Tanya Sheehan
BOOKS
Modernism, Art, Therapy, ed. with Suzanne Hudson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024)
Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death (New York: DelMonico Books; Waterville: Colby College Museum of Art, 2022)
Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2018); winner of a 2018 Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant
Photography and Migration, ed. (London: Routledge, 2018)
Grove Art Guide to Photography, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)
Photography and Its Origins, ed. with Andres Mario Zervigon (London: Routledge, 2015)
Photography, History, Difference, ed. (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2014)
Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2011)
ARTICLES AND ESSAYS (SELECTED)
“’A Different Kind of Struggle’: Jacob Lawrence’s Hospital Series and the Politics of Art as Therapy,” The Art Bulletin 106, no. 2 (June 2024): 39-64
“American Art Historiography, Slavery, and Its Aftermath,” Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art 53 (November 2023): 6-15
“Where to Begin: Marking Race in Surveys of American Art,” American Art 36, no. 3 (fall 2022): 33-37
“The Death of the Artist,” in Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death, edited by Tanya Sheehan, exhibition catalogue (Waterville: Colby College Museum of Art; New York: Delmonico Books, 2022), 112-34
“Business as Usual? Scientific Operations in the Early Portrait Studio,” in To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes, ed. Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers, and Deborah Willis (New York: Aperture; Cambridge: Peabody Museum Press, 2020), 187-203
“Color Matters: Rethinking Photography and Race,” in The Colors of Photography, ed. Bettina Gockel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 55-71
“On Display: The Art of African American Photography,” in Routledge Companion to African American Art History, ed. Eddie Chambers (New York: Routledge, 2019), 92-103
“From the Files: A Century of Black Photographers,” Manual (RISD) 13 (Fall 2019): 14-15
“Archiving the Regional,” Archives of American Art Journal 58, no. 2 (Fall 2019): 82-91
“Vernacular Photography: A Plurality of Purposes,” in Pictures with Purpose: Early Photography at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, ed. Laura Coyle and Michèle Gates Moresi (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2019), 16-22
“Playing the Race Card: Thomas Le Clear’s High, Jack, Game,” Panorama 4, no. 2 (Fall 2018)
“Staging Emancipation: Race and Reconstruction in American Photographic Humor,” in Before-and-After Photography: History and Contexts, ed. Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers (London: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2017), 139-152
“Photography and Migration: Keywords,” series of five essays published by Fotomuseum Winterthur’s blog, Still Searching (March-April 2017),
“Redrawing the Lines: American Folk and Academic Portraiture” (28-34) and catalogue entries on folk portraits by Joshua Johnson (46-47) and Sturtevant Hamblen (128-129), in A Usable Past: Folk Art at the Colby College Museum of Art, ed. Lauren Lessing (Waterville: Colby College Museum of Art, 2016)
“Aesthetic Harmonies: Whistler in Context,” in Whistler and the World: The Lunder Collection of James McNeill Whistler at the Colby College Museum of Art, ed. Justin McCann (Waterville: Colby College Museum of Art, 2015), 229-241
“Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography,” in No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality, and Ethnicity, ed. Adrian Randolph and David Bindman (Hanover: UPNE, 2015), 201-230
“A Time and a Place: Rethinking Race in American Art History,” in A Companion to American Art, ed. John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill, and Jason D. LaFountain (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2015), 49-67
“Confronting Taboo: Photography and the Art of Jacob Lawrence,” American Art 28, no. 3 (fall 2014): 28-51; winner of the 2014 Patricia and Phillip Frost Essay Award
“Ordinary Masters: Mike Disfarmer and the Reclamation of Vernacular Photography,” in Becoming Disfarmer, ed. Chelsea Spengemann (Purchase: Neuberger Museum of Art, 2014), 103-114
“Marketing Racism: Popular Imagery in the US and Europe,” co-authored with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. 5, The Twentieth Century, ed. David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 29-42
“Looking Pleasant, Feeling White: The Social Politics of the Photographic Smile,” in Feeling Photography, ed. Elspeth Brown and Thy Phu (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 127-157
“Retouch Yourself: The Pleasures and Politics of Digital Cosmetic Surgery,” in Digital Snaps: The New Face of Photography, ed. Jonas Larsen and Mette Sandbye (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 181-204
“Re-views: Reflections on Photography,” caa.reviews (October 1, 2013)
“In a New Light: Early African American Photography,” American Studies 52, no. 3 (June 2013): 7-24
“Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography,” Photography & Culture 4, no. 2 (July 2011): 133-156
“Faith Ringgold: Forging Freedom and Declaring Independence,” and “Faith Ringgold and Rutgers University: A Selected Chronology,” in A Declaration of Independence: 50 Years of Art by Faith Ringgold, ed. Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin (New Brunswick: Institute for Women and Art, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2009), 3-12, 50-51
“The Critical Eye: Reading Commercial Photography,” American Quarterly 58, no. 4 (December 2006): 1199-1206
EXHIBITIONS CURATED (SELECTED)
Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME, June 2-October 16, 2022
Photography and Migration: Waterville Stories, Common Street Arts Gallery, Waterville, ME, May 24 –July 1, 2017
Photography and Migration, Special Collections, Colby College Libraries, Waterville, ME, April 24 –September 15, 2015
Aesthetic Harmonies: Whistler in Context, Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME, September 15, 2015 – January 3, 2016
From Ethiopia to New Jersey: Photography and HIV/AIDS, Johnson & Johnson World Headquarters Gallery, New Brunswick, NJ, November 22, 2010 – January 13, 2011
PROFESSIONAL APPOINTMENTS (SELECTED)
Principal Investigator, Critical Medical Humanities: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Medicine, Public Humanistic Inquiry Lab, Colby College
Executive Editor, Archives of American Art Journal, Smithsonian Institution, 2015-
Elected Member, American Antiquarian Society, 2019-
Research Associate, Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University, 2012-
Distinguished Scholar and Director of Research, Lunder Institute for American Art, 2018-21