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 the contemporary art practices of the Caribbean and Afro-Atlantic diasporas. Her research in colonial history has informed her curatorial and artistic practice.

In spring 2016, she curated "Blood in the Sugar Bowl" at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, using 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, using large-scale styled portraits and narrative photography to examine ancestral connections to geographic sites shaped by forced and voluntary migrations under colonial rule.

After receiving her PhD from Stanford in 2016, she held the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. Her forthcoming book, "Eternal Jamaica: William Berryman Tracing Memory," examines Jamaica at the turn of the 19th century and today using ecocriticism, Black feminist, and Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices to open up a historical window that reflects past and present in the art of William Berryman. She is a 2026-27 fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities.

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