Visual Arts

by

Adrienne Childs

• LAST REVIEWED: 12 January 2017
• LAST MODIFIED: 29 May 2019
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0027

Introduction

The study of African American art, or art by African Americans, is a field of inquiry that has grown over the course of the 20th century, along with the subject matter. The focus is the study of black artists and their works of art in media such as painting, sculpture, craft, printmaking, video, mixed media, and performance art. The field is driven by the analysis of the meanings and contexts of the works of art, as well as the lives and experiences of the artists. Works vary in terms of content and style and the relationship to issues of blackness, African American history, and identity. There has been debate as to whether black artists whose work does not engage issues of blackness in America can be considered “African American” artists. This issue has largely been discredited in favor of an understanding that any work of art by an African American, no matter the content, is a reflection of the lived experiences and multidimensional concerns of black artists in America. Critics have challenged the idea of this categorization by claiming that it creates an artificial segregation of artists and their work based on an ill-defined construct of race in America. They contend that individual artists create within the framework of multiple human identities. In spite of varying viewpoints and challenges to the delineation of the field along racial lines, the study of African American art has remained a viable mode of inquiry, in large part because of a lack of attention to black artist from mainstream histories of art. A few African Americans entered the world of professional art in the 19th century. In the early 20th century, a critical mass of black artists began to coalesce around the country. Many developed visual languages that spoke to the particular social, cultural, and spiritual aspects of black life in America. Black artists gained academic training and began to enter into the mainstream professional art world, albeit marginalized by racial strictures. During the black consciousness movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the study and analysis of the art of black Americans emerged as a cohesive field. Early literature was focused on recovering the artwork and biographies of artists lost to the indifference of the mainstream art world. Postcolonial criticism influenced the modes of analysis regarding study of the art of African Americans and the field gained new scholarly attention. The literature on this subject has grown since the last quarter of the 20th century. The sources cited in this article focus on broader thematic treatments of the field and less on the work of individual artists.

Survey Texts

The survey text has been an important tool for gathering and documenting the histories of African American art and artists lost, invalidated, and underappreciated. These treatments of African American art typically begin with the few colonial artists and artisans, black artists of note in antebellum America, and the rise of the black artist in the early 20th century through the era of global identities in the 21st century. James A. Porter is considered the father of African American art history and offered the first broad look at the “Negro” artist in America (see Porter 1992, first published in 1943). The overview approach employed in Lewis 2003 and Bearden and Henderson 1993 reveals a broad swath of black artists, many unknown. Later, Patton 1998 and Powell 2003 apply a social contextual approach to the discussion of the work, demonstrating how black artists and their works chronicled and interpreted the histories of race in America. Farrington 2017 emphasizes the social, biographical, and contextual in a comprehensive and useful survey. Bindman and Gates 2014 expands upon the canon established by Porter, Patton, and Powell, and casts the history of art by blacks, largely in America, in terms of its relationship to the history of representing blacks and blackness in the West.

• Bearden, Romare, and Harry Henderson. A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present. New York: Pantheon, 1993.

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  Structured around a series of long biographical essays on individual artists that date to the 1980s. A contextual chapter introduces each section. This is a comprehensive view of the canon of African American artists established by Porter and Driskell (see Porter 1992 and Driskell 1976, the latter cited under Exhibition Catalogue Surveys). While more accurate and in-depth research on the individual artists has been conducted in the years since its publication, it remains a useful resource for undergraduates seeking more information on individual artists in the field.

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• Bernier, Celeste-Marie. African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

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  Bernier’s approach resides at the intersection of biography and critical analysis. This book is divided into six chapters that take on general topics such as the Harlem Renaissance and abstraction. Subsections are devoted to individual artists. Her discussion is framed by informed critical analysis of the artists’ works and their relationships to issues of race and representation. With limited illustrations, this text is most appropriate for upper-level students or graduate students who are familiar with the material.

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• Bindman, David, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. The Image of the Black in Western Art. Vol. 5, The Twentieth Century, Part 2: The Rise of Black Artists. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.

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  Concentrates largely on art by African Americans and covers major trends in the 20th and early 21st centuries in seven lengthy, well-illustrated essays. Although self-representation and identity formation is important binding material among the various essays, the volume treats an array of lesser-known and canonical artists who have multiple relationships to the politics of race. This volume can be used as a stand-alone text on African American art for an undergraduate survey or for a more in-depth graduate study.

