Derek Conrad Murray, Professor of History of Art & Visual Culture (HAVC), has recently been appointed editor-in-chief of Art Journal. After previously serving on the journal’s editorial board, Murray will be taking on an expansive position where he can shepherd the journal’s distinguished mission for the next three years.
Art Journal, founded in 1941 by the College Art Association (the principal organization in the United States for professionals in the visual arts), is a leading fine arts publication. The quarterly, peer-reviewed journal has an international reach and publishes in the areas of art history, theory and criticism, visual culture, and art practice.
Murray’s first introduction to Art Journal was as an undergraduate art student where he was assigned readings from the publication for class. “I was always reading it, and that’s where I learned about artists, art scholarship, and art criticism,” says Murray. He published his first piece in Art Journal as a Ph.D. student at Cornell University in 2004. The article started as a seminar paper. “At the time, there weren’t a lot of graduate students publishing in the journal,” he says. “I felt it was a long shot that it would get published.”
Murray also credits being published in the journal as a major reason he was able to begin establishing himself in the field. As a mentor to graduate students, he has encouraged them to be more aggressive about seeking publishing opportunities at major academic journals while pursuing their doctoral studies. Doing so can have a transformative impact on their professional possibilities.
In 2016, he was appointed to the editorial board at the journal. During the four years he served, he gained valuable knowledge about the editorial process, which sparked his interest in pursuing leadership positions in academic publications.
As a multidisciplinary scholar, Murray has contributed to leading arts publications and peer-reviewed academic journals such as Radical History Review, American Art, Art in America, Parachute, Third Text, Consumption Markets & Culture, and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, where he currently serves as Associate Editor. Murray served on the Editorial Board of Art Journal (CAA) and is currently on the Editorial Advisory Boards of Third Text and Visual Studies (where he was formerly Co-Editor). He is the author of Mapplethorpe and the Flower: Radical Sexuality and the Limits of Control (Bloomsbury, 2020), Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights (I.B. Tauris, UK, 2016), and an edited volume Visual Culture Approaches to the Selfie (Routledge Press, 2020).
Murray specializes in contemporary art, visual culture, multidisciplinary approaches to visually-based research, the complexities of identity, and the ethics of representation. “UC Santa Cruz has this great tradition of progressive scholarship,” he says. “That spoke to me a lot, and I wanted to be a part of that tradition. UCSC’s commitment to academic freedom promotes intellectual rigor, and the institution’s focus on social impact is in keeping with my emphasis on progressive approaches, inclusivity, and reciprocity.”
Continuing his work at UC Santa Cruz and taking up his new role at Art Journal, Murray wants to embrace new ways of thinking about art, particularly by encouraging multi-disciplinary approaches to art and visual culture. “I’m especially excited to bring new voices into the discourse and expand the conversation to help cultivate new possibilities for understanding human creativity and foster the continued vitality of the field.”