouTube channel.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey published his essay, "A Cartographer of the Long Eighteenth Century: Anastácio de Sant’Anna’s Guia de Caminhantes" in a special issue of Arts dedicated to “Black Artists in the Atlantic World." The essay is available open-access and under a Creative Commons license.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey published an essay in Esclavages: Représentations visuelles et cultures matérielles (Paris: CNRS éditions / UNESCO, 2024). Edited by Ana Lucia Araujo, Myriam Cottias, and Klara Anna Boyer-Rossol, the book brings together essays by leading thinkers on the visual and material culture of slavery in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Rarey's essay focused on how to envision anti-slavery resistance in sculpture, print culture, and public architecture in 1700s and 1800s Brazil.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey has won the 2024 Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize for Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke, 2023). Given annually by the Latin American and Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association, the award honors “the best book published in the previous year in the fields of Latin America, Caribbean, American Borderlands and Frontiers, or Atlantic World history." While the MacLeod is typically reserved for historians, the prize committee called Insignificant Things compelling across disciplinary boundaries.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey's 2023 book Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press) has been named one of four winners of the 2024 Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award. Given every three years by the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, the prize honors “excellence in scholarship on the arts of Africa and the African Diaspora." Earlier this year, Insignificant Things also won the 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association, one of highest scholarly honors in the field of art history. Insignificant Things is the first book to win both prizes.

Afterlives of the Black Atlantic, a major exhibition at the Allen Memorial Art Museum in 2019-2020, was shortlisted for a 2024 Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Arts Council of the African Studies Association. The award honors "important contributions to the dissemination and understanding of African and African Diaspora Arts made through exhibitions." Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey shares the prize with Afterlives co-curator and former Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the AMAM Andrea Gyorody.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey has also been named the winner of the 2024 Afro Latin American/Afro-Latinx Scholarship Prize for his essay “Leave No Mark: Blackness and Inscription in the Inquisitorial Archive,” published in Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World (National Gallery of Art, 2023). The award honors an outstanding scholarly essay on Afro Latin American and Afro-Latinx art, and is awarded jointly by the Association of Latin American Art and the Visual Culture Section of the Latin American Studies Association.

On January 30, Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey spoke to the Atlantic History Workshop at New York University. Rarey discussed and received feedback on a chapter of his in-progress book manuscript, tentatively titled Blackness and Cartography in the Unending Eighteenth Century, with professors and graduate students from across the university.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey has been named a finalist for the 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association. Rarey's book Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic is one of five finalists for the prize, which will be announced in January. The award honors "an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in the English language," and is among the highest recognitions for scholarship in art history.

On October 19, Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey delivered his paper "Renaming the Fetish: Assembling Bolsas de Mandinga" at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Rarey's invited talk was part of the Clark's 2023 conference, "The Fetish A(r)t Work: African Objects in the Making of European Art History, 1500-1900," which examined the making and “invention” of African art in European discourse.

On June 21, Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey gave the closing talk at "The Art and Architecture of Mapping: Visual and Material Approaches to Cartographic Objects," a symposium organized at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Rarey spoke on recent works by the contemporary Brazilian artist Jaime Lauriano, material derived from Rarey's current book project.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey was interviewed by host Rick Jackson on WKSU's The Sound of Ideas on May 25. He discussed his new book, Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic, and the wider history of art, enslavement, and religious practices in eighteenth-century West Africa, Brazil, and Portugal.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey published his essay “Sela Adjei: Seeing in Black" in the edited volume Zadokeli: Efo Sela x Mawuli Adzei x Elikplim Akorli. The essay analyzes the work of contemporary Ghanaian artist Sela Adjei, placing it in a longer history of abstract painting employed by 20th-century Black artists and social movements in West Africa and the United States.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey contributed the chapter "Leave No Mark: Blackness and Inscription in the Inquisitorial Archive," to the volume Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World. Edited by Steven Nelson and Huey Copeland, the book emerged out of meetings held at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2018 and 2019. These meetings brought together leading scholars of Black art history to debate and remake the "boundaries of modernist art—its notions time and again focused on the singular white male European or American artist—with another set of imperatives, ethics, and histories, broadening our understanding of the past and present of modernism."

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey presented his paper "Fugitive Landscapes and the Challenge of Black Atlantic Cartographies: Brazil, 1763" at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. Rarey's paper was one of eleven invited presentations at Dumbarton Oaks' Spring Garden and Landscape Studies Symposium, entitled "Environmental Histories of the Black Atlantic World: Landscape Histories of the African Diaspora," organized by N. D. B. Connolly and Oscar de la Torre. The symposium brought together archaeologists, historians, art historians, and landscape architects to discuss and debate place-based histories of landscapes, waterscapes, and environments of the Black Atlantic world from the fifteenth through the twentieth century.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey's first book, Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic, has been published by Duke University Press. The book traces the history of African-associated amulets carried as tools of survival in the Black Atlantic world between the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Rarey argues that these visually benign objects demand new ways of writing the histories of art and Atlantic slavery.

Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey has been appointed to a new Ohio-based editorial consortium for African Arts, the flagship journal in his field. Headquartered at Miami University, the consortium brings together experts in African art at Miami, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Kent State, and Ohio State.

On March 20, Associate Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey delivered the 2023 Stern Lecture at the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University in New Orleans. Rarey's talk, "Atlantic Slavery and the Ethics of Cartography: Brazil, 1763," is based on recent archival research in Brazil and Portugal, and forms part of his in-progress book manuscript about eighteenth-century colonial maps of maroon communities in South America and the afterlives of these maps in the work of contemporary Black artists and land rights activists in Brazil.

Assistant Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey's article, "Never at Rest: African Art at the University of Wisconsin" was published in the winter 2020 issue of African Arts. Rarey authored the essay along with Henry John Drewal, Evjue-Bascom Professor Emeritus of Art History and Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Assistant Professor of Art History Matthew Rarey's essay, "'And the Jet Would be Invaluable': Blackness, Bondage, and The Beloved" was published in the September 2020 issue of The Art Bulletin.

Andrea Gyorody, Ellen Johnson ‘33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Matthew Francis Rarey, assistant professor of art history, have both received 2020 Curatorial Awards for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) for their Allen Memorial Art Museum exhibition “Afterlives of the Black Atlantic.” On view since August 2019, “Afterlives” has been chosen by the AAMC as the best exhibition this past year at an organization with an operating budget of under $5 million.