Alexis Boylan

Associate Professor of Art History and Africana Studies | Director of Academic Affairs, Humanities Institute, University of Connecticut

Alexis L. Boylan’s research focus is on the visual culture of the United States from the colonial to the contemporary periods with particular emphasis on race and gender. Boylan is the author of Ashcan Art, Whiteness, and the Unspectacular Man  (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) and the editor of Thomas Kinkade, The Artist in the Mall (Duke University Press, 2011).   Boylan has published in American Art, Archives of American Art Journal, Journal of Curatorial Studies, Rethinking Marxism, Woman’s Art Journal, and Public Books and has contributed essays to museum exhibition catalogues including Seeing the City: John Sloan’s New York (Yale University Press and the Delaware Art Museum, 2007); Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art (University of South Carolina Press and the Gibbes Museum of Art, 2008); and The Life and Art of Alfred Hutty: Woodstock to Charleston (University of South Carolina Press 2012). She has recently curated an exhibition about portrait painter Ellen Emmet Rand and has edited an essay collection on the artist that will be published in 2020. Her next book project focuses on the murals and sculpture created for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.