African American Sculpture and Sculptors

by

Andy Campbell

• LAST REVIEWED: 19 April 2023
• LAST MODIFIED: 24 September 2020
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190280024-0089

Introduction

Beyond monographic texts dedicated to single artists, it is rare to find book-length studies that solely focus African American sculpture—or, sculpture made by African Americans. The reasons for this are many and complex. Although sculpture was a mainstay of 19th-century arts education in Europe and the Americas, in the latter half of the 20th century sculpture was newly questioned as a stable category of production. Between the 18th century and today media-specific practices have been broadly replaced with multimedia ones. This begs the question: what constitutes sculpture in any history or reference text that purports to span a number of centuries? An artist like Renée Green (b. 1959), for example, creates sculpture—discrete, three-dimensional objects—but also multi-part environmental installations, sound works, videos, architecture, and websites, as well as photography and prints. In light of these historical shifts, this bibliography takes a broad view of sculpture, and includes the work of self-described sculptors, such as the 19th-century sculptor Edmonia Lewis, as well as those with pluralistic practices like Green. Similarly, the category of “African American” has come under scrutiny, as the various signifiers of such an identity (for example, phenotype and/or ancestry) shift with broader social, economic, aesthetic, and political systems. Terminology has also changed a great deal since the 18th century—with popular linguistic designations moving from “negro,” to “colored,” to “black,” to “Afro-American,” to “African American,” and back to “black” again. Each contains historical political import, tied to both in-group empowerment and extrinsic, sometimes derogatory, uses. The visual arts are uniquely positioned to approach, understand, question, and challenge these changing social and semiotic conditions, and the anxieties and pleasures of black identification are often registered in nuanced and multifaceted ways within the realm of the visual. It would be a mistake to assume that the term “African American” encompassed the full political force of all artists included here, many of whom experience(d) the reality of intersectional identities and oppressions attached to gender, race, ability, class, and sexuality. For a more complete accounting of the visual arts beyond sculpture, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies article Visual Arts.

Survey Texts and Bibliographies

Included in this section are both broad-ranging surveys as well as collected and annotated bibliographies. Porter 1992, Patton 1998, and Lewis 2003 are examples of the former and Cederholm 1973, Davis and Sims 1980, Igoe and Igoe 1981 examples of the latter. Together, these six works can provide a useful starting point for any inquiry into the history of African American sculpture. The larger bibliographic reference texts include many citations for local, regional, and national publications that may otherwise be hard to locate. Because African American sculptors are often in dialogue with non-sculptors, the survey texts here supply a more integrated understanding of artistic expression across media.

• Cederholm, Theresa. Afro-American Artists: A Bio-bibliographical Directory. Boston: Trustees of the Boston Public Library, 1973.

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  Organized by artist’s last name, this compilation is broad in scope and diversity. Brief biographies detail artists’ primary media, prominent works, and exhibition histories. The bibliographies skew toward comprehensive, including rare and hard-to-find periodicals and books. Although it has been nearly fifty years since the volume’s publication, this is an ideal starting point for researchers who know the name of the artist they’d like to know more about.

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• Davis, Lenwood G., and Janet L. Sims. Black Artists in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography of Books, Articles, and Dissertations on Black Artists, 1779–1979. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980.

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  Gathering nearly five hundred sources on the history, theory, and politics of African American art production in the United States, this annotated bibliography, while now somewhat dated, is valuable as a resource and as a snapshot of the state of the field toward the end of the 20th century. Particular bibliographic attention is paid to African American published journals, such as The Crisis (1910–) and Opportunity (1923–1949).

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• Igoe, Lynn Moody, and James Igoe. 250 Years of Afro-American Art: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Bowker, 1981.

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  Comprised of 25,000-plus citations, this reference text is the most comprehensive collection of sources related to African American artists to date. It is divided into three sections including a subject bibliography, a compilation of artist’s bibliographies, and biographies. While not ideal for the researcher examining more recent practices, this volume is still an excellent, if potentially overwhelming, source for those starting the research process.

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

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  Although not focused exclusively on African American sculptors, Lewis’s book includes a number of short, introductory biographical briefs on artists within a broad sweep of US history (1619–2002). Early sculptors discussed include Eugene Warburg and Mary Edmonia Lewis, and later artists include Sonya Clark and Annette Lawrence.