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• Farrington, Lisa E. Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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  A survey of the art of African American women. The feminist movement has been critiqued as being geared toward the concerns of white women. By singling out the art of black women, Farrington chronicles the artistry and engages the histories, concerns, and visual strategies employed by women who emerged from a legacy of slavery, racism, and sexism.

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• Farrington, Lisa E. African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

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  A textbook that surveys the production of art, architecture, and photography by African Americans from the 18th through the 21st centuries. The most up-to-date survey text in the field, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the subject. Each chapter features a contextual analysis of the period or topic covered and in-depth discussions of individual artists, movements, and ideas. The author emphasizes visual literacy. Useful key terms and questions for further study accompany each chapter. This book is appropriate for an undergraduate survey as well as an overview for graduate students.

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• Lewis, Samella S. African American Art and Artists. Rev. 3d. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

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  The 2003 publication of African American Art and Artists is the third edition of this survey text, first published in 1978. This was the standard survey of African American art of its time and was aimed toward the general public and undergraduates. The third edition has a new introduction and has been expanded to include later artists. Like other survey texts in this field, it is driven by biographical treatments of artists from the 18th through the 21st centuries.

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• Patton, Sharon F. African-American Art. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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  Patton’s African American Art is a comprehensive survey text that is not driven by biographical material but rather by a chronological and topical discussion of the contexts and concerns of African American artists from early slave communities through the 1990s. Patton inserts useful definitions of terms, trends, and ideas that provide background material to the discussion. This text is suited for undergraduate surveys of the field.

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• Porter, James A. Modern Negro Art. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1992.

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  The classic survey text of the field of African American art. Porter was the founder of the discipline and first published the book in 1943. The 1992 edition adds an introduction by David C. Driskell. Porter writes an analytical treatise that defines the field and lays out many of the issues that remain relevant today. This is an essential work for graduate students or historiographers interested in how the discourse around artists of African descent emerged.

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• Powell, Richard J. Black Art: A Cultural History. 2d ed. London: Thames & Hudson, 2003.

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  This is the second edition of the book originally titled Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century, first published in 1997. It is a well-illustrated and condensed analysis of “black art.” Powell distinguishes black art from African American art by including the black diaspora. While he acknowledges the hybridity of black culture, he discusses sites of commonality. Powell also discusses video, film, and performance art. The advanced analytical discussion is appropriate for advanced undergraduates.

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The 19th and Early 20th Centuries

The literature on the few well-documented African American artists of the 19th century is largely monographic. This is due to the scarcity of professional artists, cohesive movements, and trends that would be categorized as African American “fine” art of the era. Trained African American artists and craftsmen, many of whom were mixed race, engaged the prevalent European modes and methods (see Farrington 2012). A distinct African American–inflected tradition of fine art did not begin to crystalize until the early 20th century. However, there were important and influential craftsmen whose stories and works have been lost, with the notable exception of Thomas Day (Marshall and Leimenstoll 2010). The exhibition catalogue for Sharing Traditions (Hartigan 1985) surveys the field of 19th-century African American painters and sculptors. It is based on the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, one of the earliest museums to concertedly collect and document African American art. Other books in this section are analytical biographies, providing the most critical discussions of blacks in the visual arts during the period. Buick 2010, Ketner 1994 and Marshall and Leimenstoll 2010 focus on artists and artisans who died before the 20th century and whose works represent 19th-century Euro-American traditions and styles, while Ater 2011 and Marley 2012 treat artists who were born in the 19th century but worked into the early 20th century. Henry O. Tanner (Marley 2012) and Meta Warrick Fuller (Ater 2011) are artists who form a bridge between the Victorian sensibilities of earlier artists and the modernist and more racially conscious directions of artists born in the 20th century.

• Ater, Renée. Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

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  This well-researched book concentrates on Fuller’s sculpture for three early-20th-century expositions, the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition (1907), the National Emancipation Exposition (1913), and the America’s Making Exposition (1921). These expositions created a public forum for African Americans to define and assert a vision of their own racial and historical identities in the context of the larger American identity project that was represented through a system of expositions large and small.

