Sarah Estrela Beck

Education: BA, magna cum laude, 2015, Wheaton College (Massachusetts); MA, 2018, PhD, ABD, Northwestern University. Awards: 2021-22 Mellon Foundation COSI Research Fellow, Art Institute of Chicago; 2018-2019 Block Museum of Art Curatorial Graduate Fellow; 2018 Social Sciences Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Fellow; 2014 Beinecke Scholar. Publications: "Conduits," Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica exh cat (Dec. 2024); Reviews: "Don't Look Away: A Review of Social Fabric." Exhibitions: My curatorial work is wide-ranging, though I have primarily assisted on large-scale exhibitions including Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time at the Block Museum of Art and, most recently, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica (Dec 2024-Mar 2025).

I research and theorize how Black art and design across the globe registers humanity’s socioeconomic, racial, and gender-based conditions, and especially in lusophone contexts. My dissertation assembles three artists: Sarah Maldoror, Bertina “Mama B” Lopes, and Malangatana Ngwenya. I argue that their oeuvres demonstrate a commitment to intervening and reorienting the visual vocabulary around race which structured Portuguese colonial and Estado Novo imagery. Primarily, my research is motivated by a desire to understand those figures in art history who worked despite their odds, who insisted on being heard regardless of permission, who were maligned precisely because their work was/is so moving.