Pembroke Center

Ph.D. 2024, American Studies, Yale University

Dissertation: “Antiblackness as Spatial Production: Postminimalism, Site-Specificity, and Land Art, 1970s-Present”

Patricia Ekpo is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work mobilizes black studies, art history, black feminist thought, and psychoanalysis to interrogate the role of antiblackness in constituting space, body, gender, psyche, and subjectivity. Her research explores this question through black women’s abstract sculpture, installation art, and other visual media that illuminate black formlessness—forged through the continuing violence of chattel slavery—as the containing negative space of modern human forms. Her current book project explores this through monographic study of sculptor Beverly Buchanan’s de/forming body of work and life—including her architectural painting, environmental and shack sculptures, photography, storytelling, and personal artistic production and correspondence.

In spring 2025, Ekpo is teaching the GNSS course “Visual Art and Black Feminist Theory” which will combine in-depth engagement of texts in black feminist theory with a wide-ranging survey of significant painting, sculpture, performance, photography, and installation art made by black women in the 19^th to 21^st centuries. Utilizing formal analysis and art historical context, the course will engage the ways that black women disturb, dissolve, and give definition to the conceptions of gender and racialization — as well as art historical categories and ideologies — that shape the human. Theoretical concepts representing the singular modes of dispossession that ensnare black femininity, as well as black femininity's re/production of the modern world — concepts such as black flesh, ungendering, fungibility, black mater, plasticity — will be applied to analysis of artworks and the artworks will, in turn, flesh out these concepts. 

Ekpo holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University, where she also earned a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her work is featured and forthcoming in Parapraxis and Studies in Gender and Sexuality.