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

Book SynopsisA timely consideration of African-American artists' rich engagement with the history of art from the twentieth century, this book is the winner of the James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award for African American Art History.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 Trade Review"This show couldn’t have arrived at a better time. Right after the MoMA reopened, making a huge splash by rethinking the canon, including placing work by African American artists in striking juxtaposition with modern masters...the Phillips Collection is organizing a show dedicated to further articulating these often-powerful connections. Shaking up the narrative of Modern art is no easy task. Guest curator Adrienne Childs explores how artists like Romare Bearden and Robert Colescott reimagined canonical works of European art in their depictions of African American life. Working in the vein of Modern abstractionists, artists Alma Thomas and Martin Puryear are celebrated for creating an aesthetic language for African American artists that challenged the racial politics hounding black art at the time....And these are only a few examples of the African American heavyweights in this show, who are set alongside Modern art luminaries. As investigations into the true narrative (or narratives) of Modern art continue, this show will provide a much-needed jolt of energy in the rebooting of the canon." —ARTAGENCYPARTNERS.COM

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Book SynopsisA dynamic, personal, and poignant collection of over 90 works fromEric Key?s extensive collection of art by American artists of African descent, spanning the Harlem Renaissance to the twenty-first century.Since he started collecting in the 1990s, Eric Key?s intent has always been to help preserve America?s Black experience in the arts, and to benefit the many communities of which he has been a part?opening gateways for artists, African Americans, and conversations about race, identity, and America. Featured in the volume are selected works by some of the most recognizable contemporary African American artists, including Sam Gilliam, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, William Artis, Samella Lewis, and Renee Stout. Together, these artists work to dispel the many stereotypes and misunderstandings about African American art and people, but also remain a form of personal narrative. As Eric Key states, the works in his collection are an extension of himself, a Black man in a still mostly white art world; they are an extension of the country in which he lives and an extension of the artists who created them.

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Book SynopsisCompelling 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 ranginTrade Review’This excellent volume exemplifies the increasing sophistication of scholarship around issues of the representation of race, particularly in the nineteenth century. High art, popular art and popular performance involving Africans are analysed with due regard to the complexities of European racial attitudes in an age of commercialism and empire.’ David Bindman, Hutchins Center at Harvard University, USA and author of Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century ’It is exciting to see scholars continue to probe the question of how visual arts of the West reflect the reactions to the experiences of Africans in the diaspora. The manner in which Europeans viewed and represented blacks in art is tied to the larger questions of power, cultural and political domination and exchange, along with an ever evolving influential aesthetics of difference. This well written volume of enlightening essays is a major contribution to the literature on race and representation as it broadens our understanding of the extent to which the dynamics of race has colored the history of art in Europe in many ways. Even though this volume focuses on European art, there are important contributions to the history of art relating to African Americans who created art in Europe in the nineteenth century. The discussions of slavery, Orientalism, photography and modernism in this book bring fresh perspectives to the subject of blackness in Europe. This volume is a must read for all who wish to advance their knowledge of a much neglected subject in American and European art history.’ David C. Driskell, Distinguished University Professor of Art Emeritus, University of Maryland, College Park, USA'Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century assembles studies on a wide range of subjects that, taken together, reveal not just the relevance of images of “blacks” and “blackness” to studies of the nineteenth century, but constitute a compelling argument for how integral an awareness of the issues raised by those images should be to any account of the art of the period.' CAA ReviewsTable of ContentsContents: Introduction: figuring blackness in Europe, Adrienne L. Childs and Susan H. Libby; The color of Frenchness: racial identity and visuality in French anti-slavery imagery, 1788-94, Susan H. Libby; US and THEM: Camper’s odious ligne faciale and Géricault’s beseeching black, Albert Alhadeff; ’A mulatto sculptor from New Orleans’: Eugène Warburg in Europe, 1853-59, Paul H.D. Kaplan; Ira Aldridge as Othello in James Northcote’s Manchester portrait, Earnestine Jenkins; Exceeding blackness: African women in the art of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Adrienne L. Childs; Visualizing racial antics in late 19th-century France, James Smalls; Staging ethnicity: Edvard Munch’s images of Sultan Abdul Karim, Allison W. Chang; Race and beauty in black and white: Robert Demachy and the aestheticization of blackness in pictorialist photography, Wendy A. Grossman; Selected bibliography; Index.

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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 rangin

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Book SynopsisA rich reconsideration of a short-lived but visionary voice in twentieth-century American painting and his enduring relevance

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