Matthew Francis Rarey

Biographic Data

ID1099142
NAMEMatthew Francis Rarey
GIVEN NAMESMatthew Francis
FAMILY NAMERarey
SIGNATURERAREY M F
AFFILIATIONSOberlin College
ORCID0000-0001-5050-4440
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS10
TOTAL CITATIONS11
AUTHOR COUNT10
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2017
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX1

  • Arts across Africa before 1600

    Jordan A Fenton, Matthew Francis Rarey et al.ARTICLEAfrican Arts2026

    In Cape Town, one of the origins of art sits in a gallery hidden within a winding exhibition on humanity geared at children at the Iziko South African Museum. Not much larger than a modern marker pen, a chunk of ochre found in the Blombos Cave bears gridded lines that testify to an unknown person's decisive mark-making some 73,000 years ago (Fig. 1). The so-called Lydenburg heads (ImiKrolo yeetNtloko yaseLydenburg), impressively scaled works scul…

  • The Magic of Decolonization

    Matthew Francis RareyARTICLEWest 86th2025

    Using a single line in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) as a jumping-off point, this article meditates on the decolonial possibilities of Afro-Atlantic religions and their associated ritual objects. In it, I argue not that Afro-Atlantic works are inherently opposed to colonial epistemes but rather that moralizing colonial regimes’ exercises of power has forced their association with the concept “magic” and, in turn, the institution…

  • Ana Lucia Araujo. The Gift

    Open AccessMatthew Francis RareyARTICLEThe American Historical Review2025

  • A Black Cartographer of the Long Eighteenth Century

    Open AccessMatthew Francis RareyARTICLEArts2024

    From 1816 to 1817, Anastácio de Sant’Anna, a pardo (mixed-race) artist and cartographer active in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, produced the Guia de Caminhantes, a manuscript atlas of Brazil and the Americas. Sant’Anna’s Guia is one of the few extant cartographic works produced by a Black artist during the slavery era. Discussing the Guia in English for the first time, this essay positions Sant’Anna’s work inside of the emergent subfield of Black Geog…

  • Insignificant Things

    Matthew Francis RareyBOOKInsignificant Things2023

    In Insignificant Things Matthew Francis Rarey traces the history of the African-associated amulets that enslaved and other marginalized people carried as tools of survival in the Black Atlantic world from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Often considered visually benign by white Europeans, these amulet pouches, commonly known as “mandingas,” were used across Africa, Brazil, and Portugal and contained myriad objects, from herbs and Isl…

  • Second Careers

    Matthew Francis RareyARTICLEAfrican Arts2022

    Visitors to Second Careers: Two Tributaries in African Art first encountered five striking photomontages in Tahir Carl Karmali's 2013 Untitled (Jua Kali Series) (Fig. 1). Using images of urban cityscapes alongside repurposed computer and car parts, the works reimagine select Kenyan creatives—including the artist—as Afrofuturist cyberpunks personifying the creative possibilities of the media surrounding them. As the show's introductory text explai…

  • Assemblagem, oclusão e a arte da sobrevivência no Atlântico Negro

    Matthew Francis Rarey, Oberlin College et al.ARTICLE19&202021

  • Never at Rest

    Matthew Francis Rarey, Henry John DrewalARTICLEAfrican Arts2020References: 18

    October 01 2020 Never at Rest: African Art at the University of Wisconsin Matthew Francis Rarey, Matthew Francis Rarey Matthew Francis Rarey is assistant professor of the Arts of Africa and the Black Atlantic at Oberlin College. He earned his PhD in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where from 2009-2010 he served as Graduate Curatorial Fellow in African Art at the Chazen Museum of Art. [email protected] Search…

  • Assemblage, Occlusion, and the Art of Survival in the Black Atlantic

    Matthew Francis RareyARTICLEAfrican Arts2018Cited by: 11References: 23

    An archival abscess subtly warps the pages of a manuscript held at the Torre do Tombo National Archive in Lisbon, Portugal (Fig. 1). In 1704, agents of the Portuguese Inquisition sewed this object into the binding of the trial papers of Jacques Viegas, an enslaved “natural of Ouidah” about twenty years old.1 Jacques had entered the Holy Office in June of that year, desperate to confess the sins that burdened him. Reaching into the cuff of his pan…

  • Shine

    Matthew Francis RareyARTICLEAfrican Arts2017

    In her brilliant Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice, Krista A. Thompson considers four “lens-centered” aesthetic practices across the circum-Caribbean: street photography in Atlanta and New Orleans; Jamaican dancehall spectacles; extravagant prom entrances in the Bahamas; and the bling aesthetics of contemporary transnational hip-hop. Delving into the histories and visual economies of each, Thompson argues …