Curatorial Research Fellowship: Charles Rumph Photography Collection
Position: Research Fellow in the Curatorial Department at the Phillips Collection (Washington, DC, January 2026 – July 2027)
Selected as Curatorial Research Fellow for the Charles Rumph Photography Collection, a major gift of nearly 200 photographs and related archival materials bequeathed to the museum.
In this role, I am leading a comprehensive research project encompassing in-depth examination of the Rumph photographs, catalogue documentation, archival and provenance research, and interpretive development. This work will culminate in a special exhibition of the Rumph Collection, which I will co-curate, accompanied by related publications including a scholarly essay on the artist.
Talk: Memento Mori (Part of "Fear and Folklore" Lecture)
Presented at: L'Enfant Gallery (Washington, DC, October 2025)
Talk description: What lurks beneath the surface of a still life? To find out, we'll step into the shadows of an 18th-century feast rendered in oil on canvas. Painted in 1724 by an unknown German artist, this hauntingly beautiful work belongs to the vanitas tradition, in which glossy, sumptuous objects discreetly reveal emblems of mortality. Using this painting as our guide, we will explore how the still-life genre transforms moral reflection into macabre imagery, revealing why these shadowy meditations continue to mesmerize viewers today.
Exhibition Catalogue Essay: Alice Neel Retrospective
Exhibition catalogue for Alice Neel: I Am the Century at the Pinacoteca Agnelli (Turin, Italy, October 2025)
Commissioned to write an essay for the catalogue for Alice Neel: I Am the Century, the first retrospective of Neel’s work to be presented in Italy.
My essay, “Unfit or Un-Idealized? Painting a ‘Degenerate Madonna’ in an Age of Eugenics,” builds on my doctoral research and considers how, in "Degenerate Madonna" (1930), Alice Neel transforms the sacred image of the Madonna into a study of motherhood marked by both personal grief and the social anxieties of the era.
Press:
Reviewing the exhibition and catalogue in The Burlington Magazine, March 2026, Vol. 168, No. 1476 (“Discoveries”), Kathryn Lloyd writes:
“Degenerate Madonna is often interpreted by critics and scholars as relating to Neel’s grief for her two children. However, as Kelly Richman-Abdou argues in the accompanying publication, this is not its sole meaning, situating the term ‘degenerate’ within the rise of eugenics discourse in the US press at the time and its entanglement with religious rhetoric. She also identifies Neel's probable engagement with Classical and Egyptian sculpture, notably works the artist may have seen at the Met. Such efforts to move beyond Neel's biography in pursuit of formal and art-historical readings are a key strength of the publication."
Peer-Reviewed Chapter: Cultural Skin Studies Edited Collection (Forthcoming)
Forthcoming in: Publication by Routledge (Expected 2025)
My essay, “Immaculate Complexion: The ‘Redeeming Vision’ of the Modern Black Madonna in Harlem’s Visual Art (1925–1952),” will be featured in Cultural Skin Studies, an edited collection exploring the cultural politics of skin in global contexts.
Presented at: L'Enfant Gallery (Washington, DC, April 2025)
Summary: Invited to speak about my doctoral research alongside artists and scholars, I offered curatorial insights on how exhibitions like Wall of Women challenge institutional narratives by foregrounding gendered resistance.
Title: “An ‘Awful Dichotomy’ on Display: Curatorial Approaches to Alice Neel’s Degenerate Madonna”
Panel: "Feminist Dialectics: Unheard Voices and Canonical Figures"
Presented at: College Art Association’s 113th Annual Conference (New York, NY, February 2025)
Award: Supported by a grant from the Association for Art History, which awards projects based on “their contribution to scholarship in art history, their academic rigour, and the relevance and need for the research in the specific area described.”
Summary: This paper examines Alice Neel’s candid 1930s portrayals of motherhood—especially Degenerate Madonna—and explores how contemporary curatorial strategies negotiate the display of challenging, underrepresented narratives within museum contexts.
