African American Artists Research Articles

Comic license in contemporary African American visual art

Given a dominant visual discourse predicated upon stereotypes concerning menace, sexualisation, and abjection, African American visual production is often obligated to effect a correction by producing responsible, even didactic art. While this imperative remains a potent force, in this paper I focus upon work that is determinedly irreverent, even comic in its forthright address of race. My case studies are three African American artists: William Pope.L, a performance artist self-styled as the “Friendliest Black Artist in America”; a visual artist, Sanford Biggers, and a conceptual artist, Dave McKenzie. I suggest that all three create work that, in favouring the comic rather than the tragic modality, extends the affective possibilities for black expression. The comedy is not necessarily about generating laughter, rather, as a form of what Lauren Berlant calls ‘deadpan aesthetic,’ its ambivalence engenders a deliberate and productive uncertainty.

Rhythm, colour, and movements: narratives of art and life in black Pittsburgh

ABSTRACTThis essay draws on two extended oral histories in comparing and contrasting two African American visual artists based in Greater Pittsburgh, Thaddeus Mosley and Elizabeth Asche Douglas. By probing the artistic and activist careers of both, the essay explores how the interrelated dimensions of their lives and art overlap with the context of African American life in mid-century Pittsburgh.

‘A thought of home’ memorialising slavery and narrativising war in Horace Pippin’s paintings

ABSTRACTThis article investigates twentieth-century African American artist and World War I combat veteran, Horace Pippin’s multifaceted yet under-examined narrative paintings. Coming to grips with his self-reflexive artistic strategies and his experimental practice in which he does justice to the pain of daily ‘suffering’ in a search for the spiritual peace promised by a beautiful ‘sunset,’ this article examines the thematic and formal difficulties embedded in his determination to represent the ‘everyday’ lives of African American women, children, and men as liberated from a white supremacist US national context. Across his works, he bears witness to untold generations of black strategies of resistance in the face of traumatic suffering not by emphasising the exceptional atypicality but rather the ‘everydayness’ of chattel slavery as a historical institution and of World War I as a modern European phenomenon. The overall purpose of this article is to challenge the existing criteria within which we define Pippin’s body of work – as repeatedly demarcated according to seemingly clear-cut categorisations as related either to World War I, slavery, history, religion or domesticity – in order to do justice to his lifelong conviction regarding ‘My life story of art, that is my art, and no one else.’

Unmitigated Blackness: Paul Beatty's Transscalar Critique

Unmitigated Blackness:Paul Beatty's Transscalar Critique Henry Ivry Maybe the reason so few people are funny these days is that nothing is identified as being absurd anymore. … The word is rarely even used, because for the dutiful American to acknowledge the absurdity of life implies responsibility.1 —Paul Beatty Towards the end of Paul Beatty's Booker Prize-winning novel The Sellout (2015), the narrator takes stock of contemporary African American art. The protagonist, known only by his last name Me, is at a comedy club when an African American comedian abruptly stops his performance as a white couple starts to laugh hysterically at his jokes. The comedian yells: "Do I look like I'm fucking joking with you? This shit ain't for you. Understand? Now get the fuck out! This is our thing!"2 Me is both awed and confused by the performance: I respected that he didn't give a fuck. But I wish I hadn't been so scared, that I had the nerve to stand in protest. Not to castigate him for what he did or to stick up for the aggrieved white people. After all, they could've stuck up for themselves, called in the authorities or their God, and smote everyone in the place, but I wish I'd stood up to this man and asked him a question: "So what exactly is our thing?" (SO, 287–88) Me picks up on the comedian's phrase "our thing" to ask what qualifies as African American aesthetic expression. How can the comedian, Me wonders, draw a line between our thing and their thing? This is, I argue, also a literary question. Through Me, Beatty's novel joins a conversation best encapsulated by Kenneth Warren in his controversial but essential What Was African American Literature? There, Warren claims that African American literature as an aesthetic category existed only in relation to Jim Crow legislation. This is not to say that "racism has disappeared from the nation's sociopolitical landscape," but rather that African American literature was constituted as a dialectical [End Page 1133] "function of Jim Crow and the fight against it."3 With the end of de jure segregation and the ascendancy of de facto racism, the possibility for crafting a distinctly African American aesthetic vernacular in the contemporary moment, Warren argues, lacks a grounding referent. Warren makes a political claim alongside his periodization of African American literature. Literature, Warren contends, provided the space "in which the black literary voice could count for so much because, in political terms, the voice of black people generally counted for so little."4 Warren argues that African American art is grounded in a reciprocal relation between the aesthetic and the political made possible by the obvious structural oppression of Jim Crow legislation. This is where Warren and Beatty diverge. While Warren laments the loss of a distinctly African American literature, Beatty, throughout The Sellout, critiques this idea of a stable African American literature having ever existed. The plot turns around Me's relationship to Hominy Jenkins, the former understudy of the Our Gang minstrel, Buckwheat, and the sole surviving "Little Rascal stunt coon" (SO, 71). Hominy sets off a series of events that eventually lead the narrator to being charged by the Supreme Court with "willfully ignoring the Fourteenth Amendment" and resegregating the fictional Los Angeles ghetto of Dickens while also possessing Hominy as a slave (SO, 23). In some senses, this regressive plotline seems to revolve around what Warren describes as a tired trope within contemporary literature wherein '"the discovery' [is] made again and again by recent scholarship, that despite news to the contrary, 'racism' still exists."5 But The Sellout doesn't merely uncover the racist bias of some minor character: by staging the segregation of Dickens and the reinstitution of slavery, Beatty goes much further than the "discovery" that '"racism' still exists." The Sellout satirically erases not only the gains of the Civil Rights movement but imagines returning to chattel slavery as offering the only way out of the current racial impasse. The novel therefore critiques the politics of intelligibility that underpin Warren's idea of African American literature, which remain circumscribed within...

