African American Art History

How are artists, and how are disciplines in the arts, humanities and law, responding to the hyper-visuality of racial injustices on American ground? This article explores a set of “groundwork” tactics in the Stand Your Ground Era in the United States. Stand Your Ground laws, first established in 2005, define the right to self-defense, to claim the ground on which one stands if there is a perception of “reasonable threat.” The law disproportionately affects black and brown lives today. The artworks under discussion in this article—Grace Notes: Reflections for Now by Carrie Mae Weems to honor lives lost to racial terror, and the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI)’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice to
lynching—prompt the question, What does it mean to not be able to “Stand Your Ground”? What are the representational tools available to show the frequent challenge to this upright position as a statement of
sovereignty over one’s own life? How has the manifold meaning of the term “ground”—as both reason, fact, but also soil itself, opened up a mode of critical inquiry to address the injustices wrought at our feet? Just as the field of environmental studies has begun to consider its nexus with racial inequity, this article approaches these representations of the “ground” through the lens of racial formation, art history, and legal study in the United States.

When is the negotiation of being seen in front of the lens a civic act? Dawoud Bey has consciously grappled with this foundational question for decades. His landmark work offers us invaluable models of what this negotiation requires of a photographer’s relationships with his or her subjects and community and with the field of photographic styles that might complicate the ethics of this endeavor, particularly for black subjects.

The focus of my research centers on the contemporary work of Georgia-based artist, Kara Elizabeth Walker. In conducting extensive research on the life of the artist as well as three select artworks which recall the antebellum slave era within the south, I argue the explicit presence of the power of the enslaved prepubescent girl and young woman. The three select works that I intend to analyze are Burn, a cut-paper silhouette on canvas created in 1998, The Invisible Beauty, a mixed media piece made in 2001, and Cut, a paper cut-out silhouette made in 1998. In a time where one’s power and freedom were both stripped away upon entering the prison-like confines of a plantation home, the life of a slave (a female slave in this case) was committed to grueling housework, the rearing of her slave master’s children in the place of her own, sexual exploitation and merciless beatings, humiliation, submission to her white counterparts, and in many cases, the occasion of rape. Walker’s intense, o...

The book examines how African American artists responded to the political, social, economic and cultural issues of the time in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Featured artists include Laura Wheeler Waring, Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippin, Augusta Savage, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Norman Lewis, Walter Augustus Simon, Rose Piper, and Loïs Mailou Jones.
The book is the accompanying catalogue to the exhibition, Black Artists in America-from the Great Depression to Civil Rights, Dixon Galleries and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee, October 17-January 2, 2022.

“Nothing came easy,” Gordon Parks, remarked in his 1990 autobiography, Voice in the Mirror, looking back a long and winding road that had turned the High School drop-out at age fifteen into an accomplished photographer, writer, and film director by the 1970s.

The year 1967 was a transitional moment for the rehabilitation of activist art and the formation of black identity. It was likewise significant for Faith Ringgold, who was preparing the solo exhibition that would introduce her to the New York art world. That summer, after riots devastated Detroit and Newark, NJ, she painted Die expressly for the show. The wall-size canvas depicts an interracial cast of clean-cut antagonists trying to kill each other.

Although the painting represented the kind of large-scale, politically motivated figuration that had been out of favor since the 1940s, it earned favorable attention from key art journals. I argue that its warm reception indexes the painting’s ability to speak differently to different constituencies, from mainstream and African American modernists to the activists in the Black Arts and peace movements then beginning to make waves. The painting’s multivocal potential encompassed an iconography that reads as either warning against or wishing for social unrest and a format that inserts the large-scale figuration of public murals into the more rarified space of the commercial art gallery.

As a microhistory focused on Die’s production and reception, this study aims to illuminate how racial politics influenced a politics of style in this volatile moment. To do so, it situates Die in relation to a mounting attention to protest, violence, social realism, and black aesthetics, especially as they crystallized in writer Amiri Baraka’s engagement with the Newark riot and in gallery director Robert Newman’s facilitation of Ringgold’s shift to large-scale imagery.

