This Companion authoritatively points to the main areas of enquiry within the subject of African American art history. The first section examines how African American art has been constructed over the 70 years of published scholarship. The second section studies how African American art is and has been taught in academia. The third section focuses on how African American art has been reflected in art galleries and museums. The final section opens up understandings of what we mean when we speak of African American art. This book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers and professors and may be used in African American art, visual culture, and culture classes"
This Companion authoritatively points to the main areas of enquiry within the subject of African American art history. The first section examines how African American art has been constructed over the course of a century of published scholarship. The second section studies how African American art is and has been taught and researched in academia. The third part focuses on how African American art has been reflected in art galleries and museums. The final section opens up understandings of what we mean when we speak of African American art. This book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers, and professors and may be used in American art, African American art, visual culture, and culture classes.
This is an authoritative companion that is global in scope, recognizing the presence of African Diaspora artists across the world. It is a bold and broad reframing of this neglected branch of art history, challenging dominant presumptions about the field. Diaspora pertains to the global scattering or dispersal of, in this instance, African peoples, as well as their patterns of movement from the mid twentieth century onwards. Chapters in this book emphasize the importance of cross-fertilization, interconnectedness, and intersectionality in the framing of African Diaspora art history. The book stresses the complexities of artists born within, or living and working within, the African continent, alongside the complexities of Africa-born artists who have migrated to other parts of the world. The group of international contributors emphasizes and accentuates the interplay between, for example, Caribbean art and African Diaspora art, or Latin American art and African Diaspora art, or Black British art and African Diaspora art. The book will be of interest to scholars and students working in art history, the various branches of African studies, African American studies, African Diaspora studies, Caribbean studies, and Latin American studies.
In the social and cultural histories of women and feminism, Black women have long been overlooked or ignored. The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories is an impressive and comprehensive reference work for contemporary scholarship on the cultural histories of Black women across the diaspora spanning different eras from ancient times into the twenty-first century. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into five parts: A fragmented past, an inclusive future Contested histories, subversive memories Gendered lives, racial frameworks Cultural shifts, social change Black identities, feminist formations Within these sections, a diverse range of women, places, and issues are explored, including ancient African queens, Black women in early modern European art and culture, enslaved Muslim women in the antebellum United States, Sally Hemings, Phillis Wheatley, Black women writers in early twentieth-century Paris, Black women, civil rights, South African apartheid, and sexual violence and resistance in the United States in recent history. The Routledge Companion to Black Women’s Cultural Histories is essential reading for students and researchers in Gender Studies, History, Africana Studies, and Cultural Studies.
International in scope, this volume brings together leading and emerging voices working at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, activism, and climate change, and addresses key questions, such as: why and how do art and visual culture, and their ethics and values, matter with regard to a world increasingly shaped by climate breakdown? Foregrounding a decolonial and climate-justice-based approach, this book joins efforts within the environmental humanities in seeking to widen considerations of climate change as it intersects with social, political, and cultural realms. It simultaneously expands the nascent branches of ecocritical art history and visual culture, and builds toward the advancement of a robust and critical interdisciplinarity appropriate to the complex entanglements of climate change. This book will be of special interest to scholars and practitioners of contemporary art and visual culture, environmental studies, cultural geography, and political ecology.
This companion is the first global, comprehensive text to explicate, theorize, and propose decolonial methodologies for art historians, museum professionals, artists, and other visual culture scholars, teachers, and practitioners. Art history as a discipline and its corollary institutions - the museum, the art market - are not only products of colonial legacies but active agents in the consolidation of empire and the construction of the West. The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History joins the growing critical discourse around the decolonial through an assessment of how art history may be rethought and mobilized in the service of justice - racial, gender, social, environmental, restorative, and more. This book draws attention to the work of artists, art historians, and scholars in related fields who have been engaging with disrupting master narratives and forging new directions, often within a hostile academy or an indifferent art world. The volume unpacks the assumptions projected onto objects of art and visual culture and the discourse that contains them. It equally addresses the manifold complexities around representation as visual and discursive praxis through a range of epistemologies and metaphors originated outside or against the logic of modernity. This companion is organized into four thematic sections: Being and Doing, Learning and Listening, Sensing and Seeing, and Living and Loving. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, museum studies, race and ethnic studies, cultural studies, disability studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.