On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay by Cheryl A. Wall

Reviewed by: On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay by Cheryl A. Wall Jesse McCarthy Cheryl A. Wall. On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2018. 288 pp. $29.95. This review was completed and submitted to the journal before I learned of Cheryl Wall's passing on April 4, 2020. Like so many in the field, I owe an enormous debt to her pioneering scholarship and institutional leadership. As we mourn the loss of her warmth, generosity, and guidance, we are also reminded that Dr. Wall's intellectual legacy will always be with us. Through her works she extended our vision and changed our words, indelibly enriching the historical and theoretical study of the tradition. —JM Toni Morrison once described the precious and vulnerable space in which we attempt to read and write as "a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war." That state of peace, she observed, is paradoxically one of solitude and communion, "the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one," as she put it with characteristic elegance. Cheryl A. Wall's On Freedom and the Will to Adorn: The Art of the African American Essay, reminds us that Morrison is not an outlier so much as a consummate example of a self-fashioning essayistic tradition deeply rooted in African American literary history. Yet systematic and dedicated scholarly treatments of the essay as a black literary practice have been surprisingly rare. Indeed, until now only two full monographs published a decade apart, Gerald Early's pioneering study, Speech and Power: The African-American Essay and Its Cultural Context (Ecco, 1993), and Cheryl Butler's The Art of the Black Essay: From Meditation to Transcendence (Routledge, 2003), have been devoted to the subject. Given this paucity, Wall's book remedies a terrible lack and also inevitably sets a new benchmark, one that will hopefully spur a wave of studies and renewed specialist interest while providing instructors with an essential and much-needed pedagogical resource. Historically speaking, the essay has tended to be democratic in its ambitions but typically aristocratic in its rhetorical assumptions as well as the material conditions that underwrite its appearance. Montaigne's celebrated Essais, his "attempts" at capturing an ordinary experience that could speak to the common life of others, drew on a humanistic culture that flourished among the European elite and eventually became a privileged instrument and vehicle of Enlightenment thought. In the United States, the essay received an original impress and a new mandate from Emerson, who spoke of the individual sovereignty of the American scholar at Harvard in 1837. But across the Charles in the section of Boston's Beacon Hill known then as "Nigger Hill," David Walker was also radically revising the form, although his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World emphasized not the grandeur of encompassing all knowledge within the self, but the horrors of mass ignorance and the collective abjection of his fellow black Americans. Like Emerson and the other luminaries of New England, Walker was keen to use the unruly freedom and individuated [End Page 145] voice of the essay to impart new vigor to society, to establish new relations among mankind, to make the essay a revolutionary instrument of consciousness: they have fed different, if also overlapping, rhetorical and literary traditions in the U. S. ever since. Emerson justly remains a touchstone for all readers interested in the essay. But how often do we hear about Walker's contributions to the form? What happened, we might ask, when the American essay was invested with the voices of persons whose very humanity was deemed suspect at best, and all too often simply denied outright? From Walker's Appeal and W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, Langston Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" and Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" in the hands of James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison, gathered in Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider or Alice Walker's In Search...

