BERNARD L. HERMAN is the George B. Tindall Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also serves on the Art History faculty. His books include Town House: Architecture and Material Life in the Early American City, 1780–1830 (2005) and The Stolen House (1992). He has published essays, lectured, and offered courses on visual and material culture, architectural history, self-taught and vernacular art, foodways, culture-based sustainable economic development, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century material life. In 2010 he received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for a collection of essays, Troublesome Things in the Borderlands of Contemporary Art, and in recognition of his scholarship on early American material culture and everyday life was elected a fellow in the American Antiquarian Society. He is currently hand-restoring native oyster reefs on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where he also maintains an orchard of heirloom figs.
GLENN HINSON is associate professor of folklore and anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a former chair of the University’s Curriculum in Folklore. Hinson has long been interested in the dynamic workings of African American expressive culture, exploring style and performance in realms that range from the musical and poetic to the material and spiritual. Much of this work has focused on the vibrant intersection of faith, experience, and performance, an abiding interest that yielded the collaborative ethnography Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African American Gospel (2000) and that prompted the rich conversations with the Dial family that led to his essay. These conversations, with their recurrent theme of spiritual intercession, also touched upon another area that Hinson is currently studying, the long-standing tradition of African American sacred songs that believers say were composed by the Holy Spirit and then “given” to singers here on earth.
EMILY KASS is the director of the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has organized and contributed to numerous exhibitions, lectured widely on art and museum practice, and pioneered museum and faculty collaborations leading to exhibitions ranging from Andy Warhol’s Polaroid photographs to the artifacts of the Silk Road. Educated at Skidmore College (B.A.), and the University of Minnesota (M.A.), with a specialty in modern and American art, Kass worked at the Walker Art Center, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, and the Tampa Museum of Art prior to joining the Ackland in 2006. She brings a wealth of experience in exhibition planning and implementation, education and public programming, development, and community collaboration. A member of the Association of Art Museum Directors, the American Association of Museums, and the Southeast Art Museum Directors Consortium, Kass has contributed extensively to building a vision for the future of university and community museums.
JUAN LOGAN is professor of art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A native of Nashville, Tennessee, Logan was raised in North Carolina. Although Logan was born in the South, his artworks address subjects relevant to the American experience as a whole. At once abstract and representational, his paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, and videos address the interconnections of race, place, and power. They make visible how hierarchical relations and social stereotypes shape individuals, institutions, and the material and mental landscapes of contemporary life. Logan’s works can be found in private, corporate, and public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Memphis Brooks Museum, the Ackland Art Museum, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum. Logan received an M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute, College of Art.
COLIN RHODES is a writer and artist. He has published and lectured widely on twentieth-century and contemporary art, especially in the areas of expressionism and primitivism, including his book Primitivism and Modern Art (1994), and wrote substantial parts of the Dutch Open University Modern Art course (1998). He is best known for his book Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives (2000). He continues to work across the field of Western modernism and self-taught and outsider art, contributing to numerous publications and exhibitions in Europe, Australia, and America. In 2009 he founded the Self-Taught and Outsider Art Research Collection (STOARC) in Sydney, Australia. He was educated in the U.K., at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and at the University of Essex. He was professor of art history and theory at Loughborough University, U.K., and since 2006 has been professor and dean of Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney, Australia.
CARA ZIMMERMAN is the executive director of the Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists in Philadelphia, an organization that fosters public understanding and appreciation of self-taught artists and their work through virtual exhibitions, publications, and educational programs. She serves as an exhibition assistant at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, consulting on special exhibition and publication projects related to outsider art, and has guest curated multiple exhibitions at the University of Delaware’s University Museums with a particular focus on contemporary African American art. Zimmerman’s essays on self-taught American artists including J. J. Cromer, Mary T. Smith, and William Hawkins appear in Folk Art, Raw Vision and the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Outsider Art. As a dancer, she performed with the Royal Ballet, English National Ballet, and English National Opera.