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

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  The scholar and curator Sharon Patton’s approachable survey of African American art is still the standard undergraduate text in the field. Patton gives a broad overview of African American art, attentive to its changing social contexts, as well as to the biographies of particular artists. It remains an ideal introduction for those new to the field.

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

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  First published in 1943, James A. Porter’s book established African American art as a unique field of study. While Porter’s original text can seem dated, an introduction by David Driskell provides important historiographic context, and grapples with the legacy of this pioneering study. Sculpture is addressed in fits and starts, as it applies the practice of particular artists Porter discusses.

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1800–1910

The 19th century represents a time of fundamental change for African Americans, and thus for African American artists. It is a century that encompasses the horrors of slavery, the complexities of Reconstruction, and the foundations of Jim Crow. The Civil War (1861–1865), through which chattel slavery was ultimately abolished, also saw the first African American military units, which Greenough, et al. 2013 understands through the Irish sculptor Augustus Saint-Gauden’s Shaw Memorial (1900). Free black persons such as Thomas Day, could, to a certain degree, forge careers as craftsmen and artists, as explored in Marshall and Leimenstoll 2010, but generally there were profound barriers concerning access to art education and training. Therefore this section also includes texts concerning non–African American artists making sculptures, and in the case of Marsh 2005, of African Americans because such works played a role in broader transnational abolition movements. Buick 2010 illuminates how African American sculptors during this period were largely schooled in Beaux Arts European traditions, and some, such as Edmonia Lewis, even moved overseas to find success that was unfeasible at home. The complex and generative relationship between materiality and subject matter is detailed in Nelson 2007, where the shifting politics around the color of marble are tracked against the recurrent 19th-century thematic dyad of slavery/freedom. For more on representations of slavery, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies article Visual Representations of Slavery. For more on Reconstruction, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies article Reconstruction in Literature and Intellectual Culture.

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

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  Following a bracing preface, in which the author considers “American Africanisms, American Indianisms, and the Processes of Art History,” Buick goes on to consider the near entirety of Lewis’s artistic output. Carefully researched and attentive to the discourses circulating around both black and indigenous people—Lewis was both—this monographic study makes use of coins, prints, and works by Lewis’s contemporaries, addressing notions of race and difference.

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• Greenough, Sarah, and Nancy K. Anderson with Lindsay Harris, and Renée Ater. Tell It with Pride: The 54th Massachusetts Regiment and Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2013.

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  Augustus Saint-Gauden’s Shaw Memorial (1900) commemorates the victory of one of the first African American military units during the Civil War. This exhibition catalogue traces the development and reception of the memorial, arguing that it stood as public testimony to the patriotism of African Americans during the 19th century.

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• Kinkel, Marianne. Races of Mankind: The Sculptures of Malvina Hoffman. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011.

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  Considers the work of Chicago-based sculptor Malvina Hoffman with particular attention to the historiography of ethnography and display. Of particular note is Kinkel’s analysis of Hoffman’s sculptures created for the Chicago Field Museum’s Hall of the Races of Mankind, in which the artist was given reference materials by the museum, synthesizing pervasive notions of “character” endemic to 19th-century pseudo-sciences of physiognomy and phrenology.

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• Marsh, Jan, ed. Black Victorians: Black People in British Art 1800–1900. Aldershot, UK: Lund Humphries, 2005.

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  This is the catalog made to accompany an exhibition of the same name, opened at the Manchester City Art Gallery in 2005. Although its aim is to collect and contextually site the representations of black people in 19th-centry art and visual culture in Britain, many examples involve representations of slavery in the United States and Americas. As such this text is helpful in understanding the proliferation and dissemination of images of black bodies, and their frequent positioning of the United States as an ideological epicenter of abolitionist and anti-abolitionist sentiment and action.

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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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  In this cogently researched and argued monograph, Marshall and Liemenstoll follow the life and work of cabinetmaker Thomas Day. The social and cultural specificities arising from Day’s status as a light-skinned black person are explored, as well as his process and patronage.

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• Murray, Freeman Henry Morris. Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture. Washington, DC: Murray, 1916.

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  Proposing that sculpture, more than painting or any other medium, “serves higher purposes than that of mere ornament or of the mere picturing of something” (p. xix), Freeman Murray offers an interpretation of the various iconographies related to the depiction of emancipated slaves by 19th-century sculptors. Beginning with Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave (1851), Murray also discusses work by African Americans such as Mary Edmonia Lewis and Meta Warrick Fuller.

