John Bowles

John Bowles is an Associate Professor of African American Art and Faculty Affiliate at the Institute of African American Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work centers on the intersection of art, morality, and social justice, with a focus on African American artists’ contributions to modernism and globalization. He holds a Ph.D. from UCLA (2002) and completed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. His research emphasizes re-evaluating 20th-century art canons through the lens of race, gender, and diaspora.

Bowles authored Adrian Piper: Race, Gender and Embodiment (2011), the first scholarly monograph on Adrian Piper’s work, and co-founded the African American Performance Art Archive (AAPAA) in 2008 to document underrepresented performance art histories. His current book project, Globalization and African American Art, explores how African American artists engage modernism, diaspora, and transnational politics.

His publications span journals like Art Journal, American Art, and Hyperallergic, and he has curated exhibitions such as Racial Violence and Resilience at the Ackland Art Museum. Bowles actively critiques art’s role in addressing societal inequities, linking historical practices to contemporary movements like the 1970 Artists’ Strike.