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• Buick, Kirsten Pai. Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

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  Buick’s biography of neoclassical sculptor Edmonia Lewis is a rigorous attempt to analyze and place an artist who has remained elusive to historians. Buick considers the politics of the artist’s performance of race in her own period and critiques the politics of the kind of art-historical positioning that foregrounds Lewis’s blackness as an interpretive structure for her life and work. This approach stands in marked contradistinction to Ketner’s analysis of Duncanson in Ketner 1994.

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• Farrington, Lisa E. “Black or White? Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century African-American Art.” In Special Issue: Cross-Cultural Issues in Art from the Nineteenth Century to the Present. Edited by Lisa E. Farrington. Source: Notes in the History of Art 31.3 (2012): 5–12.

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  A discussion of artists of color in 19th-century America, who, the author contends, were afforded privileges of education, access, and patronage because of their mixed-race status.

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• Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe, ed. Sharing Traditions: Five Black Artists in Nineteenth-Century America; From the Collections of the National Museum of American Art. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985.

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  Sharing Traditions is limited by the works in the exhibition. In this case, it is the collection of the current Smithsonian American Art Museum. This catalogue focuses on the museum’s extensive holdings of the works of five black artists who worked in mainstream American and Euro-American styles, such as Hudson River school, landscape painting, and neoclassical sculpture. Although dated, this remains an important overview of the topic.

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• Ketner, Joseph D. The Emergence of the African-American Artist. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994.

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  Ketner’s monograph is the only book-length treatment of the life and work of Robert Scott Duncanson, an Ohio-born mixed-race artist. Duncanson became a well-received landscape painter in the Hudson River style. He was supported and touted as an exemplar of the race by abolitionists. Ketner provides comprehensive biographical material. He also interprets many of the artist’s landscapes as coded statements of racial unrest and identity politics. This view has proven to be controversial.

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• Marley, Anna O., ed. Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

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  Marley’s edited volume accompanied a major retrospective exhibition of the work of Henry O. Tanner mounted by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Many consider Tanner to be one of the most important African American artists. This volume includes twelve essays and an introduction by various scholars who come to Tanner’s work from different approaches and disciplines, many of whom do not specialize in African American art. This volume significantly broadens the scope and depth of the literature about Tanner.

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• Marshall, Patricia Phillips, and Jo Ramsay Leimenstoll. Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

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  One of the more comprehensive publications on a 19th-century African American craftsman to date. The archival material on the Day family was considerable, and the authors uncovered substantive information about both his life and his business. Day is contextualized in terms of the racial climate in antebellum Virginia and North Carolina. In addition, the authors discuss his many surviving works in historic homes and museums.

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The New Negro Movement and Harlem Renaissance

The New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance are terms used to describe the early-20th-century race consciousness, social, and cultural movements that coalesced formally and informally in urban centers around the country. The notion that the African American community, emerging from the aftermath of slavery, Reconstruction, and post-Reconstruction, should strive for excellence, embody progress, and assert a self-defined identity that was distinct from “old” tropes of blackness undergirded this radical reframing of black cultural expression. The movement was part political, part social, and part cultural. These intersecting aspects are embodied and furthered in the visual arts of the period. The movement was galvanized by Alain Locke’s edited collection of essays on art and literature of the period, The New Negro (1925). Important repositories of visual images that reflected this new spirit were published in serialized journals (see Kirschke 2007) and collections of photographs (Smith 2004). Visual artists strove to create new imagery that truly represented black culture, history, and identity (see Driskell, et al. 1987 and Skipwith 1997). New identities were sometimes represented by pervasive stereotypical modes (Wolfskill 2009). Recent exhibition-based literature on individual artists, such as Archibald Motley (Powell 2014, cited under Modernism) and Aaron Douglas (Earle 2007, cited under Modernism), are useful sources that delve into some of the more important artists of the period. Gates and Jarrett 2007 provides a wealth of primary sources for undergraduates and graduates in the field.

• Calo, Mary Ann. Distinction and Denial: Race, Nation, and the Critical Construction of the African American Artist, 1920–40. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.

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  A critical discussion of the history, historiography, and theoretical positioning of African American art of the interwar period. Calo is particularly interested in examining the limits and contradictions that resulted from the racial segregation and marginalization of African American art. She calls for a reconsideration of the ways in which African American art of the period is part of the larger American modern movement. No works are illustrated in this volume. It is useful for an informed, scholarly audience.