Published in American Art 7 (Winter 1993): 40-59.
An analysis of the series and the ways the individual compositions set up rhythms much like "call and response."
A fuller discussion can be found in Patricia Hills, Painting Harlem Modern:  The Art of Jacob Lawrence. (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 2009,.

Beverly Buchanan's Marsh Ruins (1981) are large, solid mounds of cement and shell-based tabby concrete, yet their presence has always been elusive. Hiding in the tall grasses and brackish waters of the Marshes of Glynn, on the southeast coast of Georgia, the Marsh Ruins merge with their surroundings as they enact a curious and delicate tension between destruction and endurance.

Amelia Groom illuminates Buchanan's vision of sculptural ruination, and probes her remarkable work in terms of ideas of witnessing, documentation and cultural memory. Existing in dialogue with Land art and post-minimalist sculpture, the Marsh Ruins are nevertheless unique refusals of art world classifications and systems of value. Making abstract use of concrete forms, Buchanan's works embody their own stakes, from colonial-ism's legacies of fracture and dislocation to the workings of weather and time. In the words of her own mother, Buchanan had always 'seen things' in rocks that others didn't see.

This title is part of the Afterall One Work book series, which focuses on the artworks that have significantly shaped the way we understand history.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/beverly-buchanan

Understanding the relationship of race and the quest for full citizenship in this country requires an advanced state of visual literacy, particularly during periods of turmoil. Today, we've been able to witness injustices in a firsthand way on a massive scale that would have been unimaginable decades ago. We have had to ask ourselves questions that call upon powers of visual analysis to read, for example, the image of Eric Garner's killing, virally disseminated through social media, or to understand the symbolism in Dylann Roof 's self-styled portraiture before his killing of the Emanuel 9 in Charleston. Being an engaged citizen requires grappling with pictures, and knowing their historical context, at times, with near art historical precision. Yet it is the artist who knows what images need to be seen to affect change and alter history, to shine a spotlight in ways that will result in sustained attention.

Originally published in the 2014 Mellon Mays Undergraduate Journal; article begins on p.8

As a working section of my undergraduate thesis, “Being as Seeing: Douglass’ Phenomenology of Vision, Self, and Progress” is a close reading of Frederick Douglass’ visual theory and photographical inquiry in his 1861 lecture, "Pictures and Progress." I examine his concept of "thought-pictures," his treatment of the subject/object dialectic, and his politic of representation and humanity.

Published in Ruth Fine and Jacqueline Francis, eds. Romare Bearden, American Modernist.  National Gallery of Art, Studies in the History of Art, Vol. 71.  Washington DC, 2011.
Argues that the cultural legacies of living in the South (such as using newspaper and magazine pages as "wallpaper") influenced Bearden, Lawrence, Benny Andrews, Faith Ringgold and other artists in their attitudes  about  the collage aesthetic.

Ìké. ré. , a city in Èkìtì State of southwestern Nigeria, comes up often in the literature of art history on two principal accounts: first, its art and architecture, and second, its major annual festival. These are the two central concerns of this paper. In the first part, the unique architecture of the àfin and the traditional sculptures that were its central feature present the opportunity to examine the interconnectedness of continuity and change, tradition and modernity, and the centrality of art in the Ọba's quest for political pre-eminence. Ìké. ré. came to international attention through the virtuosic sculptures of one of Africa's master carvers — Ọló. wè. (ca. 1873–1938), who lived in Ìsè .-Èkìtì, a town about 15 miles east of Ìké. ré. . In addition to offering new insights into the relevance of Ọló. wè. to Ìké. ré. , this essay posits a re-examination of the birth year of Ọló. wè. . In the second part, this essay dissects the Ọló. sunta festival, which remains central to the collective identity of a people who subscribe to different religious doctrines. The early history of Ìké. ré. acknowledges the city as a site for the simultaneous reign of two rulers, the Ògògà and the Olúké. ré. . But it is the annual celebration of the Ọló. sunta festival that serves as the rallying point for the indigenes of the city at the same time that it provides a time-honored structure for handling potentially explosive cultural and political contestations.

