Graduate Virtual Workshop : MA Visual and Critical Studies Info Session

Join California College of the Arts (CCA) MA Visual and Critical Studies for their virtual program information session to learn more about the curriculum, and general scope of the program. VCS will present an overview of all aspects of the program, the college, and the focus of the work happening at CCA. There will also be an opportunity for Q&A.

CCA's MA Visual and Critical Studies program is a two-year program that is a deep critical dive into vision, aesthetics and visual culture. VCS operates from a radical political viewpoint, and contextualizes subject matter from a queer, POC, decolonial framework.

Jacqueline Francis is the dean of the Humanities and Sciences division at California College of the Arts. Since 2008, she has taught in the graduate Visual & Critical Studies and the undergraduate History of Art and Visual Culture programs; she has also taught in CCA’s Fine Arts division and mentored Fine Arts, Design, and Architecture division students at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. She has held key leadership positions at CCA, including serving as chair of the Visual & Critical Studies program and as vice president of the Faculty Senate. She earned tenure and was promoted to Professor in 2022.

Francis is an art historian, curator, and creative writer. She researches and writes modern and contemporary US art histories; she has a special interest in the construction of past and present racialized identities and identifications which she considers in the critical framework of social art history.

Francis is the author of Making Race: Modernism and "Racial Art" in America (2012), the first book-length study of interwar expressionist American painting scrutinized through the lens of critical race art history. Francis has edited and co-edited several books dedicated to the works and influence of historical and present-day artists: Adia Millett (2020 and 2023 catalogues); Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011); Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? [writings inspired by the work of Lorraine O’Grady] (2023); and Sargent Claude Johnson (2024). She has published essays in other exhibition catalogs, peer-reviewed journals, and reference texts, and presented her research at museums, conferences, and colleges and universities in North America, Europe, and Asia. She has been a visiting professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, at San Francisco State University, and at Kenyon College.

Francis has served on the boards of research projects, scholarly publications, and member organizations that serve the field of art history and visual cultural studies, including The Living New Deal initiative, Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture (London, UK), the College Art Association, and the US Latinx Art Forum. She is the Secretary of the National Committee for the History of Art, which is the US delegation to the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art.

Francis was the president of the Queer Cultural Center of San Francisco (2017-2023). She is currently a member of the 3.9 Art Collective—a group of Black creatives dedicated to increasing the visibility of the city's Black artists, writers, and arts professionals. In 2023, Francis was named to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts "100," honored for her activism and leadership in the San Francisco Bay arts and culture community. She was the recipient of a 2017-18 Individual Artist Commission from the San Francisco Arts Commission for work on a collection of short stories.

AB, English Literature, Dartmouth College

MA, African-American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

PhD, History of Art, Emory University

Click here for Jacqueline Francis’s full bio.