This book examines the quilts, ceramics, paintings, sculpture, installations, assemblages, daguerreotypes, photography and performance art produced by African American artists over a two hundred year period. The author draws on archaeological discoveries and unpublished archival materials to recover the lost legacies of artists living and working in the United States. As the first critical study to provide in-depth case studies of twenty artists, this book introduces readers to works created in response to the Middle Passage, Atlantic slavery, lynching, racism, segregation, and the fight for civil rights. Bernier examines little-discussed panoramas, murals, portraits, textile designs, collages and mixed-media installations to get to grips with key motifs and formal issues within African American art history. Working within this tradition, artists experiment with cutting edge techniques and alternative subject-matter to undermine racist iconography and endorse a new visual language. They push thematic and formal boundaries to create powerful narratives and epic histories of creativity, labour, discrimination, suffering and resistance. By providing close readings of works by artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, William Edmondson, Howardena Pindell, Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Betye Saar, Horace Pippin and Kara Walker, this book sheds new light on the thematic and formal complexities of an African American art tradition which still remains largely shrouded in mystery. Includes 16 colour photographs.
"In Exhibiting Blackness, art historian Bridget R. Cooks analyzes the curatorial strategies, challenges, and critical receptions of the most significant museum exhibitions of African American art. Tracing two dominant methodologies used to exhibit art by African Americans--an ethnographic approach that focuses more on artists than their art, and a recovery narrative aimed at correcting past omissions--Cooks exposes the issues involved in exhibiting cultural difference that continue to challenge art history, historiography, and American museum exhibition practices. By further examining the unequal and often contested relationship between African American artists, curators, and visitors, she provides insight into the complex role of art museums and their accountability to the cultures they represent."-- Provided by publisher.
Grant Hill and experts celebrate and examine the creative expression of African American art and artists.
Examines the impact of African culture upon Black visual artists in the United States and Caribbean (Jamaica, Haiti, and the Bahamas).
Contains sixty-six alphabetically arranged entries that profile African-American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and briefly describes the lives and accomplishments of Ghada Amer, Norman Lewis, Hale Woodruff, and others.
Examining works by Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar, this innovative book frames black women's aesthetic sensibilities across art forms. Investigating the relationship between vernacular folk culture and formal expression, this study establishes how each of the four artists engaged the identity issues of the 1960s and used folklore as a strategy for crossing borders in the works they created during the following two decades. Because of its interdisciplinary approach, this study will appeal to students and scholars in many fields, including African American literature, art history, women's studies, diaspora studies, and cultural studies.
A catalog of an exhibition of recent Afro-American folk art, with photographs of the artists, commentary, and photographs of their works.
"Signaling recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future, and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays in African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, particularly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities. Scholars from the fields of communication, theater, queer studies, media studies, performance studies, dance, visual arts, and fashion design, to name a few, collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes? If we conceive the arts as critical to the legacy of Black activism in the United States, how can we use that construct to inform our understanding of the complicated intersections of African American activism and aesthetics? How might we as scholars and creative thinkers further employ the arts to envision and shape a verdant society?"-- From Amazon
Discusses African American folk art, decorative art, photography, and fine arts.
Free within ourselves, drawn entirely from the National Museum of American Art's collection of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by more than one hundred African-American artists, serves as a guide to the art and lives of thirty-one of these artist and an introduction to African-American art of the past two centuries.
Analyzes the developments in African American painting and sculpture from pre-Civil War days to World War II.
"Many of this nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have amassed significant collections of American art and founded galleries and museums on their campuses. These collections provide a rich resource for the study of African American art and possess a diverse array of nineteenth and twentieth-century American art. To Conserve a Legacy documents an outstanding sampling of paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, and sculptures owned by Clark Atlanta University, Fisk University, Hampton University, Howard University, North Carolina Central University, and Tuskegee University.""This book serves as the catalogue for a major exhibition and conservation project organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem, in association with the Williamstown Art Conservation Center and the six participating HBCUs."--Jacket.
This distinctive volume focuses on the memorable paintings of noted African American modernist William Henry Johnson. Born and raised in a segregated South Carolina town, Johnson (1901-1970) became an expatriate experimental painter in Paris, then Scandinavia. As an African American working in Europe, he drew on primitivism and his travels in North Africa, exploring styles ranging from Northern European expressionism to boldly colorful narratives. Returning to New York in 1938 with his Danish wife, Johnson captured the edginess of city life in bluesy, nervous paintings. Johnson was ultimately struck with a debilitating mental illness that confined him to a state hospital for the rest of his life, virtually removing his work from the American Art scene. This book resurrects the story of one of America's most original artist.
