Ray Hernández-Durán, Ph.D.
Biography
Ray Hernández-Durán, Ph.D. is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at the University of New Mexico.
Ray received his M.A. in Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he studied under Henry J. Drewal, Emeritus Evjue-Bascom Professor of African and African Diasporic Arts. At UW-Madison, he was affiliated with African Studies, studied Yoruba, and was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to study and conduct research in Nigeria. His master’s thesis examined ritual objects and performance in Haitian Vodun.
Ray then completed his doctorate in Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Latin American Art History at the University of Chicago where he worked with Tom Cummins, currently Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art at Harvard University.
In addition to courses on Spanish Colonial Art, Arts of Nineteenth-Century Mexico, and Museum Studies, Ray offers courses on the Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora, such as, Arts of Subsaharan Africa and its Diasporas, Arts of the Yoruba (Ancient to Contemporary), and Arts of West and Central African Kingdoms (1500–1897), as well as graduate seminars, including, African Material Cultures and the Epistemologies of Art and African Art: Strategies of Display and Interpretation.
