Contact Information
Biography Information
Patricia A. Banks is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mount Holyoke College. Her research and teaching interests include the sociology of culture and race and ethnicity. She received her Ph.D. and A.M. from Harvard University and B.A. from Spelman College (Valedictorian, Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa). In 2009-2010 Professor Banks will be in residence as a Fellow at the W.E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She has also been awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation Career Enhancement Fellowship for Junior Faculty for 2009-2010.
Professor Banks has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, an Exchange Scholar at Columbia University, and received fellowships or grants from Harvard University, the UNCF/Mellon Program, and the Irene Diamond fund. She has been recognized for teaching excellence by the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, and presented her research at major conferences such as the American Sociological Association Annual Meetings, the Collecting African American Art: Aesthetics, Methods, and Marketplace Conference at the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora, and the Arts, Culture and the Public Sphere Conference in Venice, Italy.
Professor Banks is completing a book on racial identity and upper-middle class black participation in the visual arts. In her second major project, she is investigating the motivations and meanings underpinning patronage at black museums.
Project Description
In the hit television sitcom The Cosby Show, scenes of black life by African American artists hang in the home of the upper-middle class black Huxtable family. In this project, I go into the world of the real Cosbys to document how upper-middle class blacks construct black identities through consuming black visual art. Drawing on over 100 in-depth interviews with upper-middle class blacks, photographs of the art in their homes, and participant observation at black arts events, I richly describe how upper-middle class blacks forge black identities for themselves and their children through arts activities such as buying black art and visiting black museums. At its heart, this project shows that to fully understand the racial identity of upper-middle class blacks, it is necessary to look at their consumption of black culture.