Brownlee, Andrea Barnwell (Andrea D. Barnwell)

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Brownlee, Andrea Barnwell (Andrea D. Barnwell)

PERSONAL:

Education: Spelman College, Atlanta, GA, B.A.; Duke University, M.A., Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Museum of Fine Art, Spelman College, 350 Spelman Lane, Box 1526, Atlanta, GA 30314. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, art historian, educator, curator. Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, GA, director, 2001—. Curator of numerous exhibitions, including the "Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art," 1999; "Amalia Amaki: Boxes, Buttons and the Blues," 2005; and "Hale Woodruff, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, and the Academy," 2007. Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, Raven, GA, board member, 2004—; MOCA GA Working Artists Project, 2007, juror; Metropolitan Atlanta Art Fund, board member; City of Atlanta Arts Funding Task Force, vice chair.

AWARDS, HONORS:

MacArthur Curatorial Fellowship, Art Institute of Chicago, 1998-2000; Future Women Leadership Award, ArtTable, 2005; President's Award, Women's Caucus for Art, 2005.

WRITINGS:

The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art, Walter O. Evans Foundation for Art and Literature (Atlanta, GA), 1999.

(Under name Andrea D. Barnwell) Charles White ("David C. Driskell Series of African American Art"), Pomegranate (San Francisco, CA), 2002.

(Under name Andrea D. Barnwell, with Isolde Brielmaier) Engaging the Camera: African Women, Portraits and the Photography of Hector Acebes, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art (Atlanta, GA), 2004.

rozeal brown: a3 … black on both sides, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art (Atlanta, GA), 2004.

(Editor and contributor) Amalia Amaki: Boxes, Buttons and the Blues, National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC), 2005.

(With Amalia K. Amaki) Hale Woodruff, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, and the Academy, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art (Atlanta, GA), 2007.

Contributor of chapters to numerous scholarly works, including To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Rhapsodies in Black: The Art of the Harlem Renaissance, and African Americans in Art: Selections from The Art Institute of Chicago. Contributor of articles to journals, including the International Review of African American Art, African Arts, and NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art.

SIDELIGHTS:

Andrea Barnwell Brownlee is an art historian and writer, as well as director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, Georgia. Her primary areas of research are African American art and black British art. As the museum's curator, she has organized several exhibitions of black artists and has edited and authored books about African American artists. For example, she was the principal author of the collection catalogue for a 1999 exhibit featuring works owned by African American art collector Walter O. Evans entitled The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art. Over the course of two decades of collecting, Evans gathered a significant collection of African American artworks from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The catalogue contains eighty color plates of these artworks and includes essays on the artists by various art historians, as well as a foreword by Brownlee. Library Journal contributor Eugene C. Burt observed that the catalog "documents an important aspect of American art in a broad and inclusive manner."

Working with others, Brownlee also provides a retrospective of the art of a fellow Atlanta artist, art historian, and curator in Amalia Amaki: Boxes, Buttons and the Blues. Amaki creates mixed-media quilts as well as encrusted buttons and collages in honor of African American women. Her works are displayed in the permanent collections of numerous museums and galleries, as well as in corporate offices. Booklist contributor Donna Seaman found Amalia Amaki to be a "richly produced monograph [that] displays [Amaki's] finely detailed work and offers insights into her inspirations and motivations."

In Charles White, Brownlee has written the first volume in the "David C. Driskell Series of African American Art." White, who lived from 1918 to 1972, was arguably one of the most notable African American artists of the twentieth century, well known for the murals he created during the Depression while working for the Works Progress Administration. Clarence V. Reynolds, writing in the Black Issues Book Review, noted that White "is hailed as a treasure," and added that Brownlee "examines and relates the chapters of White's life with a quality similar to that in which the artist expressed his humanity." Reynolds further commented that Brownlee's writing is "both amiable and edifying" and that "the careful selection of White's artwork … adds weight to the book."