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• Nelson, Charmaine A. The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

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  In examining the depictions of black female subjects in 19th-century sculpture, the author levels a critique on some of art history’s foundational methodologies. By focusing on a range of artists, both African American and non–African American, Nelson charts the politics of marble as a stand-in for ethnicity (particularly whiteness), the persistence of particular historical and allegorical figures (particularly Cleopatra), and sculptural depictions of freedom and emancipation.

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• Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

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  Tracking the installation of public memorials erected after the Civil War, Savage presents the argument that such monuments often denied or simplified the legacy of trauma resulting from chattel slavery, and instead expressed paternalism and/or white supremacist ideology. Savage describes in a preface to the new edition that these monuments have recently come under larger cultural scrutiny, speaking to the continuing importance of the information contained in this text.

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1910–1950

Coinciding with the beginnings of the Great Migration—in which six million African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban Midwest, Northeast, and West coast—the Harlem Renaissance, as evidenced in a gathering of source documents in Gates and Jarrett 2007, names a period when African American artists, writers, and musicians sought to embody the spirit of Alain Locke’s New Negro. During this time the roots of African American culture was a particularly noteworthy subject of these allied arts, and incipient notions of the progressive betterment of “the race” undergirded many artistic explorations, such as those of Sargent Johnson as detailed by LeFalle-Collins and Wilson 1998. Bailey and Powell 1997 and Kirschke 2014 are suitable introductions to the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance, while Leininger-Miller 2001 and Herzog 2000 trace the careers of artists who left Harlem for other locales, evincing what literature scholar Brent Hayes Edwards has termed a black internationalism in his book The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and Black Internationalism (2003). The interrelationship between European modernism, on the one hand, and diasporic forms of making from Africa, on the other, were of continuing interest to several artists, such as Meta Warrick Fuller, during this time. For more on political theory and resistance, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies articles Political Resistance and New Negro.

• Ames, Winslow. “Contemporary American Artists: Richmond Barthé.” Parnassus 12.3 (March 1940): 10–17.

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  In this profile of the Harlem Renaissance sculptor Richard Barthé, Winslow Ames suggests that the artist’s sculptures are not to be perceived visually but “muscularly” (p. 13). Noting that Barthé learned dance from one of Martha Graham’s protégés, he interprets the artist’s work with particular attention to the physicality and movement of the figures. Ames also notes Barthé’s desire to visit Africa and make religious works.

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

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  Through a careful consideration of three of Fuller’s public sculptures—all made for expositions—Renée Ater describes the complexity of the politics surrounding nation and race during the early 20th century.

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• Bailey, David A., and Richard J. Powell, eds. Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance. London: Hayward Gallery, 1997.

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  What remains remarkable about this exhibition catalogue dedicated to the many arts of the Harlem Renaissance is its holistic view of the era. The essays included in this volume tackle everything from Orson Welles’s 1936 mounting of Macbeth to Aaron Douglas’s graphics for The Crisis. The essay by Richard J. Powell, “Re/Birth of a Nation,” is the heartiest of these contributions, and addresses the sculpture of Richmond Barthé and Malvina Hoffman.

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

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  This anthology provides a wealth of primary source material to contextualize the work of African American sculptors during the Harlem Renaissance/New Negro Movement. Included are key texts by Alain Locke and his critics, such as Gustavus Adolphus Stewart, whose “New Negro Hokum” argues forcefully against Locke’s figuration of the New Negro.

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• Herzog, Melanie Anne. Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2000.

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  In this innovative monographic study, the author considers the impact and influence of Mexican art on the sculptures and graphic works of Elizabeth Catlett, who became a Mexican citizen in 1962, and lived and taught in the country for over half a century. By centering the politics of intercultural exchange, this book offers a window into how African American artists can be thought of in relation to a more expansive definition of the Americas.

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• Kirschke, Amy Helene, ed. Women Artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014.

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  This anthology addresses the contribution of women artists during the Harlem Renaissance. Five of its eight chapters focus on artists whose primary medium was sculpture: Edmonia Lewis, Augusta Savage, Meta Warrick Fuller, May Howard Jackson, Beulah Ecton Woodard, Selma Burke, and Elizabeth Catlett. While the quality of the contributions varies, each author has synthesized a host of secondary, and sometimes archival, sources.

