Connor Ham

Connor Hamm is a PhD Candidate in Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He researches African American art history with a focus on Black artists working in the US South from the nineteenth century to the present. He has held fellowships with the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the American Council of Learned Societies and has written for Art in America and the Brooklyn Rail.

His latest research project examines Black women photographers in the Jim Crow South. Overlooked in histories of American photography, Black women photographers of the era (c. 1877-1960s) used their cameras to innovate the photographic medium, counter stereotypes and misrepresentations of African Americans and women, and challenge dominant narratives about race, gender, and power. By foregrounding the photographic practices of artists such as Mary E. Warren, Elise F. Harleston, and Wilhelmina Pearl Selena Roberts, among others, this research addresses a significant gap in the canon of American art and highlights how Black women photographers creatively resisted the segregation and sexism of the Jim Crow South.