Visual Arts

Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) is the leading visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, the first African-American to explore modernism and to reflect African art in his paintings, murals, and illustrations. His work is a vivid record both of his achievement and of the distinctive imprint of the Harlem Renaissance upon American culture. This exploration of Douglas's life and career is filled with reproductions of his art. From previously unavailable source materials, including letters to his wife, Amy Kirschke traces the struggle of this fascinating artist to advance the Harlem Renaissance and to establish its particular imprint.

Offers an illustrated survey of African American art from its beginnings in the era of slavery to the paintings, sculpture, and prints of the late twentieth-century.

In this comprehensive book, published to coincide with a groundbreaking Tate exhibition, leading scholars examine how “the Black Atlantic,” a key concept in post-colonial studies coined by British academic Paul Gilroy in 1993, applies to art, and in doing so confirms the centrality of artists of African descent to the formation of modernity. Topics explored include the early 20th-century Parisian avant-garde; the Harlem Renaissance; the cultural links between Africa and Brazil; contemporary and “post-black” art; and the way Paul Gilroy’s original concept of the Black Atlantic remains relevant to current discussions of migration and exploitation. The book includes works by leading artists from throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

Creating Their Own Image marks the first comprehensive history of African-American women artists, from slavery to the present day. Using an analysis of stereotypes of Africans and African-Americans in western art and culture as a springboard, Lisa E. Farrington here richly details hundreds of important works--many of which deliberately challenge these same identity myths, of the carnal Jezebel, the asexual Mammy, the imperious Matriarch--in crafting a portrait of artistic creativity unprecedented in its scope and ambition. In these lavishly illustrated pages, some of which feature images never before published, we learn of the efforts of Elizabeth Keckley, fashion designer to Mary Todd Lincoln; the acclaimed sculptor Edmonia Lewis, internationally renowned for her neoclassical works in marble; and the artist Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and her innovative teaching techniques. We meet Laura Wheeler Waring who portrayed women of color as members of a socially elite class in stark contrast to the prevalent images of compliant maids, impoverished malcontents, and exotics "others" that proliferated in the inter-war period. We read of the painter Barbara Jones-Hogu's collaboration on the famed Wall of Respect, even as we view a rare photograph of Hogu in the process of painting the mural. Farrington expertly guides us through the fertile period of the Harlem Renaissance and the "New Negro Movement," which produced an entirely new crop of artists who consciously imbued their work with a social and political agenda, and through the tumultuous, explosive years of the civil rights movement. Drawing on revealing interviews with numerous contemporary artists, such as Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, Nanette Carter, Camille Billops, Xenobia Bailey, and many others, the second half of Creating Their Own Image probes more recent stylistic developments, such as abstraction, conceptualism, and post-modernism, never losing sight of the struggles and challenges that have consistently influenced this body of work. Weaving together an expansive collection of artists, styles, and periods, Farrington argues that for centuries African-American women artists have created an alternative vision of how women of color can, are, and might be represented in American culture. From utilitarian objects such as quilts and baskets to a wide array of fine arts, Creating Their Own Image serves up compelling evidence of the fundamental human need to convey one's life, one's emotions, one's experiences, on a canvas of one's own making.

Stylistically and ideologically, David C. Driskell's printmaking is an integral component of his total creative practice. Reflected in his work in the print media is a dialogue, evolving since the beginning of the twentieth century, about African art, Modernism, and the role of the African American artist in the twentieth century. Driskell, through his more than fifty years of printmaking, has skillfully negotiated these currents to develop his own expressionistic brand of Modernism.

In 1927, the Chicago Art Institute presented the first major museum exhibition of art by African Americans. Designed to demonstrate the artists' abilities and to promote racial equality, the exhibition also revealed the art world's anxieties about the participation of African Americans in the exclusive venue of art museums -- places where blacks had historically been barred from visiting let alone exhibiting. Since then, America's major art museums have served as crucial locations for African Americans to protest against their exclusion and attest to their contributions in the visual arts. 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.

Over the last forty years, renewed interest in the career of Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859¿1937) has vaulted him into expanding scholarly discourse on American art. Consequently, he has emerged as the most studied and recognized representative of African American art during the nineteenth century. In fact, Tanner, in the spirit of political correctness and racial inclusiveness, has gained a prominent place in recent textbooks on mainstream American art and his painting, The Banjo Lesson (1893), has become an iconic symbol of black creativity. In addition, Tanner achieved national recognition when the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1991 and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2012 celebrated him with major retrospectives. The latter exhibition brought in a record number of viewers. While Tanner lived a relatively simple life where his faith and family dictated many of the choices he made daily, his emergence as a prominent black artist in the late nineteenth century often thrust him openly into coping with the social complexities inherent with America¿s great racial divide. In order to fully appreciate how he negotiated prevailing prejudices to find success, this book places him in the context of a uniquely talented black man experiencing the demands and rewards of nineteenth-century high art and culture. By careful examination on multiple levels previously not detailed, this book adds greatly to existing Tanner scholarship and provides readers with a more complete, richly deserved portrait of this preeminent American master.