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• LeFalle-Collins, Lizzetta, and Judith Wilson, eds. Sargent Johnson: African American Modernist. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1998.

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  This text considers the relation of modernist artistic discourse and the work of San Francisco artist Sargent Johnson, who fashioned himself as “producing a strictly Negro Art” (p. 15). Careful attention is paid to his early works of the 1930s, especially as they intersect with the concept of the New Negro; subsequent work is only given cursory treatment.

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• Leininger-Miller, Theresa. 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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  Although only two of the author’s seven chapters are dedicated to sculptors (Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and Augusta Savage), the value of a study which considers the patronage and social circles of expatriate black artists in Paris is an important addition to understanding the sociopolitical situation of African American artists, both at home and abroad.

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• Perkins, Kathy A. “The Genius of Meta Warrick Fuller.” Black American Literature Forum 24.1 (Spring 1990): 65–72.

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  Covers the major outlines of Fuller’s biography, with special attention paid to her time spent as a theater set designer. In examining stage sets, costumes, and sculptures, the author attempts to synthesize Fuller’s diverse output and make an argument for a holistic reading of Fuller’s sculpture.

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• Shaw, Gwendolyn DuBois. “Creating a New Negro Art in America.” Transition 108 (2012): 75–87.

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  This article focuses on the creation and eventual sale/de-accession of a large, twenty-two-foot, carved organ screen by sculptor Sargent Johnson. The author also explores the relationship between Alain Locke and Albert C. Barnes, the art collector and pharmaceutical tycoon. Along the way Shaw supplies a useful, if brief, exhibition history of African sculpture in the United States in the early part of the 20th century.

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1950–1980

The civil rights movement (1954–1968) sought an end to the inhumanities of Jim Crow and its emphases on violently intimidating African Americans and cordoning the necessary activities of daily life via segregation. Many artists’ practices were forged in the political crucible of the 1960s and 1970s. Craft 2015, Basualdo 2013, and Lewis 1997 provide critical exegeses on Melvin Edwards, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and Thaddeus Mosley, respectively, each of whom melded a modernist and abstract sculptural vocabulary with politically conscious themes. Others, like Betye Saar and Noah Purifoy—based in Los Angeles—emphasize assemblage as a primary form of creating sculptural work—as Mainetti 2016, Sirmans and Lipschutz 2015, and Jones 2017 discuss. Bowles 2011 shows that artists like Adrian Piper, were exploring conceptual strategies of artmaking, inclusive of, but not exclusively sculptural in nature. Finally, Oliver and Sirmans 2005 and Godfrey and Whitley 2017 provide a useful genealogy of contemporary African American art rooted in the concerns of the 1970s, pointing to this era’s formidable legacies.

• Adkins, Terry. “Notes on the Precious Few A.D.” Journal of Black Studies 35.2 (November 2004): 224–230.

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  In this autobiographical article, the artist reminisces about his undergraduate education at Fisk University, where Aaron Douglas was a professor. Adkins traces out the generational differences between artists like himself who grew up with the Vietnam War and Jimi Hendrix, an older cadre of artists (including Martin Puryear and David Hammons), and a younger cohort whose “work fell prey to art-world generated identity queries and their ensuing multicultural strategies” (p. 228).

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• Basualdo, Carlos, ed. Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles. New Haven, CT, and London: Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2013.

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  Exploring the inspiration, process, and reception of Chase-Riboud’s Malcolm X series of sculptures (1969–2008), this book features texts by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and the artist. Chase-Riboud, also a novelist of repute, writes compellingly about the steles’ juxtaposition of hard and soft materials, as well as their relationship to the history of monuments in Western art history. A chronology of the artist’s life is also included.

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• Bowles, John P. Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

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  In this deeply researched monographic study of Adrian Piper, who is both an artist and philosopher, Bowles places her work in dialogue with other minimalist, conceptual, and feminist artists, providing both historical context and an opportunity to interrogate the grounds on which the politics of identity can overdetermine the readings of artists such as Piper.

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• Craft, Catherine. Melvin Edwards: Five Decades. Dallas: Nasher Sculpture Center, 2015.

