Amelia Groom, ‘Some Fragments for Beverly Buchanan’

Amelia Groom

Amelia Groom is a writer, art historian and theorist who is currently working on a book that looks at the art and antifascist activism of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore through the lenses of queer and trans ecologies. As part of the Afterall One Work series, Groom published a book on the Marsh Ruins (1981), a swampy environmental sculpture by the artist Beverly Buchanan, who made secretive and ruinous monuments to Black history in the Deep South of the US.

Other recent publications include essays on Mariah Carey’s refusal to acknowledge time; on mud; on Scheherazade and the possibilities of ‘oblique parrhesia’; on queer, feminist and antiracist practices of gossip and ‘grapevine epistemologies’; and (co-authored with M. Ty) on the aesthetics and politics of rust. Together with Rachael Rakes, Groom co-edited the journal No Linear Fucking Time (published by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht). Groom’s research has often returned to questions of time: its undercurrents, its blockages and trickling detours, and the possibilities for its re-routing.

Groom is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Previously, they were a theory tutor and mentor for MFA students at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam (2014-24); a Postdoctoral Fellow at ICI Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin (2018-20); and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen (2021-22).