Community Tours: Christian Walker & As the World Burns

The Tufts University Art Galleries welcome Boston community members to join guest curator Jackson Davidow, PhD, and SMFA Professor of the Practice Bonnie Donohue for tours of Christian Walker: The Profane and the Poignant and As the World Burns: Queer Photography and Nightlife in Boston.

Jackson Davidow is an art historian, curator, and critic. He has published scholarship in American Art and in Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories, and his criticism has appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The Baffler, The Boston Globe Magazine, Boston Review, frieze, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. For his essay “Against Our Vanishing,” published in The Baffler in 2021, he received the “Writing Photography. DGPh Award for Innovative Publication” from the Deustche Börse Photography Foundation and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie in 2023. He is currently the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Harvard Art Museums. After receiving his Ph.D. in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture from MIT in 2019, he worked at the Stonewall National Museum and Archives and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Tufts University’s Translating Race Lab and the Center for the Humanities. He is writing a book on global AIDS cultural activism.

Bonnie Donohue is a photographer, video artist, and writer who has worked in places of conflict, such as South Africa before the end of apartheid, Northern Ireland before the peace accords, and Vieques, Puerto Rico during and after the US military presence on the island. Her work examines displacement and loss as military structures transform human settlements into uninhabitable spaces; it conjures forgotten figures from military and civilian archives. Recent work includes large-scale panoramic photographs of over 100 military bunkers that are featured in the western end of Vieques and a public art installation at the site of one of the bunkers. Her photographic exhibition in collaboration with cultural anthropologist Katherine McCaffrey, Killing Mapepe: Sex and Death in Cold War Vieques has traveled to several museums and cultural centers in Puerto Rico and the U.S. She is co-authoring a book with Katherine McCaffrey about the militarization of Puerto Rico in the 20th century, and writing a play on the murder of Mapepe Francis in Cold War Vieques in 1953.

Image: Christian Walker, The Theater Project (detail), 1983–4. Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 in. © Christian Walker.