In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then just twenty-three years old, completed a series of sixty small tempera paintings with text captions about the Great Migration. Within months of its making, Lawrence's Migration series was divided between The Museum of Modern Art (even numbered panels) and the Phillips Memorial Gallery (odd numbered panels). The work has since become a landmark in the history of African-American art, a monument in the collections of both institutions, and a crucial example of the way in which history painting was radically reimagined in the modern era. In 2015 and 2016, marking the centenary of the Great Migration's start (1915-16), the panels will be reunited in exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art and then The Phillips Collection. Published to accompany the exhibition, this publication both grounds Lawrence's Migration series in the cultural and political debates that shaped the young artist's work and highlights the series' continued resonance for artists and writers working today. An essay by Leah Dickerman situates the series in relation to heady contemporary discussions of the artist's role as a social agent; a growing imperative to write - and give image to - black history in the late 1930s and early 1940s; and an emergent sense of activist politics. Elsa Smithgall traces the exhibition history of the Migration panels from their display at the Downtown Gallery in New York in 1941 to their acquisition by MoMA and the Phillips Collection a year later. Short commentaries on each panel explore Lawrence's career and painting technique and aspects of the social history of the Migration portrayed in his images. The catalogue also debuts ten poems newly commissioned from acclaimed poets written in response to the Migration series. Elizabeth Alexander (honoured as the poet at President Obama's first inauguration) introduces the poetry project with a discussion of the poetic quality of Lawrence's work, as well as the impact and legacy of the poets in his orbit including Claude McKay and Langston Hughes.

African-American artist Kara Walker (born 1969) has been acclaimed internationally for her candid investigations of race, sexuality and violence through the lens of reconceived historical tropes. She had her first solo show at The Drawing Center in New York City in 1994 and, at the age of 28 in 1997, was one of the youngest people to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. This publication documents Dust Jackets for the Niggerati--and Supporting Dissertations, Drawings Submitted Ruefully by Dr. Kara E. Walker, a major series of graphite drawings and hand-printed texts on paper that grew out of Walker's attempts to understand how interpersonal and geopolitical powers are asserted through the lives of individuals. In scenes that range from the grotesque to the humorous to the tragic, these works vividly and powerfully explore the themes of transition and migration that run through the African-American experience. The accompanying essays take us through Walker's saga of American experience--the dual streams of renewal and destruction that trace parallel lines through the last century's rapid urbanization and the complementary emergence of a "New Negro" identity. Fully illustrated with reproductions of the entire series, and designed by award-winning design studio CoMa with Walker's close collaboration, Dust Jackets for the Niggerati represents a major contribution to the career of one of our most significant and complex contemporary artists.

KEYNOTE: The pioneering work of a group of black artists is documented in this companion volume to a groundbreaking exhibition. This comprehensive, lavishly illustrated catalogue offers the first in-depth survey of the incredibly vital but often overlooked legacy of Los Angeles's African American artists, featuring many never-before-seen works, some of which were previously considered lost. Now Dig This! will feature artists including Melvin Edwards, Fred Eversley, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, John Outterbridge, Alonzo Davis, Dale Brockman Davis, Noah Purifoy, Betye Saar, and Charles White, connecting their work to larger movements, trends, and ideas that fueled the arts during this important era of creative, cultural, and political ferment. The publication also explores the significant network of friendships and collaborations made across racial lines, while underscoring the influence that African American artists had on the era's larger movements and trends. Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 is part of Pacific Standard Time, an initiative of the Getty. AUTHOR: Kellie Jones teaches art history at Columbia Universoty in New York City. She has worked as a curator for more than two decades and has organized several exhibitions for museums and galleries around the United States. 285 colour illustrations

Before his death at the age of twenty-seven, Jean-Michel Basquiat completed nearly 2,000 works. These unique compositions--collages of text and gestural painting across a variety of media--quickly made Basquiat one of the most important and widely known artists of the 1980s. Reading Basquiat provides a new approach to understanding the range and impact of this artist's practice, as well as its complex relationship to several key artistic and ideological debates of the late twentieth century, including the instability of identity, the role of appropriation, and the boundaries of expressionism. Jordana Moore Saggese argues that Basquiat, once known as "the black Picasso," probes not only the boundaries of blackness but also the boundaries of American art. Weaving together the artist's interests in painting, writing, and music, this groundbreaking book expands the parameters of aesthetic discourse to consider the parallels Basquiat found among these disciplines in his exploration of the production of meaning. Most important, Reading Basquiat traces the ways in which Basquiat constructed large parts of his identity--as a black man, as a musician, as a painter, and as a writer--via the manipulation of texts in his own library.

Romare Bearden (1911-1988) was a modernist artist renowned for his experimental and socially conscious works. Bearden is best known for his paintings and collages but also made significant contributions to the fields of printmaking, theatrical design, film, and other visual formats. While acknowledging the artist's place in African-American art history, where he has received his primary recognition, the fourteen essays collected in this volume seek to establish Bearden's role within the broader framework of American modernism in political, social, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts. These essays, written by distinguished scholars, track Bearden's cultural concerns and artistic evolution, from his early political cartoons to his important relationships with preeminent practitioners in the fields of literature, music, theater, and dance. His universal themes are viewed through multiple lenses, distinguishing him as a major figure of culturally and socially engaged modernism in the 20th century.