Bridget Cooks
Associate Professor, Departments of Art History and African American Studies, and Ph.D. Programs in Visual Studies and Culture and Theory, University of California, Irvine

TOPIC: “The Desert as Site of Black Mythology”

Bridget R. Cooks is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. She serves as core faculty in the Ph.D. Programs in Visual Studies, Culture and Theory, and the Master’s Program in Critical and Curatorial Studies.  

Cooks' research focuses on African American artists, Black visual culture, and museum criticism.  She earned her doctorate in the Visual and Cultural Studies Program at the University of Rochester. She has received a number of awards for her work including the James A. Porter & David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History, and the Henry Luce Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. 

Cooks’ first career was as a museum professional. In this capacity she worked at several institutions including the Oakland Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and LACMA. She has also curated several exhibitions including, The Art of Richard Mayhew at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco (2009-2010); Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California at the Pasadena Museum of California Art (2018); and Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective (2019) at the California African American Museum (CAAM). 

She is author of the book Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). Some of her other publications can be found in Afterall, Afterimage, American Studies, Aperture, and American Quarterly. She is currently completing her next book titled, Norman Rockwell: The Civil Rights Paintings.