Description
Book SynopsisAfrican-American art has made an increasingly vital contribution to the art of the United States from the time of its origins in early-eighteenth-century slave communities. This major reassessment of the subject discusses folk and decorative arts such as ceramics, furniture, and quilts alongside fine art sculptures, paintings, and photography produced by African Americans, both enslaved and free, throughout the nineteenth century. It explores art and politics,the influence of galleries and museums, and examines the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, the Era of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism through the 1960s and 1970s, and the emergence of new black artists and theorists in the 1980s and 1990s. African-American Art shows that in its cultural diversityand synthesis of cultures it mirrors those in American society as a whole. `a much needed text. . . breaks down the barrier between folk and formal art, and articulates an interrelationship of both concepts to African-American people a
Trade ReviewSharon Patton has written a much needed text which surveys the broad scope of the history of African-American art from slavery to the present. She has followed a different tack, tracing art themes and their development throughout the history, rather than the influences of specific artists or periods. Thus, she shows how ideas such as crafts, formal painting and sculpture, or architecture, co-existed with equal importance to the culture from the times of the Colonies. In so doing, she breaks down the barrier between folk and formal art, and articulates an interrelationship of both concepts to African-American people and their culture. Her book expands the framework for the visual arts in the United States in the last two centuries. * Professor Keith Morrison, Dean, College of Creative Arts, San Francisco State University *
Table of ContentsCHAPTER 1: COLONIAL AMERICA AND THE YOUNG REPUBLIC 1700-1820; CHAPTER 2: NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA, THE CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION; CHAPTER 3: TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA AND MODERN ART 1900-60; CHAPTER 4: TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA: THE EVOLUTION OF A BLACK AESTHETIC
