Ellen Tani - Featured Faculty 2025
Ellen Tani
College of Art and Design
Ellen Tani, Assistant Professor of Art History, researches the practices of contemporary African American and Asian American artists through the lens of critical race and mixed-race studies, Black studies, feminism, and disability culture.
Professor Tani is writing the first scholarly monograph on the conceptual artist Charles Gaines (MFA ’67, h.c. ‘23), whose work spans drawings, sculptures, performance, and installation. Fueled by rigorous archival research, Charles Gaines: Black Conceptualism and the Poetics of Systems frames Gaines’s artistic practice via his engagement with rule-based systems. Her book, which will be published by University of California Press, was selected out of over 600 applicants for a $50,000 Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in its 2025 grant cycle. She presented her research material at two national conferences, and was the invited to give the GILD recent PhD lecture at Ohio State University’s Department of Art & Art History. Over the summer, she led a two-day convening for scholars exploring the intersection of Black studies and art history at the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute, Williams College. Translating her book research into an experiential framework for the RIT community, she curated an exhibition on Gaines, who is Anna Ballarian Visiting Artist 2025-2026. Charles Gaines, which gathers six works spanning the artist’s career, including an early painting not seen for over 50 years, will be on view in the University Gallery at RIT from March 16-April 10, 2026.
Ellen Tani
Assistant Professor, Art - Historty
School of Art
College of Art and Design