Christopher Richards

Christopher Richards is Assistant Professor of Art History at Brooklyn College in New York City. He received his PhD in Art History from the University of Florida in 2014. Dr. Richards’s main fields of interest are African dress, fashion, and bodily ornamentation, with a focus on the countries of Ghana and South Africa. He was awarded a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Centre for the Creative Arts of Africa in Johannesburg, South Africa. Dr. Richards was featured in the film Wax Print—produced and directed by British-Nigerian filmmaker Aiwan Obinyan (https://waxprintfilm.com)—and his research was presented in the nationally recognized MOMA exhibition Is Fashion Modern? (2017–2018).

Richards co-curated Beadwork, Art and the Body with Anitra Nettleton at the Wits Art Museum and guest curated Kabas and Couture: Contemporary Ghanaian Fashion at the Harn Museum of Art (both in 2015). His recent publication includes Cosmopolitanism and Women’s Fashion in Ghana: History, Artistry and Nationalist Inspirations (Routledge, 2021). He also wrote a chapter on Ghana’s female flight attendants for the edited volume Fashion, Agency, and Empowerment: Performing Agency, Following Script (Bloomsbury, 2019) and a chapter on the South African fashion designer Laduma Ngxokolo in Beadwork, Art and the Body (Taylor & Francis, 2015). His article on the history of Ghanaian fashion and the country’s first fashion designer is one of the most downloaded articles on the African Arts website: https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/AFAR_a_00296?class=ref+nowrap+abs. Dr. Richards has a variety of other publications and regularly participates in symposia and conferences.