Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art
Representing the Black Female Subject in Western Art

Author: Charmaine A. Nelson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2010-06-10

Total Pages: 553

ISBN-13: 1136968067

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This book offers the first concentrated examination of the representation of the black female subject in Western art through the lenses of race/color and sex/gender. Charmaine A. Nelson poses critical questions about the contexts of production, the problems of representation, the pathways of circulation and the consequences of consumption. She analyzes not only how, where, why and by whom black female subjects have been represented, but also what the social and cultural impacts of the colonial legacy of racialized western representation have been. Nelson also explores and problematizes the issue of the historically privileged white artistic access to black female bodies and the limits of representation for these subjects. This book not only reshapes our understanding of the black female representation in Western Art, but also furthers our knowledge about race and how and why it is (re)defined and (re)mobilized at specific times and places throughout history.

Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux's Why Born Enslaved! Reconsidered
Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux's Why Born Enslaved! Reconsidered

Author: Elyse Nelson

Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Published: 2022-03-07

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1588397440

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A critical reexamination of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's bust Why Born Enslaved!, this book unpacks the sculpture's engagement with—and defiance of—an antislavery discourse. In this clear-eyed look at the Black figure in nineteenth-century sculpture, noted art historians and writers discuss how emerging categories of racial difference propagated by the scientific field of ethnography grew in popularity alongside a crescendo in cultural production in France during the Second Empire. By comparing Carpeaux's bust Why Born Enslaved! to works by his contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as to objects by twenty‑first‑century artists Kara Walker and Kehinde Wiley, the authors touch on such key themes as the portrayal of Black enslavement and emancipation; the commodification of images of Black figures; the role of sculpture in generating the sympathies of its audiences; and the relevance of Carpeaux's sculpture to legacies of empire in the postcolonial present. The book also provides a chronology of events central to the histories of transatlantic slavery, abolition, colonialism, and empire.

Living History
Living History

Author: Ana Lucia Araujo

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-05-05

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1443810681

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This book focusses on the several forms of reconstructing the slave past in the present. The recent emergence of the memory of slavery allows those who are or who claim to be descendents of slaves to legitimize their demand for recognition and for reparations for past wrongs. Some reparation claims encompass financial compensation, but very often they express the need for memorialization through public commemoration, museums, and monuments. In some contexts, presentification of the slave past has helped governments and the descendants of former masters and slave merchants to formulate public apologies. For some, expressing repentance is not only a means to erase guilt but also a way to gain political prestige. The authors analyse different aspects of the recent phenomenon of memorializing slavery, especially the practices employed to stage the slave past in both public and private spaces. The essays present memory and oblivion as part of the same process; they discuss reconstructions of the past in the present at different public and private levels through historiography, photography, exhibitions, monuments, memorials, collective and individual discourses, cyberspace, religion and performance. By offering a comparative perspective on the United States and West Africa, as well as on Western Europe, South America, and the Caribbean, the chapters offer new possibilities to explore the resurgence of the memory of slavery as a transnational movement in our contemporary world.

Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century
Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century

Author: AdrienneL. Childs

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 1351573489

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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-si?e 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 G?cault's Raft of the Medusa, to portraits of the American actor Ira Aldridge, this volume provides new interpretations of nineteenth-century representations of blacks.

Like Life
Like Life

Author: Luke Syson

Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Published: 2018-03-19

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 1588396444

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Since before the myth of Pygmalion bringing a statue to life through desire, artists have used sculpture to explore the physical materiality of the body. This groundbreaking volume examines key sculptural works from thirteenth-century Europe to the global present, revealing new insights into the strategies artists deploy to blur the distinction between art and life. Three-dimensional renderings of the human figure are presented here in numerous manifestations, created by artists ranging from Donatello and Edgar Degas to Kiki Smith and Jeff Koons. Featuring works created in media both traditional and unexpected—such as glass, leather, and blood—Like Life presents sculpture by turns conventional and shocking, including effigies, dolls, mannequins, automata, waxworks, and anatomical models. Texts by curators and cultural historians as well as contemporary artists complete this provocative exploration of realistic representations of the human body. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}

Skin Crafts
Skin Crafts

Author: Julia Skelly

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2022-02-10

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 135012298X

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Skin Crafts discusses multiple artists from global contexts who employ craft materials in works that address historical and contemporary violence. These artists are deliberately embracing the fragility of textiles and ceramics to evoke the vulnerability of human skin and - in so doing - are demanding visceral responses from viewers. Drawing on a range of theories including affect theory, material feminism, skin studies, phenomenology and global art history, the book illuminates the various ways in which artists are harnessing the affective power of craft materials to address and cope with violence. Artists from Mexico, Africa, China, the Netherlands and Indigenous artists based in the unceded territory known as Canada are examined in relation to one another to illuminate the connections and differences across their bodies of work. Skin Crafts interrogates ongoing material violence towards women and marginalized others, and demonstrates the power of contemporary art to force viewers and scholars into facing their ethical responsibilities as human beings.