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  Craft, who also curated the exhibition that provided the occasion for this publication, has written a careful biographical essay following the artist’s chronology closely. She relates key exhibitions—Edwards’s solo presentation at the Whitney Museum of Art in 1970, for example—alongside the sculptor’s longest running, and perhaps best-known, series of wall-mounted sculptures known as “Lynch Fragments.”

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• Godfrey, Mark, and Zoé Whitley, eds. Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. London: Tate Modern, 2017.

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  This catalog considers the production of African American artists during the political and social turmoil of the civil rights era. While only a few sculptors are included (Betye Saar and Noah Purifoy, for example), this lavishly illustrated text emphasizes the entanglement of art and politics.

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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.

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  Connecting the end of the Great Migration to the surge of creativity in and around Los Angeles, Kellie Jones’s study is a new standard-bearer for localized African American art histories. The author is especially attentive to the interrelationship of sculpture, painting, music, and performance.

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• Lewis, David. Thaddeus Mosley: African-American Sculptor. Pittsburgh, PA: The Carnegie Museum of Art, 1997.

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  Formal and material connections with the practices of European modernist sculptors, such as Constantin Brancusi and Isamu Noguchi, as well as a range of African sculptural traditions, are highlighted in David Lewis’s extended essay on the artist, whose totemic wooden sculptures were the focus of an accompanying exhibition.

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• Mainetti, Mario, ed. Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer. Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2016.

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  The bulk of this volume is composed of a handsomely illustrated chronology, giving unique scope and context to Saar’s prolific output, which is placed alongside geopolitical and cultural shifts in the United States and the world. Essays by Richard J. Powell, Kellie Jones, and Deborah Willis provide more in-depth readings of the artist’s works emphasizing its spiritual dimensions, the interrelation of ritual and narrative, and the sources for her assemblage.

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• Oliver, Valerie Cassel, and Franklin Sirmans. Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970. Houston, TX: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2005.

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  Taking as its starting point W .E. B. DuBois’s notion of “double consciousness” this exhibition, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, attempts to map out how “the paradox of race remains resilient,” to a group of artists working in the wake of the conceptual turn in art (p. 17). Included in the catalogue is a selection of primary source materials and artist’s writings, alongside a timeline and biographical sketches of the artists included.

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• Sirmans, Franklin, and Yael Lipschutz, eds. Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015.

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  The accompanying catalog to the artist’s first solo retrospective exhibition, this book considers Purifoy’s assemblage aesthetic in relation to the sociopolitical changes taking place in Los Angeles and its surrounds. Particular attention is paid to the many sculptures sited on the artist’s outdoor museum in Joshua Tree, California. The book contains a chronology of Purifoy’s life, as well as reminiscences from his artists, activists, and colleagues.

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1980–2000

Amid broader philosophical and cultural debates concerning postmodernism and multiculturalism, artists working during the last two decades of the 20th century forged unique practices that encompassed a plethora of media, forms, and topical concerns. During this time the United States celebrated its quincentenary, and some of the most powerful responses from artists are catalogued in Rogers 1993. African American artists making work from the 1980s and 1990s did not capitulate a single style or monolithic set of concerns; Filipovic 2017 and Bessire 2002 focus on artists whose sculptural practices intersect with performance, and Corrin 1994 documents one of the most important examples of Institutional Critique, Fred Wilson’s 1994 exhibition Mining the Museum. Schmuckli 2009 describes Leonardo Drew’s method of creating large-scale, nearly immersive installations of detritus in the gallery, while McArthur and Burris 2015 expand upon how Beverly Buchanan questioned place and materiality in more compact work. Driskell 1995 is a key text in teasing out the connections of artists working in an expanded African diaspora, while Pogue 1994 and Clark 1989 focus on artists’ use of particularly charged materials.

• Bessire, Mark H. C. William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2002.

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  A range of essays by curators, art historians, and artists consider Pope.L’s installation, performance, and drawing practices. The catalog includes a facsimile of Pope.L’s “Hole Theory, Parts: Four & Five” (2002) which posits the hole as the foundation for “social action” (p. 84).

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• Clark, Vèvè A. “Interview with Barbara Ward July 21, 1989.” Callaloo 41 (Autumn 1989): 637–643.

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  Known primarily for her soft sculptures made of fabric, this interview illuminates Barbara Ward’s sculptural inspirations and biography. Focusing on specific works, Clark’s line of questioning allows Ward to open up about her use of charged materials (her maternal grandmother’s jacket, for example) and their relation to memory.

