Archibald Motley Jr. and Racial Reinvention (New Black Studies)
by Phoebe Wolfskill
An essential African American artist of his era, Archibald Motley Jr. created paintings of black Chicago that aligned him with the revisionist aims of the New Negro Renaissance. Yet Motley's approach to constructing a New Negro--a dignified figure both accomplished and worthy of respect--reflected the challenges faced by African American artists working on the project of racial reinvention and uplift. Phoebe Wolfskill demonstrates how Motley's art embodied the tenuous nature of the Black Renais...
A child of the Great Depression and one of the only African American students in her UCLA art program, Betye Saar has, over the course of more than six decades, made work that exposes stereotypes and injustices based on race and gender. From early prints and watercolors to Joseph Cornell–inspired assemblages and full-scale sculptural tableaux her work has inspired generations of artists. This ingeniously designed publication plays off the format of Saar’s original sketchbooks. Made throughout he...
National Museum of African American History and Culture
by National Museum of African American History and
This souvenir book showcases some of the most influential and important treasures of the National Museum of African American History and Culture's collections. These include a hymn book owned by Harriet Tubman; ankle shackles used to restrain enslaved people on ships during the Middle Passage; a dress that Rosa Parks was making shortly before she was arrested; a vintage, open-cockpit Tuskegee Airmen trainer plane; Muhammad Ali's headgear; an 1835 Bill of Sale enslaving a young girl named...
Notebook (Love Is All Around Notebook, #2) (Hello My Deer Notebook, #1)
by Char Story
Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art is the tragic story of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, detailing his turbulent childhood, explosive dealings with the art world and rise to fame, which led to his death from a drug overdose at the age of twenty-seven. Phoebe Hoban brings some order to the chaos of Basquiat s life and the arcane dealings of the international art market, placing him in a context alongside his contemporaries, Julian Schnabel and Keith Haring, as well as his mentor, Andy Warhol. Thi...
Rethinking Social Realism
by Stacy I. Morgan (Asst. Professor of American Studies, University of Alabama, USA)
The social realist movement, with its focus on proletarian themes and its strong ties to New Deal programs and leftist politics, has long been considered a depression-era phenomenon that ended with the start of World War II. This study explores how and why African American writers and visual artists sustained an engagement with the themes and aesthetics of social realism into the early cold war-era--far longer than a majority of their white counterparts. Stacy I. Morgan recalls the social real...
L. A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema is the first book dedicated to the films and filmmakers of the L. A. Rebellion, a group of African, Caribbean, and African American independent film and video artists that formed at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1970s and 1980s. The group-including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry, Jamaa Fanaka, and Zeinabu irene Davis-shared a desire to create alternatives to the dominant modes of narrative, style, and p...
Jacob Lawrence was one of the best-known African American artists of the twentieth century. In Painting Harlem Modern, Patricia Hills renders a vivid assessment of Lawrence's long and productive career. She argues that his complex, cubist-based paintings developed out of a vital connection with a modern Harlem that was filled with artists, writers, musicians, and social activists. She also uniquely positions Lawrence alongside such important African American writers as Langston Hughes, Richard W...