julia elizabeth neal

neal specializes in modern and contemporary art of the United States, with an emphasis on African American art history. Her research considers relations between the visual and the conceptual to emergent politics of identity and (trans)nationalisms since World War II. She explores art as a discursive phenomena in service of nationhood and its social and cultural scripts. Her interests in disguised and disregarded forms of power also consider console gaming and constituent cultures of role-playing that model abstractions about individual and world affairs. 

her book (in progress) is on the intermedia art praxis of Benjamin Patterson, which extends from her dissertation, "Who Taught You to Think (Like That)": Benjamin Patterson's Conceptual Aesthetic. Her research is supported by the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Getty Research Institute, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Ford Foundation, the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin and Spelman College. 

 neal is the author of Performance Works within the State of Benjamin Patterson: A Catalogue Raisonné Volume I (2021), a site-specific inventory of Patterson's Hamburg-based archive.