Hannah Ryan, PhD History of Art 2019, and her colleague Lesley Wolff have recently published a co-edited volume titled, Nourish and Resist: Food and Feminisms in Contemporary Global Caribbean Art, a revelatory exploration of the food, feminisms, and visual culture of the global Caribbean
Food is more than what we eat; it nourishes us. For women of the global Caribbean, the evocation of food makes visible histories and ideas that remain obscured: domestic labor, community and care, generational knowledge, cultural memory, artistic expression, and acts of resistance. In this interdisciplinary and comparative volume, scholars and artists engage with foodways through decolonial and intersectional feminist lenses, addressing the resonance of these themes in contemporary art. As such, they represent new scholarly and creative interventions on Caribbean and Caribbean-diasporic contemporary art in a global context.
This anthology harnesses the potential of food to create, negotiate, and analyze the visual languages emergent from a region grappling with political occupation, tourism, and ecological crises. Contributors lend a vital perspective into feminisms, the global Caribbean, tropical visuality, cookery, and consumption and feature discussions of such artists as María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Renluka Maharaj, Joiri Minaya, Victoria Ravelo, and Tania Bruguera.
Hannah Ryan is assistant professor of art history and director of gender and sexuality studies at St. Olaf College and holds a PhD in the history of art and visual culture from Cornell University. Her areas of research include Transatlantic visual culture, modern and contemporary arts of the African diaspora, African American art, Latin American art, intersectional feminism, and women-identifying artists. With a decolonial and feminist perspective, her work engages with issues of race and gender through theories of consumption, labor, recuperation, and care—frequently as they intersect with women’s lived experiences, including maternity. Ryan has curated exhibitions on contemporary film, video, and photography.
Lesley A. Wolff is assistant professor of art and design at the University of Tampa, specializing in art history and museum studies. Her interdisciplinary research on the visual cultures of the Americas, foodways, and heritage has appeared in various international publications. She has previously held fellowships with such institutions as the Texas Tech University Humanities Center, Harry Ransom Center, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in support of her forthcoming monograph on food and art in postrevolutionary Mexico City. Wolff is also an active curator committed to decolonial strategies and revisionist histories in contemporary art of the Americas.