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• Corrin, Lisa G., ed. Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson. New York: The New Press in cooperation with The Contemporary, Baltimore, 1994.

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  Reshuffling and reinstalling the collections of the Maryland Historical Society, Fred Wilson’s signal installation Mining the Museum was a watershed moment for the nascent mode of contemporary visual production known as “Institutional Critique.” The catalog for this exhibition is as much an artwork in its own right, documenting the intentions of the artist, but also experiences of docents and visitors to the Maryland Historical Society’s galleries.

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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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  This book stresses the cross-cultural connections and currents in African American art, including Carribean, Asian, and South American practitioners. The essays gathered here were an outgrowth of the symposium entitled “The African-American Aesthetic in the Visual Arts and Postmodernism,” held at the Hirshhorn Museum in Spring of 1991.

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• Filipovic, Elena. David Hammons: Bliz-aard Ball Sale. London: Afterall Books, 2017.

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  In 1983, after a nasty blizzard, artist David Hammons laid out a North African rug on a sidewalk in New York City and sold balls of snow of varying sizes to whomever approached. In her focused study of this hybrid sculpture/performance work, the curator Elena Filipovic interrogates an artist who “has made a life work of tactical evasion” (p. 16). Impermanence, gossip, and the boundaries of artistic discourse are all discussed.

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• McArthur, Park, and Jennifer Burris, eds. Beverly Buchanan: 1978–1981. Mexico City: Athénée Press, 2015.

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  This volume includes a biographical essay by the editors, a republished short text by Lowery Stokes-Sims, and a facsimile of Buchanan’s Guggenheim application for the artist’s land artwork Marsh Ruins (1981).

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• Pogue, Stephanie. SOURCES: Multicultural Influences on Contemporary African American Sculptors. College Park, MD: University of Maryland, 1994.

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  Intended to accompany an exhibition of work by contemporary African American sculptors, this slim, but important volume, contains interviews with each of the five artists: Melvin Edwards, Martha Jackson-Jarvis, John T. Scott, Joyce J. Scott, and Denise Ward-Brown. Each interview reveals the artist’s influences and sources, as well as the embedded meanings in their materials.

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• Rogers, Sarah J. Will/Power. Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, the Ohio State University, 1993.

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  Produced in response to the 1992 quincentenary anniversary of the “founding” of America, this exhibition of six artists of color (some African American, some indigenous/native) questions prevailing ideologies attached to the representation of history. Signal works include: David Hammons’s mixed-media homage to Marcus Garvey, Black Star Line (1992), and Adrian Piper’s meditation on the Rodney King beating and subsequent uprising in Los Angeles, Black Box/White Box (1992).

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• Schmuckli, Claudia. Existed: Leonardo Drew. Houston, TX: Blaffer Gallery, 2009.

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  The two essays in this book, one by the exhibition’s curator, Claudia Schmuckli, and the other by Allen S. Weiss, each pressurize the significance of Drew’s choice of materials—often agglomerations of detritus and refuse.

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• Scott, Joyce J. and George Ciscle, eds. Joyce J. Scott: Kickin’ It with the Old Masters. Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art and Maryland Institute, College of Art, 2000.

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  Fashion, installation, performance, beaded sculptures, quilts, and public art works are all part of the artistic practice of Joyce J. Scott. From her work with Thunder Thigh Review (a theatrical duo consisting of Scott and Kay Lawal) to the beaded works that skewer racialized typographies, this book makes the argument for political engagement as a through-line in all her endeavors.

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2000–2018

The texts listed in this section broadly continue the lines of postmodernist critiques pioneered in the previous two decades. The catalogs for the F-series of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, of which Golden and Walker 2001 is the first, are ideal starting points to explore the sheer diversity of artistic practices of artists working in the first decades of the 21st century. Pope.L 2014, Bolton, Ose, and Thompson 2014, Elms and Keith 2016, Globus 2011, Jersey City Museum 2004, Fowle 2016, and Berry 2017 each focus on a single artist, and represent some of the various directions such monographic studies (often connected to exhibitions) can take. One notable “turn” in the monographic catalogue is the inclusion of archival source material, which is either reproduced whole or quoted at great length in Elms and Keith 2016, Berry 2017, and Globus 2011—the idea being that the texts might provide scholars at the beginning of their research some pathways forward.