A Space of Negotiation: Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s Photographic Portraits as a Reflection on the Image of Blackness and Nudity

This article focuses on the self-portraits of contemporary African American artist Paul Mpaga Sepuya, who specializes in studio photography. In his self-portraits, Sepuya raises the issue of the contemporary representation of the black queer subject caught up in interracial relations. The author analyzes how the photographer blurs the boundary between the subjective "I" and "we," presenting a creative collective where the model-artist, artist-model relationship is defined on the basis of feelings of love and friendship. The author discusses issues of the homoerotic act and the hyper-visibility and invisibility of the racially determined subject.

South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s

South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s

Whiteness, Artist Identities, and Artworld Spaces

This paper considers a research study into the artist identity formation in young people engaged in a teen arts internship program at a contemporary arts center in post-Katrina New Orleans using the construct of whiteness to examine access to artist identities and artworld spaces. Art has always been embedded into the cultural and spiritual practices of people’s everyday lives. Yet, modern and contemporary artworld identities and spaces have been shaped by exclusionary and oppressive practices. In the city of New Orleans, there is a persistent presence of African American art and cultural practices that thrive outside of artworld institutions. And yet, as this study demonstrates, artworld identities and spaces within the city of New Orleans and beyond, even when they espouse social justice orientations, often remain within the milieu of whiteness and related power structures.

Charles White

The recent exhibition Charles White: A Retrospective (Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 7, 2018–January 13, 2019) offered a chance to consider the technical and iconographic breadth of an oeuvre that has been exhibited mainly in sporadic doses for the past few decades and has expanded in scope through recent attention from a subsequent generation of African American artists, including several students as well as art scholars. White (1918–79) was vocally committed from the mid-1960s through his final decade to African American art subjects in tandem with social issues, climactic in poignant, politically charged lithographs in a realist drawing style set in increasingly abstract environments. By then associated with the Black Arts Movement, he continued to recycle historical figures and references from his earliest work in the milieu of a Black Renaissance in Chicago and bolstered by the Works Progress Administration, which, with reciprocal viewing, takes on a collective modernist context in terms of current events related to African American experience and American life broadly, even where allegorical. White’s prolific graphic experimentation yielded varied surface patterns that often evoke content-laden textures, elided into several distinctive late paintings also featured.

Economies of Black Culture

This essay foregrounds the problem of commercial art in the history of African American art. Despite recent interest in graphic design and the history of capitalism, scholars of African American art tend to diminish commercial art as background context or overlook it entirely. For scholars to reckon fully with the economy, however, they must consider commerce as a critical tradition and dimension of African American art practices. I focus on commercial artist Emmett McBain and public artist William Walker—each associated with the Black Arts Movement—as well as contemporary social practice artist Theaster Gates, to illuminate the commercial dimension of black art and the work of art as a form of commerce.

Sophie Tucker, Racial Hybridity and Interracial Relations in American Vaudeville

This article discusses Sophie Tucker's racialized performance in the context of early twentieth-century American vaudeville and black–Jewish interracial relations. Tucker's vaudeville musical acts involved mixed racial referents: ‘black-style’ music and dance, Jewish themes, Yiddish language and the collaboration of both African American and Jewish artists. I show how these racial combinations were a studied tactic to succeed in white vaudeville, a corporate entertainment industry that capitalized on racialized images and fast changes in characters. From historical records it is clear that Tucker's black signifiers also fostered connections with the African American artists who inspired her work or were employed by her. How these interracial relations contended with Tucker's brand of racialized performance is the focus of the latter part of the article. Here I analyse Tucker's autobiography as a performative act, in order to reveal a reparative effort toward some of her exploitative approaches to black labour and creativity.

Atomic Afrofuturism and Amiri Baraka's Compulsive Futures

In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Criticism,’ Amiri Baraka was formulating his own version of nuclear futurity in Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Jazz Musical. Baraka's musical manifests and conceptualises atomic afrofuturism, a historically specific affirmation of black existence that was forged while facing nuclear apocalypse. Nuclear Criticism, which lost much of its exigency after the end of the Cold War, needs to evolve to account for the present nuclear era, as its focus on totalities leaves it ill-equipped for incorporating the disparate lived experiences of those who have already experienced the apocalypse and for whom nuclear apocalypse is a repetition or extension of white supremacy's agenda of extinction. This article offers a genealogy of atomic afrofuturism, examining how throughout the cold war period African American artists like Sun Ra, Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka were exploring the post-apocalyptic conditions of black existence, including its conflicting temporalities and tenses, while much of America still believed the apocalypse was imminent, not immanent. And so it is Derrida's anti-apocalyptic missives together with Baraka's anti-nuclear musical that can offer the framework Nuclear Criticism so desperately desires for imagining the unimaginable.

Perspectives on the 1933 Exhibition: Herring, Locke, and Porter

The comprehensive 1933 Exhibition of Works by Negro Artists at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Gallery of Art sought to introduce a broad public to the creative expression of African America...