Public Feminism in Times of Crisis
Public Feminism in Times of Crisis

Author: Leila Easa

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-07-26

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1793648115

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Public Feminism in Times of Crisis examines the public practice of feminism in the age of social media. While their concept of public feminism emerges from a moment of acute crisis (the Trump years and the Covid-19 pandemic), Leila Easa and Jennifer Stager locate its foundations in history, journeying through broad swatches of time looking for connections between the centuries through art and literature and culture. Each chapter focuses on what public feminists do in the world: Public feminists gain control over an archive that otherwise contains or excludes them; they recover their own stories and subjective experiences, sometimes for activist use; they examine images and language that construct women in patriarchal texts; they situate the individual within a collective and the collective within an individual; they confront the limitations of such situating due to the containment of patriarchy and reclaim new systems of power in response; and they resurface a deep history for the alternative strategies of memorializing they employ. In navigating these practices, the authors also attend to the material conditions of writing histories as well as those shaping and enabling public feminist acts and protests more broadly.

Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica
Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica

Author: CharmaineA. Nelson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 1351548530

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Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica is among the first Slavery Studies books - and the first in Art History - to juxtapose temperate and tropical slavery. Charmaine A. Nelson explores the central role of geography and its racialized representation as landscape art in imperial conquest. One could easily assume that nineteenth-century Montreal and Jamaica were worlds apart, but through her astute examination of marine landscape art, the author re-connects these two significant British island colonies, sites of colonial ports with profound economic and military value. Through an analysis of prints, illustrated travel books, and maps, the author exposes the fallacy of their disconnection, arguing instead that the separation of these colonies was a retroactive fabrication designed in part to rid Canada of its deeply colonial history as an integral part of Britain's global trading network which enriched the motherland through extensive trade in crops produced by enslaved workers on tropical plantations. The first study to explore James Hakewill's Jamaican landscapes and William Clark's Antiguan genre studies in depth, it also examines the Montreal landscapes of artists including Thomas Davies, Robert Sproule, George Heriot and James Duncan. Breaking new ground, Nelson reveals how gender and race mediated the aesthetic and scientific access of such - mainly white, male - artists. She analyzes this moment of deep political crisis for British slave owners (between the end of the slave trade in 1807 and complete abolition in 1833) who employed visual culture to imagine spaces free of conflict and to alleviate their pervasive anxiety about slave resistance. Nelson explores how vision and cartographic knowledge translated into authority, which allowed colonizers to 'civilize' the terrains of the so-called New World, while belying the oppression of slavery and indigenous displacement.

Black Venus 2010
Black Venus 2010

Author: Deborah Willis

Publisher:

Published: 2010-01-08

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13:

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As a young South African woman of about twenty, Saartjie Baartman, the so-called “Hottentot Venus,” was brought to London and placed on exhibit in 1810. Clad in the Victorian equivalent of a body stocking, and paraded through the streets and on stage in a cage she became a human spectacle in London and Paris. Baartman’s distinctive physique became the object of ridicule, curiosity, scientific inquiry, and desire until and after her premature death. The figure of Sarah Baartman was reduced to her sexual parts. Black Venus 2010 traces Baartman’s memory in our collective histories, as well as her symbolic history in the construction and identity of black women as artists, performers, and icons. The wide-ranging essays, poems, and images in Black Venus 2010 represent some of the most compelling responses to Baartman. Each one grapples with the enduring legacy of this young African woman who forever remains a touchstone for black women. Contributors include: Elizabeth Alexander, Holly Bass, Petrushka A Bazin, William Jelani Cobb, Lisa Gail Collins, Renée Cox, J. Yolande Daniels, Carole Boyce Davies, Leon de Wailly, Manthia Diawara, Diana Ferrus, Cheryl Finley, Nikky Finney, Kianga K. Ford, Terri Francis, Sander Gilman, Renée Green, Joy Gregory, Lyle Ashton Harris, Michael D. Harris, Linda Susan Jackson, Kellie Jones, Roshini Kempadoo, Simone Leigh, Zine Magubane, E. Ethelbert Miller, Robin Mitchell, Charmaine Nelson, Tracey Rose, Radcliffe Roye, Bernadette Searle, Lorna Simpson, Debra S. Singer, Penny Siopis, Hank Willis Thomas, Kara Walker, Michele Wallace, Carla Williams, Carrie Mae Weems, J. T. Zealy, and the editor.