BARBARA THOMPSON, ph.d.
art historian
curator
art consultant
BIOGRAPHY
A freelance art historian, curator, and art consultant, Dr. Barbara Thompson specializes in historical and contemporary African, Native American, and Pacific Island arts and their diasporas. She has served as curator of the arts of Africa, Native America, and Oceanic Arts at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. With over 25 years of museum experience, she has curated major exhibitions in the USA and Europe, including A Different Perspective: African Ceramics from the Collection of Franz, Duke of Bavaria; Dotty Attie: Sometimes A Traveler/There Lived in Egypt; Expanding Views of Africa; Longing for Sea-Change; Black Womahood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body; FRED WILSON, So Much Trouble in the World--Believe It or Not!; Picturing Change: The Impact of Ledger Drawing on Native American Art; and Dreaming of Country: Painting, Place, and People in Australia, among many others. She has taught art history and anthropology at the University of Iowa and the University of Northern Iowa; has lectured internationally, and has been featured in news, television, radio, print, and web media.
Dr. Thompson has conducted original research in the United States, Germany, Belgium, France, Hungary, Czech Republic, Austria, Tanzania, Mali, Senegal, India, Puerto Rico, and Australia. She has published internationally in academic journals, exhibition catalogues, and art historical anthologies, often addressing the crossover between historical, contemporary, and global artistic practices and aesthetics. She has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kress Foundation, Smithsonian Institutions, LEF Foundation, and Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, among others; served as scholar-in-residence at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, University of Iowa; consulted on traditional healing in east Africa for the USAID; and was web-editor for H-AfrArts, a Humanities and Social Sciences Online web site for African expressive culture. Between 2014-2017, she served on the Board of Directors of Hawai'i Craftsmen, a non profit organization of fine craft artists in the state of Hawai'i, as Vice President, Chair of the Annual Statewide Juried Exhibition, and for a brief time as Acting President. She now lives on the island of Hawai'i, where she continues to work as an independent scholar and curator; to consult on private and public art collections and museum exhibitions; and to engage in the creation of her own ceramic arts.