Editor’s Note

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s NoteTanya SheehanTanya Sheehan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAs more Americans come to terms with racial inequities and injustice in the United States, I have been asking more urgently, What can a journal devoted to interpreting archives of the past contribute to a critical reevaluation of the present? How might publishing histories of the visual arts in the US, built upon primary sources, effect change in a society defined and divided by race?New research in this issue offers ways into these questions by addressing topics as disparate as an elite nineteenth-century circle of white writers and painters, a collective of Black artists founded in the tumultuous year of 1968, and the feminist iconography of a Cuban-American artist. Peter Betjemann introduces us to the New York Sketch Club, whose work he argues was shaped by racial violence. Reflections on the American landscape by its famous members associated with the Hudson River School promoted ideas deeply invested in Indian removal and African slavery. Chris Dingwall takes us inside AfriCOBRA’s commitment to forging an autonomous community of Black artists in a racist, capitalist society. Members of this group not only created a unique aesthetic to express Black experiences, but they also deftly navigated the boundaries between art and economics, seeking to control their work’s commercial value. Finally, Xuxa Rodríguez hears in Ana Mendieta’s interview with critic Judith Wilson the specific experiences of a feminist, exiled, and bilingual woman of color—not reflections of white desires. Rodríguez reinterprets Mendieta’s oeuvre as speaking to the peculiar condition of displacement and unbelonging that comes with living as both a Cuban in exile and a racialized American citizen.These essays uncover the racial politics that engulf, and often directly motivate, art-making in the US. While Betjemann points to the long history of such politics, which white aesthetics has worked to deny, Dingwall and Rodríguez underscore the cruciality of centering archives of BIPOC artists and listening attentively to the stories they tell, especially if those stories challenge dominant narratives about American art and racist assumptions about non-white others. Such archives include the papers of Nela Arias-Misson and Consuelo Jiménez Underwood, both profiled in this issue.We are also pleased to share two commissions: a curatorial intervention by Kevin M. Murphy, who asks what researchers can do when they encounter seemingly indecipherable sources, and an insightful analysis by Jennifer Liese of the artist talk, an enduring genre that has received surprisingly little critical attention. We look forward to focusing on the interpretation of oral archives in a special issue planned for 2023. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Archives of American Art Journal Volume 60, Number 2Fall 2021 Sponsored by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/717523 Views: 748 © 2021 The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.