Ten adults—men and women, black and white—fight, flee, or die over the twelve-foot span of American People Series #20: Die as an interracial pair of children cowers unnoticed in their midst. While Faith Ringgold was painting this apocalyptic vision in a Manhattan studio in the summer of 1967, civil unrest convulsed black neighborhoods across the United States and protests against the war in Vietnam escalated. Art historian Anne Monahan explores the mural’s orchestrated chaos and its multiform inspirations, from contemporary anxiety about black revolution, through the writings of James Baldwin and Leroi Jones (soon to be Amiri Baraka), to iconic canvases by Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock then on view at The Museum of Modern Art.

Each volume in the One on One series is a sustained meditation on a single work from the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. A richly illustrated and lively essay illuminates the subject in detail and situates the work within the artist’s life and career as well as within broader historical contexts. This series is an invaluable guide for exploring and interpreting some of the most beloved artworks in the Museum’s collection. 48pp; 35 illus.

An illustrated lecture on the art of renowned artist Betye Saar in relation to the works included in the exhibition, "A Sense of Place: Six Contemporary African American Artists" in the Frick Fine Arts Gallery of the University of Pittsburgh, fall 2005.

Book review for Journal of American Studies on Ruth Fine  and Jacqueline Francis (eds), Romare Bearden, American Modernist, (National Gallery of Art, Washington; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), $70,  304 pages, ISBN: 9780300121612
Richard J Powell (ed), Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, (Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University: Durham, 2014), $36.69 176 pages, 9780938989370

This is an interview that Michele Wallace did with Faith RInggold in which we discuss the various images and ideas behind The French Collection, a series of story quilts Ringgold create in the 1990s.  This interview also comes with illustrations available on the Soul Pictures blog: http:/mjsoulpictures.blogspot.com

There has been much debate in art, and other fields, about the efficacy of identity politics for advancing social justice and change. My contribution considers anti-racism, as a type of social analysis and political strategy, in the context of Leftist debates that also reoccur in relation to sex and gender politics. Pointing to how ideas articulated in art relate to politics, this essay identifies what makes a particular phenomenon a model, when specificities can be generalized, or from which concrete situations we can extrapolate abstractions. If we articulate the universal potential of identity politics, we can base solidarity on the intersection of class with other forms of identity-based, or ascriptive, politics.

In the fall of 2019, the University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press will present
an exhibition of work by the African American artist Elizabeth Catlett (1915 – 2012).
Drawn primarily from the collection of artist, scholar, and collector Samella Lewis, this
exhibition will display prints and sculpture by Catlett in conversation with work by Lewis
and by Catlett’s husband, Francisco Mora. In conjunction with this exhibition, the
University of Delaware is pleased to announce a one-day symposium that explores the
transnational perspectives of Catlett’s work, to be held on October 4, 2019.

Laura Wheeler Waring (1887-1948), African American painter, is best known for her portraits of black elites of the first half of the 20th century. Yet perhaps her most celebrated work is the portrait of Anna Washington Derry, a working class woman Waring met during the artist's nearly 40 year tenure as an instructor at one the nation's oldest HBCUs. This paper details how the lives of artist and sitter intersected, and how the portrait--now part of the Smithsonian's permanent collection--brought acclaim to Waring far beyond the confines of rural Pennsylvania where Derry spent her entire life.

In 1970 Melvin Edwards crisscrossed a gallery in the Whitney Museum of American Art with barbed wire. His work was in reaction to developments in American art, especially Minimalism, but in material that evoked violent racism, raising significant and still potent questions about how abstract art can meaningfully address the politics of race. Recently, Edwards’s long-neglected work has been featured in several major books and high-profile exhibitions. This scholarship, however, has mostly focused on his response to debates on Black Art in the civil rights era, separating his work from the dominant approaches to modern sculpture that Edwards both referenced and reconfigured. Rather than protest the museum from without, he criticized it from within, addressing the art world’s exclusion of African American artists by installing barbed wire and directing the Minimalist emphasis on literal space toward the more specific problem of Black art in the white cube.

African American artist Grafton Brown depicted a young Virginia City (founded in 1859) with a bird's eye view, captured in late 1860 or early 1861. Brown was only twenty years old at the time. The image includes insets around the border, depicting various buildings important to the community at the time. Besides identifying those buildings, this article provides an analysis of this emerging capital of international mining, as depicted by an important American artist. 49:1 (Spring 2006)