FASHIONING MODERNISM

Abstract

: This essay asks why modernist art history has been unable to account for the career of the African American painter Rose Piper. One of the most gifted painters of her generation, Piper was also among the least prolific. Her career is bookended by two important solo exhibitions. The gap between these shows, filled by a career in textile design, is typically narrated in terms of the degeneration of promise and the wasting of creative talent. Piper’s designs mark a break in the progressive arc of her life. They split her late paintings from the early ones and have seemed to shut off the potential for sensitive criticism. But her modernism refuses such distinctions. Piper used her early paintings to interrogate reification, commodification, and economic compulsion as they interacted with questions of racial oppression. These images interrogated the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and the options remaining open for black modernist art. Her late paintings, produced after thirty years at work in the textile industry, need to be read as the culmination of this project rather than as an unfortunate diversion. In them, she directed the technical and institutional knowledge gleaned from her career as a designer towards a searching, self-reflexive critique of race, gender, and the commodity form. These images open the way to a renewal of black modernism.