• Elaine Yau

Curator’s Talk: Elaine Yau on Rosie Lee Tompkins

Presented Wednesday, February 19, 2020, 12 PM

Explore Rosie Lee Tompkins: A Retrospective with exhibition cocurator Elaine Yau, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at BAMFPA. Yau will discuss how Tompkins’s textile art evolved both within and outside of quilting traditions, sharing new information about the artist’s life and introducing never-before-exhibited artworks along with Tompkins’s signature quilt tops.

Yau, who received her PhD from UC Berkeley’s Department of Art History, specializes in modern and contemporary art as it intersects with vernacular culture; African American art history; and American material and visual culture. She is the author of a major essay for the Rosie Lee Tompkins exhibition catalog, a recent article on Sister Gertrude Morgan’s performance and painting in the 1960s, and a forthcoming essay on the shifting position of folk art in African American art.