Bridget R. Cooks

Bridget R. Cooks is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on African American artists, Black visual culture, and museum criticism. Cooks has worked in museum education and has curated several exhibitions including, Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California, (2018) (Pasadena Museum of California Art); and Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective at the California African American Museum (2019) (CAAM) and the forthcoming exhibition The Black Index.

She is author of the book Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011). Some of her other publications can be found in Afterall, Afterimage, American Studies, Aperture, and American Quarterly. She is currently completing her next book titled, Norman Rockwell: The Civil Rights Paintings.