About

Arletha Greer is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher whose work examines Black women’s artistic production, abstraction, and the construction of artistic authorship. Her research focuses on how artists working outside dominant institutional frameworks develop formal and material languages that preserve memory, assert authorship, and construct presence within and beyond archival systems.

She is currently a Master’s student in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where her research centers on abstraction and pictorial structure, with particular attention to artists working in Washington, D.C. Her scholarly work has been presented at the Popular Culture Association Conference and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), and her writing combines close visual analysis with archival and field-based research grounded in sustained engagement with artworks and material process.

Her background includes curatorial and archival work supporting the preservation, documentation, and interpretation of African American visual culture. This experience informs her ongoing research into how artists shape their own narratives and how institutional and independent archives contribute to the construction of art history.

Greer’s artistic practice spans painting, ceramics, textile work, and sculptural forms. Working across media, she engages material as a site of immediate expression, where gesture, surface, and process record presence within a specific moment in time. Her work reflects an ongoing investigation into abstraction, transformation, and the relationship between memory and material. Select works are available for acquisition through her studio.

She is also engaged in the study of French as part of her broader research interests in transnational artistic exchange and the relationship between Black women artists and Francophone cultural contexts. Her work explores questions of migration, refuge, and artistic development, particularly in relation to Senegal and other Francophone regions that have historically served as sites of creative and intellectual expansion for Black artists.

Her writing, research, and artistic practice together contribute to an ongoing effort to document, interpret, and expand the historical and contemporary presence of Black women artists.