Olubukola Gbadegesin, Ph.D.
Associate professor
Art History
Courses Taught
African-American Art, Art in Africa; Modernity and Photography in Africa; Art and the African Diaspora; Traditions in West African Art Introduction to African American Studies; Contemporary Black America; Research Methods in Black Studies; Senior Capstone in African American Studies Radical Art/Work: Art and Politics in the US; Afrofuturism: Art and Black Political Expression; Masks, Masquerades and Festivals; Crimes Against Art: Thieves, Frauds, Vandals and You; Art History Research Methods
Education
Ph.D. Emory University, 2010
M.A., Emory University, 2007
B.A., Cornell University, 2004
Research Interests
As an art historian of Africa and the African Diaspora, my research focuses on the visual expressions, artistic practices, and creative exchanges of people of African descent. My work is focused on questions of materiality, visual economy, and transnational studies and within these broad areas of interest, I examine the ways West Africans intervene in a broader global history of photography. My publications and research to date focuses on the ways that West African practitioners and photographs moved through transnational networks, consequently contributing to the rise of modern visual practices in Africa and beyond. Ultimately, I seek to uncover how photographic technologies, anti-/colonial politics, and transnational movements converged to produce new regional practices of representation in West Africa that are simultaneously reflected in black visual practices, globally.
Professional Experience
Known to my students as Dr. Bukky, I have been joint appointed with teaching and advising responsibilities across two departments—African American Studies and Visual and Performing Arts—since 2011. In this role, I’ve offered a range of courses centered on the artistic and political expression of peoples of African descent around the world and also cultivated the success of my students in academic and community engaged spaces.
With a research focus on African photographic histories, my work reaches across archives in Africa, Europe, and the United States. My current book project focuses on the intersections of materiality, visual economy, and transnational studies in photographic histories in colonial West Africa. Titled Lens on Lagos: Photography and Place in a West African City, 1861-1953, the book examines how photographic practices evolved in Lagos (Nigeria) over several decades. By detailing how African photographers produced contested visions of the city, the manuscript puts the making of the modern visual record in line with the rise of this major colonial and economic center, the most populous in West Africa.
A concurrent project, tentatively titled, Paper Trails of Traveling Plays: Vernacular Photoplays and Popular Forms, tells the story of Atoka, a popular photographic magazine. First published in 1967 in southwest Nigeria, these photoplays featured sequential photographic panels that depicted theatre actors captured in mid-performance, delivering their lines in speech bubbles written in Yoruba, the local language. Often regarded as the precursors to the influential Nollywood film industry, these incredibly popular magazines were rooted in the local popular culture and political conditions of Lagos, yet inextricable from transnational networks of exchange that guided the movement of cultural forms across a winding and distinctive circuit from Italy to South Africa, and finally, Nigeria. Building on archival research and firsthand interviews, this project is the first to trace the art historical legacy of a publication that functioned across a range of discursive registers—vernacular linguistics, postcolonial politics, theatre traditions, print media and literature, etc. In essence, I argue that these photoplays contributed to and transformed the ways that Nigerian audiences made sense of their collective post-colonial experiences.
Publications and Media Placements
Books
Lens on Lagos: Photography and Place in a West African City, 1861-1950 (Expected December 2026)
Articles and Book Chapters
“Is This Picture Not a Proof”: Photojournalism and Anti-Colonial Politics in Lagos 1937-1953” African Studies Review (Published)
“A Divine Provenance: African Photographers in CMS Archives” Photographica 9, 2024, 107-122.
“Early Photography in Lagos” Exhibition Essay. Ouvrir l’album du Monde, Photographies 1842-1911, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. (Editor-reviewed, April 2023)
Collecting and Exhibiting Modern African Art. Mildred Lane Kemper Museum of Art. March 2023.
A Conversation with Gary Logan. Museum of Contemporary Religious Art. July 2019
“Animating Genre in Yoruba Photoplay Series.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 4, no. 2 (2017): 176–190. (Peer-reviewed, published)
“Damon Davis’s Negrophilia: Encounters with Black Death” Art Journal Open. August 30, 2017. (http://artjournal.collegeart.org/?p=8867) (Editor-reviewed, published)
“‘True to Life’”: Illuminating the Processes and Modes of Yoruba Photoplays.” Book Chapter. African Print Cultures, edited by Derek Peterson and Emma Hunter, pp. 251-279. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016. (Peer-reviewed, published)
“Paper Trails of Traveling Plays: Yoruba Traveling Theatre and the Advent of the Photoplay.” Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture 9, no. 1 (January 2015): 35-58. (Peer-reviewed, published)
“‘Photographer Unknown’: Neils Walwin Holm and the (Ir-)retrievable Lives of African Photographers.” History of Photography 38, no. 1 (February 2014): 21-39. (Peer-reviewed, published)