Abstract
In 1930, American artist Alice Neel (1900–1984) abandoned her young daughter after failing to find a balance between motherhood and making art. “I always had this awful dichotomy,” Neel reflected in 1983. “I loved [her], of course I did. But I wanted to paint.” Struggling to come to terms with her sudden, self-imposed childlessness, Neel suffered a severe nervous breakdown in 1931 and was institutionalized for one year. During this delicate time, she produced highly personal, emotionally charged studies of motherhood, such as Degenerate Madonna, a bleak study of maternal labor. Delving into discomforting themes such as child loss and eugenics and once considered blasphemy, Degenerate Madonna is often distanced from Neel’s later, more well-known studies of motherhood in exhibitions and, in certain cases, excluded from major retrospectives of her work.
In this paper, I first explore the significance of Degenerate Madonna’s iconography, contexualizing it with two other paintings of the period—Well Baby Clinic and Futility of Effort—and situating it within the scope of Neel’s broader practice. I then examine the factors that motivate contemporary curatorial approaches to the painting, comparing recent exhibitions and sharing findings from an interview I conducted with a curator of one of these shows. Through this multifaceted analysis, I aim to communicate the complex and, at times, controversial aspects of displaying—or not displaying—Alice Neel’s unidealized interpretations of maternity in the modern museum.
Title: “‘Where there ain’t been no light’: American Museums and the Overlooked Potential of the Modern Black Madonna”
Presented at: Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums Annual Meeting, (Philadelphia, PA, October 2024)
Summary: Presented original research on how American museums have historically overlooked the Black Madonna as a curatorial and interpretive figure, arguing for its potential to activate conversations around race, spirituality, and modernism in contemporary museum contexts
Abstract
The Madonna is among the most iconic motifs in the canon of Western art. Today, the subject’s presence in premodern painting out of Europe is of enduring interest to scholars of art, while its appearance in later works—especially those that challenge conventions of representation—is undervalued. This gap in research is particularly prevalent in analyses of art produced by African American artists during the Harlem Renaissance, when the subject was repeatedly reimagined.
Presenting a case study comprising nine works of art completed between 1925 and 1952, this poster presentation examines why the Black Madonna is often collected but seldom displayed by American art institutions.
After participating in this session, attendees will be able to grasp the significance of this overlooked iconography and identify its untapped power to decolonize and diversify collections as well as assess, reconsider, and reflect on their institutions’ own collecting practices and curatorial priorities.
Presented at: The Phillips Collection (Washington, DC, March 2024)
Summary: This gallery talk used Bonnard’s The Palm to reveal how framing choices—linked to the artist’s Parisian exhibitor and Duncan Phillips’s archives—impact both aesthetic experience and curatorial interpretation.
Program Description:
Frames have a prominent place in the display of paintings. So why do conversations often end at the edge of the canvas? Step into the salon with Phillips Educator Kelly Richman-Abdou for a talk on these overlooked objects. Pay a visit to Bonnard exhibitor Bernheim Jeune—a Parisian art gallery founded by a family of frame manufacturers—and dive into primary source documents that reveal Duncan Phillips’s desire to custom frame The Palm, a painting he praised as “one of Bonnard’s most important canvases.”
Title: “Oh, My Dark Children”: Seeing the Holy Mothers of the Harlem Renaissance in the Art of John Biggers
Published in: I Dream a World: Mary Lou’s Harlem Festival essay series, New World Symphony (Miami, FL, February 2024)
Summary: In this guest essay, I drew on my doctoral research and curatorial focus to explore how John Biggers and other Harlem Renaissance artists used spiritual and maternal imagery to honor Black motherhood, reclaiming it as a powerful symbol of resilience and cultural memory within African American visual traditions.
Conference Paper: The Modernist Studies Association's Annual Conference
Title: ‘Holy Hub: Picturing the Modern Black Madonna in the Streets of Harlem and Beyond (1940-1948)’
Panel: ‘Sensing Harlem: Visual and Sonic Cultures of the Harlem Renaissance’
Presented at: Modernist Studies Association Conference (New York City, NY, City, October 2023)
Award: Supported by a grant awarded by the Modernist Studies Association
Summary: This paper explores modern reinterpretations of the Black Madonna in 1940s Harlem and beyond, analyzing works by Palmer Hayden, Jacob Lawrence, and Allan Rohan Crite. It argues that these street-centered portrayals of sacred maternity reframe Marian iconography and challenge the male-centered focus of Harlem Renaissance scholarship.
