Rachel Grace Newman

Rachel Grace Newman is an art historian with family roots in Jamaica. She specializes in the art history and visual culture of the colonial Caribbean and contemporary art practices of the Caribbean and Afro-Atlantic diasporas. Her research in colonial history has informed her curatorial and artistic practice. 

In the spring of 2016, she curated "Blood in the Sugar Bowl" at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, which used 18th-century sugar bowls as an entry point to examine the colonial sugar trade. Her art collective, In Rapture, is a collaboration with her brother, Alex, who completed his BA in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. Using large-scale styled portraits and narrative photography, their work examines ancestral connections to geographic sites in a world impacted by the forced and voluntary migrations that took place under colonial rule. 

After receiving her PhD from Stanford University in 2016, she went on to accept the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Her forthcoming book, "Assurance of Infinity: A Jamaican Remembrance," is an examination of Jamaica at the turn of the nineteenth-century and today through the art of William Berryman. It reflects on the beauty and pain of belonging and diaspora and the continuance of ancestral power and infinite life in spite of colonial violence.

Stanford University
2016 PhD, Art History
2011 MA, Art History

Rutgers University, New Brunswick
2008 BA, History and Art History (majors)

"Assurance of Infinity: A Jamaican Remembrance" (forthcoming)

“At the Edges of the Light: Buried Beings, Black Sacred Geographies, and the Camera Lucida in Colonial Jamaica,” Small Axe, 28 no. 1 (March 2024): 39-56.

“The Cemí and the Museum,” American Art Journal, 36 no. 2 (Summer 2022): 13-19.

“Drawing Back the Veil: William Berryman and the Effaced Histories of Plantation Jamaica,” University of Toronto Art Journal, Art-Work: Art’s Productive Economy, 5, (2014): 25-56.

Blood in the Sugar Bowl, Rachel Newman, Stanford, CA: Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, 2016. (Exhibition Catalogue)

• Introduction to Caribbean Art
• Colonial Visual Systems: Constructing a “New World”
• Manifest Spirit: African Art and Spirituality
• Assurance of Infinity: Black and Indigenous Conceptions of Space, Time, and Memory