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• Driskell, David C., David Levering Lewis, and Deborah Willis Ryan. Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1987.

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  Accompanied the exhibition Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America. Focusing on the visual arts of the Harlem Renaissance, including painting, sculpture, and photography. The illustrated essay “Harlem My Home” (pp. 57–105) by David Levering Lewis provides an evocative sense of time and place in Harlem during the rich cultural period of the 1920s and 1930s.

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• Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett, eds. The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

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  This edited volume of original writings that date between 1892 and 1938 is a valuable source for primary materials on the black intellectual, political, and cultural climate of the New Negro movement. It is a useful resource for undergraduate- and graduate-level students.

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• Kirschke, Amy Helene. Art in Crisis: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Struggle for African American Identity and Memory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.

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  An illustrated critical analysis of the images in the magazine The Crisis. The Crisis was the first significant national magazine aimed at African Americans, and it was a vital voice in the New Negro movement. This is a sustained study of the visual language presented in the magazine, and it provides analysis of the ways in which politics, popular culture, and art collided and operated as a tool for activism in this period.

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• Leininger-Miller, Theresa A. New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922–1934. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

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  The importance of Paris in the story of African American artists in the first half of the 20th century is the subject of Leininger-Miller’s text. She explores the lure of Paris in particular, and the freedoms, educational opportunities, and hardships that the city afforded black American artists. The book is divided into chapters that focus on the experiences of individual artists.

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• Skipwith, Joanna, ed. Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance. London: Hayward Gallery, 1997.

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  This is the catalogue for the exhibition Rhapsodies in Black, which was curated by Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey and mounted at the Hayward Gallery in London. Critical essays reflect the interdisciplinarity of Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age expression, including painting and sculpture, theater, performance, music, literature, and photography. Included is a useful chronology of visual art and culture from 1919 to 1938.

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• Smith, Shawn Michelle. Photography on the Color Line: W. E. B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

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  Photography was a particularly important method of documenting the spirit of New Negro identity. Smith’s book takes on the photos that were part of the American Negro exhibit presented by W. E. B. Du Bois at the Universal Exposition in Paris in 1900. Her analysis reveals how photography aided Du Bois’s project of racial uplift.

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• Wolfskill, Phoebe. “Caricature and the New Negro in the Work of Archibald Motley Jr. and Palmer Hayden.” Art Bulletin 91.3 (September 2009): 343–365.

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  This article investigates the works of two African American artists, Motley and Hayden, whose images of black figures employed stereotypical tropes of blackness that we now understand as aggressive and offensive. Wolfskill explores the tensions in New Negro artists’ use of problematic visual vocabularies.

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Modernism

The definition of modernism and the manner in which African American artists fit into prescribed narratives of the modern have been difficult to untangle. Individual artists, such as Aaron Douglas (Earle 2007) and Archibald Motley (Powell 2014), have been hailed as quintessential African American modernists because of their relationship to contemporary black urban culture. Expatriate Beauford Delaney’s modernism was shaped in exile (Leeming 1998). Recent scholarship has focused on new definitions of modernism for African American artists that go beyond the idea that modernism is outside of the realm of the racial, social, and cultural and limited to formal concerns. Francis 2012 and Mercer 2005 approach modernist artists by releasing them from the strictly African American racial frameworks and exploring them in the context of other artists and entertaining the possibilities of varying forms of modernisms. Although Romare Bearden’s artwork extends into the 1980s, beyond the modernist era, his aesthetic and conceptual approach to art was framed within and continued to express a modernist ethos (Fine and Francis 2011).

• Earle, Susan, ed. Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.

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  Douglas remains one of the most acclaimed African American artists who embraced the formal and social tenants of modernism in America. His work is often considered the fullest visual expression of the New Negro ethos. Earle’s edited volume concentrates largely on works from his early years from the 1920s through the 1940s and includes discussions of his illustrations, murals, paintings, prints, and drawings.

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• Fine, Ruth, and Jacqueline Francis, eds. Romare Bearden, American Modernist. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.

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  This is a publication of symposium papers presented at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in 2003. Both biographical and critical material make this one of the more diverse publications on Bearden, who is one of the most documented and analyzed African American artists.

