Dr. Megan Driscoll
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Profile
Megan Driscoll is an historian of contemporary art whose research explores the intersections of Black studies with discourses on art and technology. Before coming to Richmond, she served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Recent publications can be found in The Routledge Companion to African Diasporic Art History, Art Journal, Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology, and The Black Scholar, and she was scholarly guest editor for the Media-N special issue “No Template: Art and the Technologies of Race.” Dr. Driscoll’s reviews and public scholarship can also be found in Woman’s Art Journal, VoCA Journal, caa.reviews, and Smarthistory, and she is currently completing the book manuscript Art on the Internet: Computer Networks and the Rise of Contemporary Art, which addresses how artists working with computer networks examined the internet’s role in defining shifts toward the current period of contemporary art.
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Presentations
Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, 2025, Conference, October 22-25. Convener for symposium “Black Studies: Breaking and Remaking Art History.”
Clark Art Institute Research Art Program 25 year convening, 2025, Colloquium, June 26-28. Participant in a group holding a private research working group followed by a public pedagogy workshop on the theme “A call to transform: art history and Black studies.”
College Art Association, 2025, Conference, February 12-15. Presented “Networked Bodies: Identity, Sexuality, and the Internet in Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon.”
College Art Association, 2024, Conference, February 14-17. Presented an updated version of “Body to the Ground: Movement Toward Abstraction in Sondra Perry and Senga Nengudi.”
Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, 2023, Conference, October 4-7. Presented “Body to the Ground: Movement Toward Abstraction in Sondra Perry and Senga Nengudi.”
Archives of American Art, 2022, Invited participant at the Terra Foundation funded Computer Art Study Days, May 19-20.
College Art Association, 2022, Virtual conference, March 3-5. Presented “Intimacy, through the wires: Desire and stranger relationality on the early web.”
Archives of American Art, 2022, Invited virtual publication talk, January 27. Presented “The Technicity of Blackness: On Failures and Fissures in the Art of Sondra Perry.”
Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, 2021, Virtual conference, October 27-30. Presented “Skin on Key on Skin: Art and the Human Network.”
SECAC, 2020, Virtual conference, December 11. Presented “Tactics: Art and Publicity on the Internet.”
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 2020, Works-in-progress lecture series, March 4. Presented“(In)habitable and (Un)seen: Failures and Fissures in the Art of Sondra Perry.”
Association for the Arts of the Present, 2019, Conference, October 10-12. Presented“(In)habitable and (Un)seen: Technology, Failure, and the Politics of Inefficiency in Sondra Perry.”
College Art Association, 2019, Conference, February 13-16. Presented “A New Platform for Publicity: ®™ark and Net Art’s Battle for the Digital Public Sphere.”
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Presentations
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Publications
Journal Articles
“The Technicity of Blackness: On Failures and Fissures in the Art of Sondra Perry.” Art Journal 80, no. 4 (Winter 2021): 8–23.
“Art, Race, and the Internet: Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Black.Net.Art Actions,” in Smarthistory, September 21, 2020, https://smarthistory.org/art-race-internet-mendi-keith-obadike-black-net-art-actions/.
Megan Driscoll is guest editor of “No Template: Art and the Technicity of Race,” a special issue of Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus 18, no.1 (2022), https://doi.org/10.21900/j.median.v18i1.
“‘And there was violent relaxation.’ Art's Ambivalence Toward the Age of the Internet,” in VoCA Journal, March 28, 2018, http://journal.voca.network/and-there-was-violent-relaxation/.
“Color Coded: Mendi + Keith Obadike’s Black.Net.Art Actions and the Language of Computer Networks.” The Black Scholar 47, no. 3 (July 3, 2017): 56–67.
“Online and Off: Interpersonal Networks and the Development of Internet Art.” Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, no. 9: Networks (November 2016). http://shiftjournal.org/networks/online-and-off/.
Book Chapters“Being Seen: An Art History of the Blackness of Technology,” in The Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art History, ed. Eddie Chambers, 520–33. New York: Routledge, 2024.
“Now You’re in My Computer: Performing in the Network’s Theater of Visibility,” in The Art Happens Here: Net Art Anthology, ed. Michael Connor, 405–10. New York: Rhizome, 2019.
ReviewsBook and exhibition reviews can be found in Woman’s Art Journal, caa.reviews, Art Journal, apricota, PORT, and Visual Codec.
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