Art History students in Paris at the Louvre Museum

“I believe that society reveals its deepest fears and aspirations in the texts that it produces—texts that include images and objects as a particularly chatty, if not outright confessional, subset. In their deepest visual structures, then, artworks make arguments about both the world and themselves. As an art historian, I feel compelled to listen to these arguments through acts of close looking.”

Mary Campbell is an associate professor whose research focuses on the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and law in the art of the United States. Her first book, Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) examines the work of a little-known Mormon photographer whose images of prophets, temples, and half-dressed vaudeville actresses helped to mainstream the Latter-day Saints into the nation after the scandal of polygamy. Her current manuscript project, tentatively entitled Beauford’s Sound, is the first monographic study of the Knoxville-born painter Beauford Delaney (1901-1979) and focuses on the expansive work of reference and rewriting that drives so much of his art.

Campbell’s research has received the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the University of Tennessee’s Humanities Center. A lawyer as well as an art historian, she continues to publish in legal journals and teaches a class on art law. She also takes UTK students to Paris every July, where they study the history of Western art in the city’s museums and learn to make really good macarons.

Mcampb33@utk.edu @marycaulouvre