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• Francis, Jacqueline. Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012.

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  A comparative analysis of three American artists who engage issues of race but come from different racial backgrounds: A Japanese American, Yasuo Kuniyoshi; a Russian American, Max Webber; and an African American, Malvin Gray Johnson.

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• Leeming, David. Amazing Grace: A Life of Beauford Delaney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

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  Written by a personal friend of the artist, this biography of Delaney chronicles his extraordinary life story from his beginnings in Knoxville, Tennessee, to his life of exile in France. As a black homosexual modernist painter, Delaney forged a new path for African American modern art and queer identity in a European context. While not an art-historical source, this book provides a framework for Delaney’s artistry.

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• Mercer, Kobena, ed. Cosmopolitan Modernisms. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

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  Mercer’s edited volume explores modernism’s international and interdisciplinary context, which includes sites such as colonial India and Brazil, locations not typically considered in the literature on Western modernism. African American artists Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis are featured in two different essays.

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• Powell, Richard J., ed. Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.

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  An edited volume of essays that accompanied an exhibition of the art of Archibald Motley mounted by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Well illustrated with the artist’s works, this is a well-researched and broadly conceived approach to Motley, one of the most accomplished artists of Chicago’s Black Renaissance.

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The Art of Power and Protest

The civil rights and Black Power eras of the 1950s through 1970s brought about radical shifts in attitudes, methods, and modes of visual representation for black American artists. Visual arts became one aspect of a multipronged movement to achieve civil rights and social justice and to assert political and cultural power. Recently, major museums have presented exhibitions that focus on this era (Carbone, et al. 2014; Jones, et al. 2011). The Black Arts movement has been well documented in terms of its literary manifestation, but less so in terms of the visual culture of the period. Collins and Crawford 2006 is an edited volume that presents a multidisciplinary approach to the movement, including, but not limited to, the visual. Jones 2017 is a case study of black artists in Los Angeles art during the era of protest. Childs 2014 is devoted exclusively to painting and sculpture from this era and provides a useful general overview.

• Carbone, Teresa A., Kellie Jones, Connie Choi, Dalila Scruggs, and Cynthia Young, eds. Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties. New York: Monacelli, 2014.

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  Mounted by the Brooklyn Museum, Witness considers painting, sculpture, and photography from the 1960s and includes not only African American artists, but also white, Latino, Asian, Native American, and Caribbean artists. This volume is fully illustrated and contains a useful chronology.

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• Childs, Adrienne L. “Activism and the Shaping of Black Identities (1964–1988).” In The Image of the Black in Western Art. Vol. 5, The Twentieth Century, Part 2: The Rise of Black Artists. Edited by David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr., 131–178. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.

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  A lengthy essay surveying the ways in which African American artists engaged the protest and social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Childs also discusses artists who resisted the politics of power and, instead, contributed to the widespread interrogation of black identity through idiosyncratic and oppositional works, ushering in the postmodern movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate readers.

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• Collins, Lisa Gail, and Margo Natalie Crawford, eds. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006.

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  This edited volume presents illustrated essays on topics that range from poetry and photography to black beauty and drag. The multiplicity of voices and media discussed in this volume evokes the dynamic nature of the movement. Useful for undergraduate and graduate levels.

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• Jones, Kellie. South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

  DOI: 10.1215/9780822374169Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  A wide-reaching and in-depth study of the Los Angeles art scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Jones uncovers and discusses the interplay of African American artists, institutions, and collectors who formed a vital arts network during a politically and socially dynamic period. Included are in-depth discussions of vanguard artists and lesser-known cultural institutions and exhibitions integrated into a narrative that, while focusing on Los Angeles, is relevant to the story of American art writ large. Suitable for undergraduate specialists and graduate readers.

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• Jones, Kellie, Hazel V. Carby, Karin Higa Franklin Sirmans, Jacqueline Stewart, and Roberto Tejada. Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980. Munich: Prestel, 2011.

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  Now Dig This! presents essays and images that chronicle and analyze African American artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Articles present discussions of various media, including photography, filmmaking, and assemblage. Fully illustrated, this volume also offers useful biographies of the artists, selected exhibitions, and bibliographies for individual artists.

