About

Olivia K. Young is an interdisciplinary scholar of African Diaspora Studies with a focus on contemporary art, visual culture, black cultural history, queer theory, black feminisms, performance studies, and disability studies. She is an Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History at Rice University. Young is trained in black studies and holds a graduate degree from the Department of African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a designated emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality. Her research includes a current book project titled 'How the Black Body Bends: Sensorial Distortions in Black Contemporary Art,' which analyzes the relationship between blackness, sensate formations, and material distortions in the artwork of black contemporary artists. In her teaching, she centers black cultural histories and modern and contemporary art to broaden students' understanding of how visuality structures narratives of race, gender, sexuality, and disability. Young has received multiple fellowships and awards, including the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Smithsonian American Art Museum Predoctoral Fellowship, and an inaugural scholar-in-residence fellowship at the Rauschenberg Residency.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Visual arts
• Artificial Intelligence
• Art
• Gender studies
• Pedagogy
• Art history
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Library science

Selected publications

• To an Always Knowing

  Art Journal · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Visual arts
  • Aesthetics
  PublisherDOI

• Black Op Art

  Art Journal · 2023-10-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this article, I conceptualize the term "black op art" to consider how black artists are centralizing speculative sensory effects as both object and subject within their work and therefore as dynamic interventions within the political, hyper-racialized, and dispossessing field of visuality. I consider themes of dispossession through a studied meditation of two works that similarly play and push on the edges of optical effects: James Baldwin (2018) by Nekisha Durrett and Requiem for Charleston (2016) by Lava Thomas. Black op art is neither about what is knowable nor enigmatic through the visual field, but rather about what lengths black artists must go to in order to work within it, as well as the ciphered language of mattering and meanings embedded within their works of art.

  PublisherDOI

• Awe of What a Body Can Be: Disability Justice, the Syllabus, and Academic Labour

  Performance Matters · 2023 · 2 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Pedagogy

  This article explores the practice of critically and lovingly manifesting access in syllabus construction and examines how axes of oppression shape our classrooms via the syllabus. We are a collective of multi-racial queer and trans disabled academics writing from our personal experiences and our engagements with performance studies and Disability Justice. We argue that the academy must shift from discussions of accommodations to access, surface questions of Disability Justice and teaching labour in graduate school and higher education at large, and offer a series of questions for teachers to examine their approach to disability in their classrooms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Out of the Box: <i>Beverly Buchanan</i>

  Archives of American Art Journal · 2023

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Art

  In 2018, the Archives of American Art acquired the papers of Beverly Buchanan. The diverse collection includes personal notebooks, journals, scrapbooks, artist statements, clippings, documentation of artworks, correspondence with colleagues and friends (including Lucy R. Lippard and Lowery Stokes Sims), photographic materials, illustrations, zines, and quickly executed jokes on paper. For the debut installment of the journal’s new section “Out of the Box,” executive editor Tanya Sheehan and guest editor Amelia Groom invited seven contributors to each select and meditate on one object from the Buchanan Papers—a rich and varied collection that poses timely questions about environmental and racial justice.

  PublisherDOI

• Retracing the contours of her figure … slippages begin to appear: Reckoning the limits of the archive with Senam Okudzeto’s<i>Large Reclining Nude</i>

  Women & Performance a journal of feminist theory · 2017-01-02 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Large Reclining Nude (2004) by transnational artist and scholar Senam Okudzeto is an 86-inch by 63-inch acrylic drawing of a nude, black female body released into a bare milieu. At first glance, the figure is grounded as shadows cast across her body hint at the presence of a foundation. However, outside the bounds of the body, Okudzeto resists three-dimensional perspective, calling into question the necessity of mediational signifiers for the orientation of the figure. How are we to read this solitary body after Scenes of Subjection, after Saidiya Hartman recontextualizes black corporeality as social relationality, throwing the “autonomous individual … into crisis?” For this article, the author reads the lone, floating body of Okudzeto’s 2004 Large Reclining Nude for new openings into Hartman’s archival reckoning in Scenes of Subjection. She offers a meditation on the aesthetic techniques evident through the visual aporia of the drawing – irresolvable contradictions in the field of the visible – suggesting Okudzeto offers alternative reading practices that afford reengagement with Hartman’s work.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Julia Havard

  Dartmouth College

  2 shared

• Phoebe Collings-James

  1 shared

• M. Ty

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  1 shared

• Jess Dorrance

  University of California, Berkeley

  1 shared

• Amelia Groom

  1 shared

• Ciarán Finlayson

  1 shared

• Catherine E. Morris

  Ottawa Hospital Research Institute

  1 shared

• Caleb Luna

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship…
• Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, Inaugurate Scholar…
• Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) Patricia and Phillip…
• Andy Warhol Foundation and Creative Capital, Arts Writers Bl…