• Berry, Ian, ed. Terry Adkins: Recital. Saratoga Springs, NY: Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, 2017.

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  Terry Adkins’s work is located at the juncture of sculptural practice and sound; recombinant musical instruments and used vinyl records are recurring materials, and some of the sculptor’s works are designed to be activated by performers. Of particular note is an archive of reprinted texts (reviews, interviews, curatorial texts) compiled by Hilary Reder, which will no doubt be of use to scholars of Adkins’s work.

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• Bolton, Andrew, Elvira Dyangani Ose, and Nato Thompson, eds. Nick Cave: Epitome. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2014.

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  Dedicated to the sculptural and performance work of Chicago-based artist Nick Cave, this text provides a visual introduction to the artist’s obsessive work. Large, detailed photographs predominate, providing any educator with a suite of images to elucidate the textures and construction of the artist’s famed “sound suits.” Elvira Dyangani Ose’s essay is the most useful in setting up the context and confluence of meanings of the artist’s works.

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• Elms, Anthony, and Naima J. Keith. Rodney McMillian. Philadelphia and New York: Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania and The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2016.

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  In a multimedia practice that touches sculpture, painting, performance, and video, McMillian is given thoughtful and holistic treatment. Excerpts from Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth Century America (2005) and a 1966 interview with Sun Ra, are strategic archival inclusions that subtly highlight the political contexts and imperatives around McMillian’s work.

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• Fowle, Kate. Rashid Johnson: Within Our Gates. Moscow: Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2016.

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  Although ostensibly focused on the creation and reception of one work—the monumental sculptural installation entitled Within Our Gates—in actuality this book provides a much broader reading of Johnson’s corpus of work through a sequence of dedicated essays, artist’s interviews, and a transcript of a public lecture with audience questions. Minimalism, African-Russian international relations, and the artist’s biography are all considered here.

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• Globus, Doro, ed. Fred Wilson: A Critical Reader. London: Ridinghouse, 2011.

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  This volume gathers together over two dozen previously published texts by curators, critics, scholars, and the artist, regarding Wilson’s singular contributions to institutional critique and critical race theory in the visual arts. The texts range from biographical to theoretical, and are appropriate for all levels of scholarship.

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• Golden, Thelma, and Hamza Walker. Freestyle. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2001.

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  Published alongside the occasional survey exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem focusing on emerging African American artists, as well as artists of the African and Afro-Carribbean diaspora, these volumes feature scholarship on early career artists, serving as a bellwether for future writings on the artists. Freestyle was subsequently followed by Frequency (2005), Flow (2008), Fore (2012), and Fictions (2017), each featuring a different curatorial team and a dedicated catalog. Taken together they represent the most sustained and heterogeneous thinking on contemporary African American art.

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• Jersey City Museum. Chakaia Booker: Jersey Ride. Jersey City, NJ: Jersey City Museum, 2004.

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  Over the course of two dedicated essays and one interview, this mid-career exhibition catalogue traces the origins and development of Chakaia Booker’s sculptural practice. Well known for her works made of tire rubber, Booker’s influences range from ceramics to African dance forms.

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• Pope.L, William. Showing Up to Withhold. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

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  An extended essay by the queer theorist Lauren Berlant not only gives this catalogue its name—the phrase describes what Berlant calls “the performative event that is deadpan” (p. 123)—but also suggests a phenomenological encounter with Pope.L’s installations that is attentive to race, sex, gender, and the history of the genre of melodrama. Other essays in the catalogue address various aspects of Pope.L’s installations, performances, and drawings.

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Transhistorical Texts

These texts do not easily fit into any particular period, as they focus on work by African American sculptors made across longer time periods. In Dallow and Matilsky 2005 multiple generations of the Saar family—Betye, Lezley, and Alison—are covered so that connections might be drawn between their various practices. In the case of Rosengarten 2008 and Okediji 2003 a transhistorical view is necessary because they each offer a genealogy of particular cultural forms or types of objects. There are many books dedicated to museum holdings of African American objects in the permanent collections of major US and international museums, and Sims 2015 is emblematic of this type of text. Wilkinson 2011 gathers together an intergenerational groups of artists to examine the shifting impact of gender and sexuality, while Collins 2002 considers artists whose research-based practices mine histories both particular to African Americans and not. Vlach 1990, Hollingsworth 2009, and Arnett and Arnett 2000 focus on artists left out of nominal canons of African American art, either because of their visionary or outsider status, or because the kind of object they created has been traditionally understood under the categories of craft or decorative arts.