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• Neal, Larry. “The Black Arts Movement.” TDR: The Drama Review 12.4 (1968): 29–39.

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  This article provides a clear expression of the philosophy of the Black Arts movement as it was developing in the moment. It is an unfiltered and unmediated explanation of the ideologies behind the movement. Neal was an influential voice in the movement, and this short article serves as foundational literature for any exploration of the movement. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate levels.

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The Influence of African Art

Since the Harlem Renaissance, the role that African ancestral arts have played in the visual expressions of African Americans has been an important issue. The literature on this topic is varied and comes from multiple sources and points of view. Thompson 1983 is seminal in this area in its discussion of African retentions, both conscious and unconscious, dating back to slavery. Barson and Gorschlüter 2010, Ellisworth 2009, Harris 1994, and Okediji 2003 chronicle the intentional engagement with African art as an ancestral, aesthetic, and/or political statement.

• Barson, Tanya, and Peter Gorschlüter, eds. Afro-Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic. Liverpool, UK: Tate, 2010.

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  Illustrated exhibition catalogue from the Tate Liverpool considering the visual arts of black cultures mapped by Paul Gilroy’s concept of the black Atlantic. It examines the transnational, intercultural network created through the slave trade and includes, but is not limited to African Americans, British blacks, Brazilians, Caribbean blacks, and Africans. Essays are by an international cadre of critics and art historians. African American artists are treated in tandem with black artists throughout the diaspora.

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• Ellisworth, Kirstin L. “Africobra and the Negotiation of Visual Afrocentrisms.” Civilizations 58.1 (2009): 21–38.

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  Presents a history and analysis of the important African American arts collective Africobra and its members’ Afrocentric aesthetic codes and practices that served their Black nationalist world view.

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• Harris, Michael D. “Double Consciousness to Double Vision: The Africentric Artist.” African Arts 27 (1994): 44–53.

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  See also pp. 94–95. A useful historical overview of the impact of African arts for black American artists. In-depth discussion of the artists collective Africobra and individual artists, such as Renée Stout, working in the 1990s. A useful bibliography on the subject.

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• Okediji, Moyosore B. The Shattered Gourd: Yoruba Forms in Twentieth-Century American Art. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003.

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  Delves deep into the use of Yoruba artistic forms in the art of several African American artists. Rather than engaging sources from across the African continent, the focus on Yoruba practice results in a thorough discussion of both the African source material and the New World manifestations. A rich and analytical approach to issues of artistic exchanges and continuities in the art of the black diaspora. Suitable for graduate study.

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• Rozelle, Robert V., ed. Black Art Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art. Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1989.

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  An exhibition catalogue exploring the connections and continuities between African art and artistic practice and African American/Afro Caribbean art and culture. Premised on the idea that African Americans inherited a cultural legacy from their ancestors that constituted a significant dynamic in the art of the 20th century. Focuses largely on professional artists who consciously engaged African arts, but also includes untrained artists who were not aware of the connections. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate study.

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• Sims, Lowery Stokes, and Leslie King-Hammond. The Global Africa Project. New York: Museum of Arts and Design, 2010.

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  An extensive publication in association with an exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. An international cadre of artists and designers of the African diaspora, including African Americans, are represented in this far-reaching investigation of artists working in what the editors call the “psychic and social space” of Africa. Objects traverse traditional boundaries to include painting and sculpture, along with fashion, textiles, home furnishings, basketry, ceramics, and architecture.

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• Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy. New York: Random House, 1983.

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  A foundational text in the field of African American culture and its relationship to African ancestral roots. Thompson’s sweeping theory made connections in areas from music and visual arts to religion and architecture. Some of his generalizations and seemingly tenuous connections between African sources and New World production caused some to question his methodology, but the text remains an essential source for studies of culture ways in the black diaspora, particular in North America.