A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework explores the ways specialists and institutions in the fine arts, curation, cultural studies, and art history have attempted to situate art in a more global framework since the 1980s. Offering analyses of the successes and setbacks of these efforts to globalize the art world, this innovative volume presents a new and exciting way of considering art in its global contexts. Essays by an international panel of leading scholars and practicing artists assert that what we talk about as ‘art’ is essentially a Western concept, thus any attempts at understanding art in a global framework require a revising of established conceptual definitions. Organized into three sections, this work first reviews the history and theory of the visual arts since 1980 and introduces readers to the emerging area of scholarship that seeks to place contemporary art in a global framework. The second section traces the progression of recent developments in the art world, focusing on the historical and cultural contexts surrounding efforts to globalize the art world and the visual arts in particular global and transnational frameworks. The final section addresses a wide range of key themes in contemporary art, such as the fundamental institutions and ontologies of art practice, and the interactions among art, politics, and the public sphere. A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, researchers, and general readers interested in exploring global art beyond the traditional Euro-American context.
This book invites readers into a growing, dynamic conversation among scholars and critics around a vibrant community of artists from an African American South. This constellation of creative makers includes familiar figures, such as Thornton Dial Sr., Lonnie Holley, and quiltmakers Nettie Young and Mary Lee Bendolph, whose work is collected in major museum and private collections. The artists represented extend to lesser-known but equally compelling creators working across a wide range of artistic forms, themes, and geographies. The essays gathered here, accompanied by a generous selection of full-color plates, survey subjects such as the artists' engagement with enslavement and liberation, the spiritual and religious dimensions of their work, the technical aspects of their work (such as the common use of "assemblage" as an artistic medium), the links between art and biography, and the evolving status of their reception in narratives of contemporary, modern, southern, and American art. Contributors are Celeste-Marie Bernier, Laura Bickford, Michael J. Bramwell, Elijah Heyward III, Sharon P. Holland, and Pamela J. Sachant.
Now in its second edition, this volume is an accessible introduction to the history of art. Using an international range of examples, it provides the reader with a toolkit of concepts, ideas and methods relevant to understanding art history. This new edition is fully updated with colour illustrations, increased coverage of non-western art and extended discussions of contemporary art theory. It introduces key ideas, issues and debates, exploring questions such as: What is art and what is meant by art history? What approaches and methodologies are used to interpret and evaluate art? How have ideas regarding medium, gender, identity and difference informed representation? What perspectives can psychoanalysis, semiotics and social art histories bring to the study of the discipline? How are the processes of postcolonialism, decolonisation and globalisation changing approaches to art history? Complete with helpful subject summaries, a glossary, suggestions for future reading and guidance on relevant image archives, this book is an ideal starting point for anyone studying art history as well as general readers with an interest in the subject.
This book examines the involvement of African American artists in the New Deal art programs of the 1930s. Emphasizing broader issues informed by the uniqueness of Black experience rather than individual artists’ works, Mary Ann Calo makes the case that the revolutionary vision of these federal art projects is best understood in the context of access to opportunity, mediated by the reality of racial segregation. Focusing primarily on the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), Calo documents African American artists’ participation in community art centers in Harlem, in St. Louis, and throughout the South. She examines the internal workings of the Harlem Artists’ Guild, the Guild’s activities during the 1930s, and its alliances with other groups, such as the Artists’ Union and the National Negro Congress. Calo also explores African American artists’ representation in the exhibitions sponsored by WPA administrators and the critical reception of their work. In doing so, she elucidates the evolving meanings of the terms race, culture, and community in the interwar era. The book concludes with an essay by Jacqueline Francis on Black artists in the early 1940s, after the end of the FAP program. Presenting essential new archival information and important insights into the experiences of Black New Deal artists, this study expands the factual record and positions the cumulative evidence within the landscape of critical race studies. It will be welcomed by art historians and American studies scholars specializing in early twentieth-century race relations.