• Arnett, Paul, and William Arnett, eds. Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, Vol. 1, The Tree Gave the Dove a Leaf. Atlanta: Tinwood Books, 2000.

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  Organized by material, this volume presents the most detailed and complex scholastic consideration of Southern vernacular art made by African Americans. In addition to the essays by the volume’s editors, this well-researched book concludes with a text by Amiri Baraka entitled “Revolutionary Democratic Art from the Cultural Commonwealth of Afro America.” Future volumes promise to “offer an antihierarchy of artworks” (p. xx).

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• Collins, Lisa Gail. The Art of History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

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  While sculpture is not discretely addressed in this study of black artists who engage with the visual and material cultures of the past, the practices of sculptors such as Renée Green, Renée Stout, Alison Saar, Edmonia Lewis, and Martha Jackson-Jarvis are all brought to bear on the author’s petition for the abolishment of “the entrenched practice of disregarding visual art and artists in the field [of African American studies]” (p. 1).

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• Cooks, Bridget R. Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011.

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  Tracing the appearance of African American artists in US museums back to a 1927 exhibition, Cooks addresses the absence of African American artists and exhibitions within an emergent field of exhibition histories. Of particular interest is the Museum of Modern Arts’ 1937 solo exhibition of William Edmondson’s work, Two Centuries of Black American Art (1976), and Black Male: Representations of Black Masculinity in Contemporary American Art (1994–1995).

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• Dallow, Jessica, and Barbara C. Matilsky. Family Legacies: The Art of Betye, Lezley, and Alison Saar. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2005.

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  The lives and works of members of the Saar family, Betye Saar and her two daughters, Alison and Lezley, are brought together in this exhibition catalog. Material and formal resonances between the practices of the elder Saar and her daughters are highlighted across two extended essays by the catalogue’s authors. A brief writing by the third Saar daughter, Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh, is also included.

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• Hollingsworth, Mar. Inside My Head: Intuitive Artists of African Descent. Los Angeles: California African American Museum, 2009.

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  This catalogue includes the work of thirty-two artists, many located in Southern California, whom the curator (Hollingsworth) has dubbed “intuitive” for their auto-didacticism and existence outside a formalized art world. Short bios and full color plates are included for each of the artists.

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

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  In this study of the persistence of Yoruba forms in the American diaspora, the author conducts a sequence of “semioptic” investigations into the signifying practices of a range of artists, sculptors, and non-sculptors. Okediji’s focus is on how such Yoruban elements “have arrived and thrived so lusciously in the diasporas” (p. 5). Of particular interest is his final chapter, “Crossroads of Amnesia,” which studies the works of several sculptors.

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• Rosengarten, Dale, Theodore Rosengarten, and Enid Schildkrout, eds. Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art. New York: Museum for African Art, 2008.

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  Well-researched and richly illustrated, this catalogue represents the most concerted scholarly effort in the study of grass baskets, primarily from the Lowcountry. Informed by archival research and an attention to visual and material cultures, many of the essays here stress the interrelationship of process, form, dissemination, and cultural transmission, cementing it as a definitive volume on the subject.

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• Sims, Lowery Stokes. Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2015.

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  Divided by sections dedicated to thematic subjects (Interiors, Landscape and Place, Street Life, Spirituality, etc.), this catalogue of works by African American artists in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, features a host of short catalog entries, as well as essays by Lowery Stokes Sims, Elliot Bostwick Davis, and Edmund Barry Gaither.

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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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  Pottery, architecture, and basketry are only some of the arts covered in this signal text on African American decorative art traditions. Originally published in 1978 this revised edition provides a new introduction and more bibliographic sources in lieu of the author revising the main body of the book.

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• Wilkinson, Michelle Joan. Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists. Baltimore: Reginald D. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture, 2011.

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  All eight artists included in this exhibition catalog have practices that centralize sculpture and/or installation. The curator’s essay functions to introduce the interconnections between the artists’ work—a focus on materials alongside the transmission of familial and cultural traditions.

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