2023 exhibition.

This online publication was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Black Artists in America: From the Great Depression to Civil Rights, on view at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, from October 17, 2021, through January 2, 2022. Also available in print.

2024. This volume examines for the first time the Harlem Renaissance as part of a global flowering of Black creativity, with roots in the New Negro theories and aesthetics of Alain Locke, its founding philosopher. Featuring artists such as Aaron Douglas, Archibald Motley, and William H. Johnson, who synthesized the expressive figuration of the European avant-garde with the aesthetics of African sculpture and folk art, this publication also includes works by lesser-known contributors who took a radically new approach to depicting Black subjects with dignity, interiority, and gravitas. This reframing of a celebrated cultural phenomenon shows how the flow of ideas through Black artistic communities on both sides of the Atlantic contributed to international conversations around art, race, and identity while helping to define our notion of modernism-- Publisher.

In the period of radical change that was 1963-83, young Black artists at the beginning of their careers in the USA confronted key questions and pressures. How could they make art that would stand as innovative, original, formally and materially complex, while also making work that reflected their concerns and experience as African Americans? This significant new publication surveys this crucial period in American art history, bringing to light previously neglected histories of twentieth-century Black artists, including Frank Bowling, Sam Gilliam, Melvin Edwards, Bettye Saar, Jack Whitten and William T. Williams. It accompanies a major exhibition, opening at Tate Modern and touring to Crystal Bridges and Brooklyn Museum of Art. This book features substantial essays from co-curators Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley, writing on abstraction and figuration respectively. It will also explore the art historical and social contexts with subjects including black feminism; AfriCOBRA and other artist-run groups; the role of museums in the debates of the period; and where visual art sat in relation to the Black Arts Movement-- Publisher.

Employing new scholarship that reassesses and recalibrates traditional narratives of postwar Chicago art, the exhibit resonates with current national dialogues around race, gender, protest, and belonging. The book contains a series of long and short essays, interviews, and other contextual material, along with full-color images of all works included in the exhibition and extensive reproductions of ephemera and historical photographs--Publisher.

Important exhibition from 1976.

The Art of Remembering brings together a collection of essays by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw written over the course of a twenty-year period (2002-2022). The book documents Shaw's own intellectual journey as an African American art historian and considers how desire, delusion, and what she calls re-memory figures in the practices of critical race art history and visual cultural studies. Shaw sees her book as a project that seeks to address the unspeakable traumas of enslavement and to recover the narratives of Black creativity and self-representation that exist outside the American art-historical canon. Shaw's book is organized chronologically and divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the second on the twentieth century, and the third on contemporary work--Publisher.

Published in 2006. Painter deeply enriches her narrative with a series of striking works of art--more than 150 in total, most in full color--works that profoundly engage with black history and that add a vital dimension to the story, a new form of witness that testifies to the passion and creativity of the African-American experience.* Among the dozens of artists featured are Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Beauford Delaney, Jacob Lawrence, and Kara Walker--Publisher.

"Distinction and Denial" challenges conventional theories of race and art in the period between 1920-40 by shedding light on the role early art critics had in marginalizing African American artists by characterizing them as sharing a primitive, ethnic essence. Mary Ann Calo dispels this myth through an engaging study of the germinal writing of Alain Locke and other significant critics of the era, who argued that African American artists were both a diverse group and a constituent element of America's cultural center. By documenting the effects of the "Negro aesthetic" on artists working in the inter-war years, "Distinction and Denial" shows that black artistic production existed between the claims of a distinctly African American tradition and full inclusion into American modernist culture--Publisher.

This work goes beyond the "blackness" of black art to examine the integrative and interdisciplinary practices of Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L - five contemporary black artists in whose work race plays anything but a defining role. Work by black artists today is almost uniformly understood in terms of its "blackness, " with audiences often expecting or requiring it to "represent" the race. In "How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness", Darby English shows how severely such expectations limit the scope of our knowledge about this work and how different it looks when approached on its own terms. Refusing to grant racial blackness - his metaphorical "total darkness" - primacy over his subjects' other concerns and contexts, he brings to light problems and possibilities that arise when questions of artistic priority and freedom come into contact, or even conflict, with those of cultural obligation--Publisher.

Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett, "The New Negro" collects more than one hundred canonical and lesser-known essays published between 1892 and 1938 that examine the issues of race and representation in African American culture. These readings - by writers including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alain Locke, Carl Van Vechten, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright - discuss the trope of the New Negro, and the milieu in which this figure existed, from almost every conceivable angle. Political essays are joined by essays on African American fiction, poetry, drama, music, painting, and sculpture--Publisher.

This anthology of black writers traces the evolution of African-American perspectives throughout American history, from the early years of slavery to the end of the twentieth century. The essays, manifestos, interviews, and documents assembled here, contextualized with critical commentaries from Marable and Mullings, introduce the reader to the character and important controversies of each period of black history--Publisher.

A passionate, rigorous, and persuasive look at the helpful complexity of art during a time of profound cultural turmoil By turns historical, critical, and personal, this book examines the use of art-and love-as a resource amid the recent wave of shootings by American police of innocent black women and men--Publisher.