Renée Ater
American Art
Office: 4216 Art-Sociology Building
Email: rater@umd.edu
Telephone: 301-405-1490
Renée Ater is a historian of art of the United States from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a specialization in African American visual culture. Most recently, she is the author of Keith Morrison , volume 5 of the David C. Driskell Series of African American Art (Pomegranate Books). She also contributed an essay on Aaron Douglas's murals for the Texas Centennial Exposition of 1936 to Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist (ed. Susan Earle) (Yale University Press).
Professor Ater's research focuses on the intersection of race and gender in American art in the twentieth century. She contributed an article on embodying the black body in three-dimensional form for an exhibition catalog of the Aaron Douglas Collection at the Amistad Research Collection. She is currently at work on two essays: one examines the role of African folklore in the sculpture of Malvina Hoffman and Meta Warrick Fuller and the other considers the theatrical performances of Josephine Baker and Beyonce.
In 2002-2004, Professor Ater was the recipient of a Henry C. Welcome Fellowship Grant from the Maryland Higher Education Commission. She was awarded a 2004/2005 National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers and a 2006 General Research Board Summer Research Award from the Graduate School of the University of Maryland for her forthcoming book, The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller: Remaking Race and History at U.S. Expositions, 1907-1921 ( University of California Press ).