Politics of the Press: Newspapers and the Representation of Art by African Americans in the Nation’s Capital

This essay focuses on the role of the newspapers in extending the reach and impact of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History’s (ASNLH) Exhibition of Works by Negro Artists (1933), which the Smithsonian National Gallery of Art hosted. I analyze how the press advanced the show’s politics of representation through accounts produced by critics writing in the black and white newspapers. By covering certain aspects of the exhibition, reporters highlighted black Americans’ achievements in the visual arts. This emphasis on the aesthetic abilities of the African American artists in the show aligned with the goals of progressive politicians and civil rights activists at the time, including Carter G. Woodson, the founder and head of the ASNLH.

Student Art in the United States National Museum: Progressive Education on Display

The Smithsonian Institution’s 1933 Exhibition of Works by Negro Artists included student work. This may seem unremarkable, but underlying this curatorial choice were contemporary debates over how t...

Exhibiting the Negro: Art and Anthropology in the National Museum, 1929–33

This article considers a specific context in which the 1933 Exhibition of Works by Negro Artists operated. The Smithsonian National Gallery of Art was located in the National Museum’s new building ...

Biennials' Temporality

Biennials' Temporality

Editor’s Note

Previous articleNext article FreeEditor’s NotePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis issue opens with an essay on the aesthetic and political potential of the modern scrapbook. Makeda Best’s argument focuses on a unique object at the Archives of American Art, one that artist William H. Johnson created through careful selection, transformation, and recombination. I must admit feeling kinship with the scrapbooker when I collect and assemble the content for each issue of the journal. Diverse research materials intersect on our pages, bringing together multiple art-historical contexts, artistic media, and interpretive methods. At its best, the resulting arrangement—in this case, a sequence of articles concerning African American modernist painting and politics, the social practice of gift-giving in the art world of the 1960s, and the economics of nineteenth-century art—exceeds the sum of its parts. Taken together, this research by Best, David McCarthy, and Diana Seave Greenwald presents new ways of reading artworks and primary sources in the field of American art history.In “Archive Matters,” two essays apply inventive methodological questions to American aestheticism, focusing on personal papers at the Archives. Elizabeth Lee revisits her research on Abbott Handerson Thayer by considering what the diary of the artist’s physician-father and period letters might say (or not say) about medical themes in Thayer’s paintings. While archives can appear to their modern users as incoherent or incomplete, Lee advocates for subjecting them to a critical, indeed clinical, gaze that reanimates their contents and thereby an artist’s oeuvre. Erica E. Hirshler brings Thayer into her own reflection on archival absences by looking to the letters he exchanged with fellow painter John Singer Sargent. Hirshler is interested in the gaps in this, like most, archived letters. How do we creatively approach these gaps, Hirshler asks, while remaining critical of the interventions into the historical record that doing so necessitates?With this issue, the journal welcomes curator of African American manuscripts Erin Jenoa Gilbert. This new position is part of the Archives’ African American Collecting Initiative (2018–21), supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. We look forward to Gilbert’s expansion of the collections by and about African American artists, and to the exciting research opportunities her work will surely provide our authors and readers. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Archives of American Art Journal Volume 58, Number 1Spring 2019 Sponsored by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/703658 © 2019 by The Smithsonian Institution. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The “Simple” Way to Climb a Racial Mountain

ABSTRACT This essay examines Langston Hughes's vision and cultural politics via his fictional character Jesse B. Semple. Known as the Simple stories, Hughes's sketches were collected in five volumes published during his lifetime, including Simple Speaks His Mind (1950), Simple Takes a Wife (1953), Simple Stakes a Claim (1957), The Best of Simple (1961), and Simple's Uncle Sam (1965). A sixth volume, titled The Return of Simple, was published in 1994. The author examines the stories in relation to his 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” and argues that Simple's musings were largely representative of black working-class ethos in the twentieth century. At the same time, the author situates Hughes's stories in the broader context of African diasporic literary and cultural history.

Langston Hughes and the Timeless Questions of Life and Death

ABSTRACT This essay probes the resonance of Langston Hughes's writings from the vantage point of twenty-first century America. More specifically, the author points up Hughes's capacity to provide succor and comfort for contemporary readers who have suffered in the wake of death, including the death of Trayvon Martin and the racial overtones involved. Drawing from both personal and professional experience, the author demonstrates how Hughes's poetry can be interpreted in spiritual terms. At the same time, the author reexamines Hughes's racial politics, especially his criticism of a young black poet, whom many believe to be Countee Cullen, at the outset of his famous essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.”