Lisa Uddin is an historian of U.S. American art, visual culture, and the built environment in the African Diaspora. She researches how expressive formations of blackness and anti-blackness have built, and rebuilt, the United States, and how these formations connect to Black migrations and solidarities. Her teaching connects modern and contemporary art and architecture to critical-reparative projects across and beyond academia. She is Associate Professor of Art History and Paul Garrett Fellow at Whitman College, located in the traditional Weyíiletpuu (Cayuse), Imatalamláma (Umatilla), and Walúulapam (Walla Walla) homelands, and Director of Whitman’s Social Justice concentration. Previously, Uddin taught at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, and held postdoctoral fellowships in Environment, Culture, and Sustainability at the University of Minnesota and at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Her work has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, the Social Science Research Council of Canada, among others. This site features selected scholarship and pedagogy as a map for possible collaborations. Please reach out if interested.
Design History
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Uddin’s first book, Zoo Renewal: White Flight and the Animal Ghetto (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), examines the shift from “naked cages” to naturalistic enclosures in U.S. zoos of 1960s and 70s. Reading architectural designs, institutional histories and popular zoo media, the book situates global wildlife conservation within the racial and spatial logics of U.S. urban renewal. Uddin shows how the material and symbolic emergence of endangered species displays in and around American zoos unfolded as the resurgence of white anti-urbanism in the long postwar period. Reviewers praised the book as a “surprising perspective on urban and racial issues” (Planning Magazine) that “adds a new dimension to what has become the standard historical understanding of zoos' relationship to race and empire” (Buildings and Landscapes) and “helps us to see zoos, and cities more widely, as multispecies environments, where humans and animals came together to shape the contours of urban life.” (Journal of American Studies). Research materials for this book are now housed at the Whitman College and Northwest Archives.
Art Criticism, Black Study
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Uddin co-edited with Michael Boyce Gillespie the art criticism series Black One Shot on ASAP/J, the online journal for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. Launched in 2018, and written by leading and emerging scholars and curators of black visual and expressive culture, the series consisted of 85 pieces over 21 transmissions. Essays had a 1000 word limit and each were devoted to a single work of art, broadly conceived. Contributors resisted the pressures to formulate complex discussions of blackness for easy public consumption by making creative-critical space for its often speculative, ambivalent, and irreconcilable forms. A reflection on the series was published in the open-access journal liquid blackness in Fall 2021.
Open Black
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Uddin’s current research examines spatial production through visual culture under the forces of anti-Black racism and Indigenous dispossession. Moving across multiple site-sensitive expressive modalities and racialized assemblages, her study considers what happens when settler colonial productions of “open space” reconfigure through the African Diaspora. Portions of this research appear in the volume Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), the Toxics project through the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, and the forthcoming Design Radicals: Spaces of Bay Area Counterculture (University of Minnesota Press).
(Open Access) Writing
Interpreting Race and Space
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Students in ARTH/IRES 135 Architectures of Race researched how based industry and popular magazines participate in the racialization of architecture, and the formation of race itself. Papers and presentations made arguments based on collaborative close readings of one year of one periodical, drawing on recent scholarship in modern and contemporary architectural history. Fall 2023.
Sensing Sovereignty
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Students in ARTH 355 Indigenous Aesthetics: Native North American Art and Visual Culture researched, wrote, and presented interpretations of campus and visiting artwork by Indigenous artists. They: 1. identified Indigenous aesthetics (i.e., materials, forms, iconographies and functions) as they presented themselves in specific works and through close readings 2. put those identifications into conversation with select social and/or environmental histories (e.g., white settlement, the reservation system, residential schools, resource extraction, habitat loss, disease, the American Indian Movement, NoDAPL, etc.) and 3. formulated an interpretation of the artwork and/or artist’s practice based on #1 and #2. Fall 2021.
Investigating Collections
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Students in ARTH 230 The Social Life of Photography conducted group research on massive digital photography collections from the Library of Congress using frameworks from our course, including: photographic processes and circuits, photography as a civil contract, honorific and repressive dimensions, photography as colonialism, landscape, and art. Collections ranged from the Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South Collection to Ansel Adams' Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar. Spring 2022.
Image credits: author photograph of 1911 general store at Allensworth CA; book cover of Zoo Renewal: White Flight and the Animal Ghetto, 2015; banner collage for Black One Shot on ASAP/J, 2020; screenshot of Instagram post @wangechistudio, 09/11/19; illustration of the squat, Natural Energy Design Handbook, September 1973; cover of Architectural Forum, April 1973; photograph of student presentation in ARTH 355 courtesy of Sheehan Gallery, 2021; photograph of student presentation in ARTH 230, 2022; film still from Men of the Forest (United States Information Service, 1952).