Faculty

Allison Young

Assistant Professor

Allison Young is assistant professor of contemporary art history at LSU, and an affiliate faculty member in the department of African and African American Studies (AAAS) at LSU. A specialist in postcolonial and contemporary art of the Global South, she received her B.A. (2009) in Art History and Anthropology from Brandeis University, and her M.A. (2012) and Ph.D. (2017) from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Young’s scholarship centers primarily on African and African-Diasporic artists and art histories, with focus on questions surrounding migration, transnationalism, and political engagement in contemporary art. Her research has been supported by several recent grants and fellowships, including a 2022 Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a 2022 Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society, a 2022 Monroe Fellowship from Tulane University’s New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, and a 2021 Research Support Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art at Yale University. She is honored to have received the 2022 Tenure-Track Faculty Award from the LSU chapter of the Phi Kappa Phi Honors Society.

Young is currently at work on a book project on the work of South African artist Gavin Jantjes, and is engaged in research on the intersection of contemporary art, environmentalism, and social justice in Louisiana. She has published scholarly articles on contemporary artists such as Regina Agu (Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, 2022), Zarina Bhimji (British Art Studies, 2021), Gavin Jantjes (Art Journal, 2017) and Penny Siopis (Contemporaneity: Historical Presence in Visual Culture, 2015) and has also contributed writing to numerous exhibition catalogues and books. These include essays for the Phaidon publication African Artists (2021), multiple artist entries for Prospect 5: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow (2021), an extended essay on the work of Remy Jungerman for The Measurement of Presence, the Dutch Pavilion at the 58^th Venice Biennale (2019); on Robert Pruitt for Queen: From the Collection of CCH Pounder (2018); on Juliana Huxtable for Out of Easy Reach (2018); and on several international artists for the Short Guide of All the World’s Futures, the 56^th Venice Biennale (2015), and several other publications. Her arts criticism has been featured on platforms such as Artforum, Apollo International, ART AFRICA Magazine, Burnaway, and Wallpaper*, and she has served as Content Editor of Global Modern and Contemporary Art for Smarthistory since 2015.

Before joining LSU, Young was Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow for Modern and Contemporary Art at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where she curated and published an exhibition catalogue for Lina Iris Viktor: A Haven. A Hell. A Dream Deferred (2018). At NOMA, she co-curated several exhibitions including Torkwase Dyson: Black Compositional Thought | 15 Paintings for the Plantationocene (2020); Bodies of Knowledge (2019); and Changing Course: Reflections on New Orleans Histories (2018), which was named the 2018 Museum Exhibition of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Award. In 2021, she joined the National Advisory Panel for the exhibition “Promise, Witness, Remembrance” at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, which commemorated the life and legacy of Breonna Taylor.

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