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Vernacular Art

Free and enslaved artisans in antebellum America whose circumstances necessitated creative and innovative approaches to material culture carried with them practices from Africa that emerged in their New World production (Vlach 1990, Fry 2002). We look at their production as the beginnings of a vernacular tradition in African American arts. With the rise of the trained artist in the 20th century, the distinction between vernacular or outsider artists and the mainstream is an ill-defined border characterized by contested terminology. In the 20th century a strong tradition remained of untrained or vernacular black artists who worked in “fine art” modes such as painting and sculpture. Horace Pippin received acclaim from the mainstream as a self-taught painter in the 1940s (Roberts 1999). Thornton Dial is a contemporary artist who has gained national attention as a master of his craft and emblematic of the vernacular or visionary artist (Cubbs and Metcalf 2011). Many vernacular artists emerge from the American South, and their work often has elements of deep spirituality (Conwill, et al. 2001; Cubbs and Metcalf 2011). The study of vernacular, untrained, or visionary artists has often been channeled through collectors and exhibitions, like much of the study of African American visual arts.

• Conwill, Kinshasha, Arthur Coleman Danto, and Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. Testimony: Vernacular Art of the African-American South; The Ronald and June Shelp Collection. New York: H. N. Abrams, 2001.

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  Essays by scholars interrogate the complexities of the rise of African American vernacular arts in the scholarly and collecting realms. Artworks are well illustrated, along with biographies of individual artists in the collection. Published in association with Exhibitions International and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

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• Cubbs, Joanne, and Eugene W. Metcalf, eds. Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial. Indianapolis, IN: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 2011.

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  Dial is perhaps the most widely acclaimed African American vernacular artist. A companion book to an exhibition, this book goes well beyond an exhibition catalogue. Essays by critics and scholars dive deep into Dial’s work and the complexities of the southern black African American tradition of vernacular art. Well illustrated.

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• Fry, Gladys-Marie. Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

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  Originally published in 1990, this is the first concerted study of the work of slave women in the design and production of quilts and other fabric-related industries. Well illustrated with quilts and clothing made by enslaved seamstresses.

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• Roberts, John W. “Horace Pippin and the African American Vernacular.” Cultural Critique 41 (1999): 5–36.

  DOI: 10.2307/1354519Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  A useful and insightful critique of the contested terms describing African American vernacular, folk, or outsider artists in general through a discussion of the life and work of Horace Pippin in particular.

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• Vlach, John Michael. The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990.

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  This foundational study of decorative arts by African Americans was first published in 1978. The 1990 edition has a new introduction and added bibliography, but the text remains unchanged. The content covers domestic objects, such as basketry, ceramics, woodworking, and quilts. Vlach describes New World practices and forms along with their links to various African traditions as they were manifest in the work of enslaved and free artisans.

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Postmodern and Contemporary Art

Here, African American postmodern and contemporary practice is defined as an approach to the visual arts emerging after or outside of the civil rights and Black Arts movements of the 1970s. Reimaginings of histories, representing multiple and complex identities and conceptual modes, mining the instability of race, and allowing for the hybridity of culture and the vagaries of identity characterize much of the artistic practice, as well as the scholarly literature, of this era. History and slavery (Collins 2002, Copeland 2013) become important subjects in considering the visual art of African Americans in postmodern criticism. The black body in performance (Oliver 2013) and the expressive possibilities of the body (Powell 2008) free the discussion from outmoded essentialist discourses that are hinged solely on race. Queer perspectives (Murray 2016), questions of stereotype, and the reductive representation of blacks have spawned not only a tremendous amount of artistic activity, but have also shaped the way scholars frame their discussion of contemporary art (Harris 2003, Collins 2002).

• Collins, Lisa Gail. The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

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  An analysis of black women artists whose work is filtered through a sense of the fraught history of black women and the impact of how they were represented in the West. Suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduates.

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• Copeland, Huey. Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2013.

  DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226013121.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  Engages the art of four African American artists in the 20th century who variously conceptualized slavery in site-specific installations. Copeland contends that these artists opened new interpretive possibilities for engaging the past and imagining blackness in the post–civil rights era. Illustrated chapters focus on each artist. Suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduates.

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• Driskell, David C., ed. African American Visual Aesthetics: A Postmodernist View. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.

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  A series of essays that emerged from a 1991 conference at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden titled “The African-American Aesthetic in the Visual Arts and Postmodernism.” An early scholarly effort to reconsider African American art and aesthetics through a postmodern lens.

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• English, Darby. How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.

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  A highly theoretical intervention into the limitations and restrictions that the politics of race and identity places on the interpretation of art by African Americans. English presents a close analysis of five artists whose works represent new positions on cultural difference. Suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduates.

