Joshua Massey is a doctoral candidate at Bard Graduate Center in New York City, where he studies American decorative arts and material culture. His dissertation explores the yard environments of “self-taught” Black artists in the American South and the ways in which such spaces were encountered, interpreted, documented, collected, and preserved by White professionals from the 1980s to the present.
Massey holds a master’s degree in decorative arts, design history, and material culture from Bard Graduate Center and a bachelor’s degree in American Studies and English/Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Massey is associate curator of This Is Not: Aldwyth in Retrospect, a travelling retrospective exhibition of the collage and assemblage artist’s seventy-year career, displayed at the Gregg Museum of Art & Design in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina. He is also the principal essayist for the exhibition’s catalogue. Massey is editor of Wordsmithing: The Spoken Art of Lonnie Holley, an in-progress collection of the artist’s verbal performances, completed in collaboration with the late Bernard Herman and Holley himself. He is the 2023 recipient of the Sybil Brenner Bernstein Endowed Scholarship at Bard Graduate Center, a Beinecke Scholar, and an Eagle Scout. Massey is also a published poet whose works appear in Alien Magazine, Defunct Magazine, and Petrichor.
Massey holds a master’s degree in decorative arts, design history, and material culture from Bard Graduate Center and a bachelor’s degree in American Studies and English/Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Massey is associate curator of This Is Not: Aldwyth in Retrospect, a travelling retrospective exhibition of the collage and assemblage artist’s seventy-year career, displayed at the Gregg Museum of Art & Design in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina. He is also the principal essayist for the exhibition’s catalogue. Massey is editor of Wordsmithing: The Spoken Art of Lonnie Holley, an in-progress collection of the artist’s verbal performances, completed in collaboration with the late Bernard Herman and Holley himself. He is the 2023 recipient of the Sybil Brenner Bernstein Endowed Scholarship at Bard Graduate Center, a Beinecke Scholar, and an Eagle Scout. Massey is also a published poet whose works appear in Alien Magazine, Defunct Magazine, and Petrichor.