Abstract:
In “The Task of Negro Womanhood,” an essay published in Alain LeRoy Locke’s The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), educator Elise Johnson McDougald declared laboring African American women—especially working mothers—the “hub of progress.” McDougald acknowledged that this neoteric perception of the figure was not yet part of the popular imagination, lamenting that “the ideals of beauty, built up in the fine arts, have excluded her almost entirely.” Soon, however, a new feminine iconography would challenge this reality. Enthroned on stoops and enshrined by sidewalks, the modern Black Madonna of the 1940s brought sacred maternity down to earth—specifically, to the streets of contemporary Harlem.
This paper presents a case study comprising three paintings. Two of these works—Madonna of the Stoop (1940) by Palmer Hayden and Tombstones (1942) by Jacob Lawrence—are set in Harlem; the other—Our Lady of the Neighborhood (1948) by Allan Rohan Crite, an East Coast artist who exhibited with the Harlemites—is based in Boston.
This paper first explores how these radical interpretations of the Madonna reconsidered established conventions of Marian iconography, paying particular attention to the significance of the street as a sacred space—an unexpected modernist motif. This paper then questions why this iconography is overlooked by recent research. Stressing that contemporary scholarship seldom diverges from the movement’s masculine metaphors, it asks the question: If the modern Black mother was the “hub of progress” during the Harlem Renaissance, can scholarship that disregards her role in the arts—a “spoke” of this hub—truly be progressive?
Conference Paper: The Maternal Bodies Network Symposium
Title: ‘Hardly a Heavenly Body: Alice Neel’s ‘Degenerate Madonna’ and the Antibeauty of Maternal Labour’
Panel: “(Un)deserving Motherhood”
Presented at: ‘Maternal Bodies: Individual, Collective, Other’ Symposium (University of Birmingham, UK, June 2023)
Summary: This paper examines Alice Neel’s Degenerate Madonna (1930) as a radical portrayal of maternal labor, challenging idealized depictions of motherhood in art. It reconsiders critical readings of the work’s “unbeautiful” body and situates the painting within Neel’s political context and personal experiences of loss.
Abstract:
During a severe mental breakdown triggered by child loss in 1931, American artist Alice Neel (1900–1984) painted 'Degenerate Madonna', a bleak study of maternal labour. Seated barefoot before a blood-red wall, the painting’s weary subject—the visual antithesis of the Virgo Lactans (‘Nursing Virgin’) of the Middle Ages—unsuccessfully attempts to breastfeed a pallid child propped on her lap. Contemporary analyses of 'Degenerate Madonna' obsessively gravitate toward the unidealised appearance of the figure’s exposed breasts, which scholars and critics have described as ‘witchy teats’, ‘serpents’, ‘bloody daggers’, and ‘far from nurturant or charming . . . like bells, announcing death, pointy, empty’.
While such dehumanising descriptors align with the haunting nature of the painting, they perpetuate harmful false equivocations about maternal labour and, as a result, construct ‘ordinary’ childbearing bodies as inadequate. This limited scope also overlooks the artist’s possible intentions and plausible inspirations, which are seldom considered in the context of 'Degenerate Madonna'. Using case studies, this paper explores these factors, which include: Leftist ideologies and New Deal art; the artist’s encounters with non-Western sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and, most significantly, Neel’s complicated views on both childbearing and childrearing.
With these models in mind, one may begin to consider that the 'degenerate' mother’s breasts are not ‘witchy’, serpentine, or lethal; they are simply an unidealised interpretation of the maternal body. As such, the supposed ‘emptiness’ of the figure’s breasts does not necessarily denote a mother who is ‘far from nurturant’; it could, rather, signify the ‘antibeauty’—a term coined by Linda Nochlin in 2006—of a mother who has given so much to her infant that she has nothing more to offer. If this is the case—that Neel’s ‘degenerate’ mother desires to sustain her child but can’t— then what makes the figure ‘degenerate’?
