Abstract
Thelma Johnson Streat is perhaps best known as the first African American woman to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. However, in the 1940s–1950s she inhabited multiple coinciding roles: painter, performer, choreographer, cultural ethnographer, and folklore collector. As part of this expansive practice, her canvases display a peculiar movement and animacy while her dances transmit the restraint of the two-dimensional figure. Drawing from black feminist theoretical redefinitions of the human, this paper argues that Streat’s exploration of muralism, African American spirituals, Native Northwest Coast cultural production, and Yaqui Mexican-Indigenous folk music established a diasporic mapping forged through the coxtension of gesture and brushstroke. This transmedial work disorients colonial cartographies which were the products of displacement, conquest, and dispossession, aiding notions of a new humanism at mid-century.
Highlights
In 1942, Alfred Barr bought a small gouache painting called Rabbit Man for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
According to an invitation saved in the Streat scrapbook, Streat made a public appearance in San Francisco in conjunction with the DeYoung Museum, which sponsored a “Meet the Artist” event in 1941 as a send-off before the artist’s travels (OHS)
This is, the foundational premise of primitivism: using or appropriating forms “other” to oneself in order to pursue the fantasy of purity, wholeness or completion, or to rectify the perceived decline of one’s home culture
Summary
In 1942, Alfred Barr bought a small gouache painting called Rabbit Man for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Scholars of American and African American art have traditionally read Rabbit Man as a biomorphic hybrid of man and mask: here, the figure’s symmetrically patterned torso could be understood as a face with rectangular slits signifying eyes, and the raised arms instead connoting ears. By transmitting the painted figure through staged movement and expressive gesture, or injecting painting with animacy, does Streat exist between traditional mediums? Arts 2020, 9, x FOR PEER REVIEW staged andother, expressive gesture, or understand injecting painting with animacy, does. Streat exist she nestmovement one inside the such that we only performance vis-à-vis the characteristics between traditional mediums?. Streat’s career a dancer, and her wide-ranging raised limbs, research—a is heightened understood through.
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