Search results for ""Author Adrienne L. Childs""

Riffs and Relations: African-American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition presents works by African-American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries together with works by the early-twentieth-century European artists with whom they engaged. Black artists have investigated, interrogated, invaded, entangled, annihilated, or immersed themselves in the aesthetics, symbolism, and ethos of European art for more than a century. The powerful push and pull of this relationship constitutes a distinct tradition for many African-American artists who source the master narratives of art history to critique, embrace, or claim their own space. This groundbreaking catalog--accompanying a major exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.--connects the work of artists such as Romare Bearden with Pablo Picasso; Renee Cox and Robert Colescott with Edouard Manet; Norman Lewis with Paul Klee; and Leonardo Drew with Piet Mondrian. The volume explores how blackness has often been conceived from the standpoint of these international connections and presents the divergent and complex works born of these important dialogues.

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Compelling and troubling, colorful and dark, black figures served as the quintessential image of difference in nineteenth-century European art; the essays in this volume further the investigation of constructions of blackness during this period. This collection marks a phase in the scholarship on images of blacks that moves beyond undifferentiated binaries like ’negative’ and ’positive’ that fail to reveal complexities, contradictions, and ambiguities. Essays that cover the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century explore the visuality of blackness in anti-slavery imagery, black women in Orientalist art, race and beauty in fin-de-siècle photography, the French brand of blackface minstrelsy, and a set of little-known images of an African model by Edvard Munch. In spite of the difficulty of resurrecting black lives in nineteenth-century Europe, one essay chronicles the rare instance of an American artist of color in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. With analyses of works ranging from Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, to portraits of the American actor Ira Aldridge, this volume provides new interpretations of nineteenth-century representations of blacks.

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A rich reconsideration of a short-lived but visionary voice in twentieth-century American painting and his enduring relevance Bob Thompson (1937–1966) came to critical acclaim in the late 1950s for paintings of unparalleled figurative complexity and chromatic intensity. Thompson drew upon the Western art-historical canon to formulate a highly personal, expressive language. Tracing the African American artist’s prolific, yet tragically brief, transatlantic career, this volume examines Thompson’s outlier status and pays close attention to his sustained engagements with themes of community, visibility, and justice. As the contributors contextualize the artist’s ambitions and his unique creative process, they reposition Thompson as a predecessor to contemporary artists such as Kerry James Marshall and Kehinde Wiley. Featuring an array of artwork, and never-before-published poems and archival materials, this study situates Thompson’s extraordinary output within ongoing dialogues about the politics of representation. Published in association with Colby College Museum of ArtExhibition Schedule:Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME (July 20, 2021–January 9, 2022)Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago (February 10–May 15, 2022)High Museum of Art, Atlanta (June 18–September 11, 2022)Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (October 9, 2022–January 8, 2023)

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