Paper: ‘Immaculate Conceptions: The ‘Black Madonna’ and the Modernisation of Sacred Maternity by African American Artists (1925–1945)’
Panel: “Presenting Skin”
Presented at: ‘Skin in Literature and Culture, Past, Present, Future’ (University of Surrey, UK, July 2023)
Summary: This paper explores how African American artists between 1925 and 1952 reimagined the Madonna to affirm Black maternity, uplift communities, and critique institutional exclusion. It also examines why these works remain largely absent from U.S. museum collections, advocating for more inclusive curatorial representation.
Abstract:
There is ample in-depth, recent scholarship on the significance and prevalence of the Madonna—the Virgin Mary as an artistic subject—in Western art history. This research, however, seldom diverges from liturgical models produced in pre-modern Europe, which consistently picture the Virgin as an idealised maternal figure with white skin and fair features. This limited scope is a misstep, as sacramental representations of the Madonna and Child with brown and black skin date back to the eleventh century. To fully understand the significance of this age-old artistic phenomenon, we must look to its modern legacy: the Black Madonna by African American artists.
Presenting a case study comprising nine works of art (four paintings, two works on paper, and three photographs) completed between 1925 and 1952, this paper first explores how African American artists’ radical reinterpretations of the Madonna reconsidered the established conventions of Marian iconography, adapting its sacred purposes as three social functions: to uplift African Americans, ‘sacralise’ Black maternity, and decolonise the Catholic Church. It then examines why this iconography has been overlooked by American art institutions.
An analysis of each piece’s provenance indicates that none of the works featured in this paper’s case study are currently on display, and only three have been featured in exhibitions in the last twenty years. Such statistics are not true of most Madonnas; in fact, numerous art institutions in the United States prominently feature medieval or Renaissance Madonnas as cherished highlights in their displayed collections. That this Marian model—one that tends to situate the Virgin Mary in pre-modern Europe and depict her with white skin—has more relevance in the American art museum than the modern African American Madonna is not merely an ironic coincidence; it is a systemic problem worth addressing.
Title: “Old Forgotten Banjo Songs”: A Lyrical Look at the Paintings of Henry Ossawa Tanner and Loïs Mailou Jones
Published in: I Dream a World: The Harlem Renaissance in Europe festival series, New World Symphony (Miami, FL, February 2023)
Summary: This research examines Henry Ossawa Tanner’s and Lois Mailou Jones’s paintings through Alain Locke’s New Negro Renaissance, highlighting their use of rhythm and cultural expression to affirm Black identity in American art.
Title: Harlem is Where the Heart Is: The Meaning of Movement in the Art of Jacob Lawrence
Published in: I Dream a World: The Harlem Renaissance & Beyond festival series, New World Symphony (Miami, FL, February 2022)
Summary: The piece explores how Jacob Lawrence’s dynamic storytelling and vibrant visual language reflect Harlem’s cultural vitality and resonate within both American and European modernist contexts. Through this lens, I highlight Lawrence’s contribution to expanding narratives of Black identity and his influence on transatlantic artistic dialogues.
Published in: In The Raw exhibition catalogue, Sydney Road Gallery (Sydney, AU, 2021)
Summary: I wrote the foreword for Jessica Watts’s In the Raw exhibition at Sydney Road Gallery, highlighting how her large-scale wooden diptychs use exposed woodgrain and tactile materials to merge feminine strength with artistic process, celebrating the raw authenticity of creative labor.
Art and Culture Feature: Augusta Savage and the Harlem Renaissance
Title: “Augusta Savage: How a Black Art Teacher and Sculptor Helped Shape the Harlem Renaissance”
Published by: My Modern Met, 2021
Summary: This article explores Augusta Savage’s impactful career as a pioneering African American sculptor and educator. Central to the Harlem Renaissance, Savage overcame personal and societal challenges to create powerful works and mentor emerging Black artists, leaving a lasting legacy in American art and education.
Art and Culture Feature: Neo-Expressionism and Figurative Painting
Title: "Explore How Neo-Expressionism Revolutionized Contemporary Figurative Painting"
Published by: My Modern Met, 2020 [Featured by Almine Rech Gallery]
Summary: This essay investigates the Neo-Expressionist movement’s dynamic impact on figurative painting, showcasing my engagement with postmodern art movements and their evolving critical reception.
