35th Annual James A. Porter Colloquium

2025 James A. Porter Book Award Recipient - Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw--The Art of Remembering: Essays on African American Art and History

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Professor in the Department of the History of Art and the inaugural faculty director of the Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on portraiture and issues of representation, with an emphasis on the construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the American context. She has previously served on the faculty of Harvard University and as the Director of Research, Publications, and Scholarly Programs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. In addition to her books, The Art of Remembering, Essays on African American Art and History, (Duke: 2024), Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Duke: 2004) and First Ladies of the United States (Smithsonian: 2020), she has also curated numerous exhibitions, including Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (2006), Represent: 200 Years of African American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2015), and I Dream a World: Selections from Brian Lanker’s Portraits of Remarkable Black Women, at the National Portrait Gallery.

James A. Porter Book Award Honorable Mention

Emilie Boone- A Nimble Arc: James Van Der Zee and Photography

Sarah E. Lewis- The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America

2025 Inaugural Floyd W. Coleman Professional Excellence Award- 

Camara Dia Holloway & Jacqueline Francis

Dr. Camara Holloway is the Project Manager for the Romare Bearden Digital Catalogue Raisonné at the Wildenstein Plattner Institute. Her research expertise is on twentieth century American and African American art, with special knowledge of African American photography and critical race art history. She is the founding co-Director of the Association of Critical Race Art History. Holloway’s graduate work was at Yale University and her undergraduate work at Barnard College. She has previously taught at the University of Delaware, the University of Southern California, Swarthmore College and Sarah Lawrence College. Holloway curated the exhibition, “Portraiture & the Harlem Renaissance: The Photographs of James L. Allen” at the Yale University Art Gallery in 1999, which rescued the Harlem Renaissance photographer from obscurity. Her most recent publication is the essay, “Dark Stars: Reinventing Blackness in the Interwar New York-London Circuit,” in the peer-reviewed journal American Art.

Jacqueline Francis is the dean of the Humanities and Sciences division at California College of the Arts. Since 2008, she has taught in the graduate Visual & Critical Studies and the undergraduate History of Art and Visual Culture programs. Francis is an art historian, curator, and creative writer. She researches and writes modern and contemporary US art histories; she has a special interest in the construction of past and present racialized identities and identifications which she considers in the critical framework of social art history. 

Francis is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012), the first book-length study of interwar expressionist American painting scrutinized through the lens of critical race art history. Francis has edited and co-edited several books dedicated to the works and influence of historical and present-day artists: Adia Millett (2020 and 2023 catalogues); Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011); Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? [writings inspired by the work of Lorraine O’Grady] (2023); and Sargent Claude Johnson (2024). She has published essays in other exhibition catalogs, peer-reviewed journals, and reference texts, and presented her research at museums, conferences, and colleges and universities in North America, Europe, and Asia. She has been a visiting professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, at San Francisco State University, and at Kenyon College.

Francis is the founding Co-Director of the Association for Critical Race Art History. Francis has served on the boards of research projects, scholarly publications, and member organizations that serve the field of art history and visual cultural studies, including The Living New Deal initiative, Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture (London, UK), the College Art Association, and the US Latinx Art Forum. She is the Secretary of the National Committee for the History of Art, which is the US delegation to the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art. Francis was the president of the Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco (2017-2023).In 2023, Francis was named to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts “100,” honored for her activism and leadership in the San Francisco Bay arts and culture community. She was the recipient of a 2017-18 Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission for work on a collection of short stories.