Julie L. McGee is an art historian and curator. She joined the University Museums of the University of Delaware as curator of African American art in 2008 after a dozen years on the faculty of Bowdoin College and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She has curated exhibitions for the David C. Driskell Center, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine, the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey and Guga S’Thebe Community Arts Centre in Langa (Cape Town), South Africa. With Vuyile C. Voyiya, McGee co-produced the documentary film The Luggage is Still Labeled: Blackness in South African Art. In 2011-2012 she held the Dorothy Kayser Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History at the University of Memphis. She was a 2019 Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, at The National Gallery, Washington, D.C., where she devoted her research to the American-Dutch artist Sam Middleton (1927-2015) and transnational art history. Her current book project is devoted to Middleton.
McGee’s extensive scholarship on the celebrated curator and art historian David Driskell includes the monograph David C. Driskell: Artist and Scholar (2006), curatorial essays, artist interviews, and analyses of Driskell’s writings. She co-curated the 2011 exhibition Creative Spirit: The Art of David C. Driskell with Dr. Adrienne Childs for the University of Maryland, College Park. In collaboration with the High Museum of Art, Atlanta and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine, she curated David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History (2021). McGee is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Art History, and Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center at the University of Delaware.