Lecture: Black Feminist Creative Traditions as Soundscape of a Middle Ground

Carolyn Jean Martin
Carolyn Jean Martin is a writer, educator, and artist based in Oakland, California. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute where she earned an MA in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art and an MFA in painting. Her writing practice interrogates the impact of philosophy and aesthetic traditions on the construction of race and identity, with an emphasis on articulations of Blackness in the Western visual field. Carolyn has presented her research at the University of Pretoria, UC Berkeley, and Georgia Southern University among other venues. As a visual artist her multi-media practice explores how identity is constructed and understood within the social lenses of nationality, ethnicity and race, and how these are sustained and/or transformed through the movements of diaspora. Her artwork has appeared in solo and group exhibitions in China, Canada, and various locations in the United States.

Carolyn is Chair of the Arts and Cultural Studies Department and lead faculty of the Art History Program at Berkeley City College in Berkeley, CA. Additionally, she is a PhD candidate and David Driskell Fellow at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, where she is in the final phase of completing her dissertation “Historical Presence and Vernacular Traditions of Black Women Artists Since 1980.”