UNC Department of Art and Art History

10/14/2026

The Institute for the Arts and Humanities is excited to announce its 2026-27 Faculty Fellowship Program recipients. This spring, art and art history professor Maggie Cao joins the Fellows Table to work on her project “Arboreal America: The Temporalities of Natural and National History.

Dr. Cao’s research focuses on 18th- and 19th-century American art in a global context. Her research employs the history of globalization and art’s interaction with topics like technology, economics, and the natural sciences. Dr. Cao’s publications include Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies (2025) and The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America (2018).

See the upcoming Faculty Fellows and their project titles on the IAH website: https://go.unc.edu/Dr6m5

10/01/2026

Salvador Jiménez-Flores will be the next Hanes Visiting Artist Lecturer on October 8, 2026, 5:30 pm, in 100 Hamilton Hall.

Salvador Jiménez-Flores (b. 1985, Jalisco, México) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the politics of identity, double consciousness, colonization, migration, "the other," and futurism through socially conscious installation, public, and studio-based art. His practice spans community-based work, drawing, ceramics, prints, and mixed media sculpture.

for more information: https://go.unc.edu/flores

09/30/2026

ConvergeCon returns Oct. 21-22!

This two-day event will explore creativity in the age of AI through performances, workshops, discussions, demonstrations and creative experiments.

Hear from artists, researchers, educators and creative professionals as they examine how emerging technologies are reshaping the creative process and what it means to create in a rapidly changing world.

Free and open to all. Learn more: go.unc.edu/cc26


Innovate Carolina, UNC Department of Music, UNC Department of Art and Art History, UNC Joan H. Gillings Center for Dramatic Art, UNC English and Comparative Literature, UNC School of Education

09/21/2026

Our MFA candidates have a group show at UNC-Pembroke opening tomorrow!

UNC Pembroke’s A.D. Gallery will present Body to Body, featuring four UNC Chapel Hill MFA artists, Sept. 22-Oct. 22 in Locklear Hall.

09/18/2026

Art and Art History Chair Annette Lawrence in Conversation with Poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Love Across Dimensions or A Full and Brazen Sky:
Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Annette Lawrence in conversation

In celebration of the release of primary: after and with alma thomas, an exploration of Black sisterhood, creativity, and community inspired by the artist Alma Thomas’s life and work, from the award-winning poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Annette Lawrence is the Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Studio Art in the Department of Art and Art History at UNC at Chapel Hill.

Tuesday, September 22, 2026, the 135 anniversary of Alma Thomas’s birth!
7-9 pm

Community Family Life & Recreation Center
Lyon Park
1309 Halley Street
Durham, NC 27707

09/18/2026

The next lecture in our Art, Health, Equity series will be Amanda Cachia, September 23, 2026, 5:30 pm at 125 Chapman Hall.

"Access, Activism, and Aesthetic Revision: Crip Methods for Art History"

Amanda Cachia, Professor at Arizona State University, develops what she calls a critical-aesthetic approach to access, care, and confinement, tracing how hospitals, asylums, and contemporary art institutions function as overlapping architectures of power, creativity, and resistance. Moving between art history, disability studies, medical humanities, institutional critique, and the activist strategies of contemporary disability artists, Cachia shows how access operates as an artistic medium and how care becomes an aesthetic category. By centering disability as both method and material, she proposes an art history that is structurally transformed by the politics and poetics of access, and how pertinent historical artworks and movements can be reconfigured based on a crip revision.

for more info: https://go.unc.edu/ahe

09/09/2026

Hey! Is that a photo of dual-degree MA/MSLS student Lee Must doing a summer internship at the Library of Congress! Our grad students get the best summer jobs!

09/08/2026

Congratulations to Art History Professor Maggie Cao on winning the 2026 Eldredge Prize!

The Smithsonian American Art Museum announced that Dr. Maggie M. Cao, professor of art history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill has been awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for her book Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

The annual Eldredge Prize, named in honor of the museum’s former director (1982–1988), recognizes originality and thoroughness of research, excellence of writing, and clarity of method. Single-author, book-length publications in the field of American art history appearing within the previous three calendar years are eligible.

09/02/2026

The IAH is proud to announce its 2026-27 Faculty Fellowship Program recipients. This fall, assistant professor of art and art history Sherrill Roland will join the Fellows Table to work on his project “Personal Effects: Archive of the Weathered.”

Roland is an award-winning artist who teaches sculpture and expanded media at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the creator of The Jumpsuit Project, a performance-arts based project that aims to deconstruct audience perceptions about incarceration. He’s held solo exhibitions at institutions around the country, including the Ackland Art Museum and Brooklyn’s Central Public Library, and is the recipient of numerous fellowships and accolades, including a 2025 USA Fellowship Award.

See the upcoming Faculty Fellows and their project titles on the IAH website: https://go.unc.edu/Dr6m5