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• Harris, Michael D. Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

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  A useful thematic look at race (blackness) and representation from 19th-century Europe through 20th-century America. Examines African American artists who variously engage, resist, appropriate, and dismantle denigrating stereotypes. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students.

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• Jones, Kellie. Eyeminded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

  DOI: 10.1215/9780822393498Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  A compilation of essays by art historian Kellie Jones, her father, Amiri Baraka, and others. Jones’s work on post-1960s African American artists is seminal in the field and provides a look into the first generation of black postmodernists, such as David Hammons, Howardena Pindell, and Lorna Simpson. These essays are important resources for any study of African American artists, exhibition practices, and aesthetic theory in the 1960s through the postmodern era.

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• Murray, Derek Conrad. Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity after Civil Rights. London: I. B. Tauris, 2016.

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  Each chapter is dedicated to a critical analysis of the work of four queer African American artists: Glen Ligon, Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, and All Kalup. Murray contends these artists represent a new generation of post-black artists who resist the hetero-normative identity politics of traditional African American artists. The introduction provides a thorough and useful analysis of civil rights–era identity politics, and post-black and queer ideologies in contemporary art.

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• Oliver, Valerie Cassel, ed. Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. Houston, TX: Contemporary Arts Museum, 2013.

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  An exhibition catalogue that accompanied the first comprehensive survey of black performance art beginning in the 1960s. A large number of known and relatively unknown performance artists are discussed in a number of essays. A useful resource on a subject that has received little documentation. A DVD compilation of performances is included.

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• Powell, Richard J. Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2008.

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  Powell comes at the black portrait from multiple angles from a discussion of the depictions of black figures in historical Western art to postmodern and contemporary portraiture. An in-depth and multilayered analysis of the ways that black people are perceived and represent themselves. Suitable for advanced undergraduates and graduates.

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Criticism

Since the publication of Alain Locke’s writings on New Negro art, discourse on African American art has been grounded in the politics of race and representation in the United States (see Calo 2004). The discipline seemed to focus on reclamation and recovery of unknown artists during the 20th century, but it took on new and more methodological rigor toward the end of the century (Francis 2003, McGee 2008). Cultural critics from outside of the field of visual art brought new dynamism and current modes of criticism to the field (hooks 1995, Golden 1994).

• Calo, Mary Ann. “Alain Locke and American Art Criticism.” American Art 18.1 (2004): 88–97.

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  A look at how Locke’s important criticism early in the 20th century shaped ideas of race, aesthetics, and representation in American art.

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• Francis, Jacqueline, ed. Special Issue: Writing African American Art History. American Art 17.1 (2003).

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  A special issue of the journal dedicated to a critical review and assessment of the field by major scholars, including Jacqueline Francis, Mary Ann Calo, James Smalls, Richard J. Powell, Deborah Willis, and Floyd Coleman.

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• Golden, Thelma, ed. Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994.

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  Features thirteen separate short critical essays on the representation of black men in American visual culture from 1968 to the 1990s. Major scholars and critics of race such as Elizabeth Alexander, Greg Tate, bell hooks, Kobena Mercer, and Isaac Julien explore the shifting definitions, visualizations of, and responses to black masculinity as embodied in art, music, photograph, television, and film. Multiple approaches to the politics of black masculinity are employed, including feminist and queer studies.

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• hooks, bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: New Press, 1995.

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  A volume of short essays, some reprinted from other sources, by the cultural critic bell hooks. In addition to issues of race, art, and aesthetics, hooks discusses the artists Emma Amos, Margo Humphrey, Alison Saar, and Carrie Mae Weems.

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• McGee, Julie L. “‘The Evolution of a Black Aesthetic, 1920–1950’: David C. Driskell and Race, Ethics, and Aesthetics.” Callaloo 31.4 (2008): 1175–1185.

  DOI: 10.1353/cal.0.0241Save Citation »Export Citation » Share Citation »

  McGee analyzes Driskell’s seminal essay from the exhibition Two Centuries (Driskell 1976, cited under Exhibition Catalogue Surveys). Written in the 1970s, Driskell chronicled African American art criticism to date and called for an understanding of the universality of art, even within the racial strictures of African American culture. McGee provides an astute critical overview of Driskell’s influential aesthetic philosophy and the larger discourse on the contested notion of a black aesthetic.

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