Mannequins in Museums

Bridget R. Cooks is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and Associate Director of the Institute and Museum of California Art. Her research focuses on African American artists, Black visual culture, and museum criticism. Cooks has worked as a museum educator and curator for several exhibitions. She is author of the book Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). Some of her other publications can be found in Afterall, Afterimage, American Studies, Aperture, and American Quarterly. She is currently completing her next book, Norman Rockwell: The Civil Rights Paintings.

Jennifer J. Wagelie is the Academic Liaison at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis. She received her PhD in art history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her area of study is the art of the Pacific Islands, specifically Maori art and material culture, with other research interests in the history of museums, collections and exhibitions. She has worked at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC and the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University and taught at UC Santa Cruz and CSU, Sacramento. She has also held postdoctoral fellowships in the anthropology departments of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.