Lisa Gail Collins

Lisa Gail Collins is Professor of Art on the Sarah Gibson Blanding Chair at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. She received her BA in Art History from Dartmouth College and her PhD in American Studies--with graduate minors in Studies in Africa and the African Diaspora and Feminist Studies--from the University of Minnesota. Committed to the interdisciplinary humanities, her research and teaching areas include U.S. based art, social, and cultural history with an emphasis on Black lives; visual culture, activism, and everyday life; movements for social justice; art and artmaking as social practice and community building; intimacy and quilts; communities of creativity and care; and art and storytelling. Her latest book Stitching Love and Loss: A Gee’s Bend Quilt, a meditation on suffering, creativity, resilience, and grace, was published by University of Washington Press (2023; paperback, 2025). This holistic study of a quilt made in mourning and the memory of its making won the Horowitz Prize from Bard Graduate Center and the James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Award in African American Art History.

Previous books include The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past (Rutgers University Press, 2002), Art by African-American Artists: Selections from the 20th Century (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003), and Arts, Artifacts, and African Americans: Context and Criticism (Michigan State University, 2007). She is also coeditor, with Margo Natalie Crawford, of New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (Rutgers University Press, 2006) and coauthor of African-American Artists, 1929–1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003). Her essays appear in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, African American Review, International Review of African American Art, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Rutgers Art Review, Chicago Art Journal, Exposure, Colors, Journal of Southern History, and Transition: An International Review as well as in numerous edited collections and exhibition catalogues.

“Where tenderness is possible”--an open letter to the students in her course on art, urgency, and everyday life--was chosen to serve as the lead essay for ART & Histories, ed. Kaira M. Cabañas (DC: National Gallery of Art, forthcoming), the inaugural volume of a new book series launched by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.

Upon invitation, she has taught at Barnard College, Bowdoin College, Princeton University, and St. John’s University as the D’Angelo Endowed Chair in the Humanities. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Institute for Citizens & Scholars, College Art Association, New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art.

Recently she served a three-year term as Director of Vassar’s American Studies Program (2022–2025); from 2018–2021, she served as Chair of the Art Department.

On earth that was recently ablaze and in close community with scholars from around the world engaged in the work of “Art and Repair,” she’ll deepen her new book project “tending towards” as a 2025-26 residential research scholar at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.