Romi Crawford, is an American educator, writer, curator, art historian and professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She researches how artistic practice generates knowledge, particularly through collaboration engaging the intersections of race, culture, and visual representation. Education Crawford attended University of Chicago where she received both MA and PhD in English literature, theory, and criticism.
Career Scholarship Crawford is an art historian and professor of Visual and Critical Studies at SAIC, where her research focuses on how artistic methods function as forms of knowledge creation, often examining the relationship between art-making, race, ethnicity, American visual and pop culture.
She is the initiator of two pedagogical platforms: the Black Arts Movement School Modality and the New Art School Modality (NASM) for collaborative, intergenerational learning and alternative values in arts education.
New Art School Modality (NASM) Launched in 2023, the New Art School Modality (NASM) proposes an alternative, non-degree model for art and art-historical study, grounded in practices of collaboration, experimentation, and improvisation associated with the Black Arts Movement. Terra Foundation for American Art supports NASM initiative through a multi-year funding partnership, supporting free courses for students in Black art history.
Documenta 16 In August 2025, Artistic Director Naomi Beckwith announced an all-female artistic team for documenta 16, naming Crawford alongside Carla Acevedo‑Yates, Xiaoyu Weng, and Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro to collaborate on the exhibition, publications, and programming for the 2027 edition.
Selected Projects Publications Crawford, Romi, ed. (2021). Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect. Chicago: Green Lantern Press; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (co‑editor, with Abdul Alkalimat and Rebecca Zorach). Northwestern University Press, 2017.
Exhibitions Citing Black Geographies, Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago and New York, 2022. So Be It! Asé!: Photographic Echoes of FESTAC ’77, Richard Gray Gallery, New York, 2023. Radical Relations!: Memory, Objects and the Generation of the Political, University of Chicago Center for Gender Studies.
See also documenta Xiaoyu Weng Naomi Beckwith
References
External links Romi N. Crawford SAIC faculty profile BAM School Modality Black Arts Movement School Modality