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Amy Bowman-McElhone, Phd
mother-scholar / curator / educator
My praxis is rooted in the mission and camaraderie of Apotropaicas Colectiva. We gather to transform disciplinary barriers and build new art histories for the Americas through femme-centered relationality that foregrounds friendship and care as sites of knowledge creation. As such, my work fosters feminist, decolonial, and maternal lineages of knowledge and wisdom as vital forms of ritual and repair. Through transcontinental and hemispheric collaboration, we are reimagining the very rituals of scholarship as an ethics of care,
creating systems of circulation that bypass the entrenched logics of patriarchy and colonialism. Central to this work is a critique and re-imagining of the status-obsessed world of academia towards a more service-oriented, idea-centered, and ethical model and values system.
This inquiry extends into my role as Associate Professor of Art History and Curatorial Studies and Director/Curator of the Carlow University Art Gallery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. There, I endeavor to cultivate the gallery as a pedagogical and experimental commons. Curatorial projects like Motherwork (2025), Permissible Dose: Erin Mallea (2024), Anthropology of Motherhood: Kinship and Othermothering (2024), and Flight Plans: Njaimeh Njie (2023) are conceived as gestures of reciprocity, foregrounding art as a site of care, kinship, and feminist worldmaking.
Grounding all my work is an ethos of interdependence and embodied knowing. I live in Pittsburgh with my partner, our three children, and a joyful dog who reminds me daily of the vital work of rhythm and play. My practice, scholarly, curatorial, maternal, remains rooted in the belief that the most radical forms of care begin in the everyday.
Scholarship / Curatorial Work / Teaching / Writing and Creative Projects
My writing appears in publications such as Social Science Quarterly, Arts Journal, Contested Commemoration in U.S. History (Routledge), Journal of Curatorial Studies, and the forthcoming Innovating Higher Education at a Small University (Rutgers University Press).
Forthcoming writing projects include:
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“Mike Kelley’s Speculative Architectures: Rethinking Public Art, Pedagogy, and Memory in the Politics of Social Engagement,” in Arts Journal (November 2025)
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Milk, Blood, and Ghosts: Visualizing Maternal Anarchy (forthcoming book)