African American and Black Diaspora

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Description: African Americans in Art: Selections from The Art Institute of Chicago
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00008
This special, expanded issue of Museum Studies focuses on the Art Institute of Chicago's growing collection of works by African Americans. Essays on the work of such influential artists as Archibald J. Motley, Jr., Marion Perkins, and Lorna Simpson are presented along with an article on the Art Institute’s striking daguerreotype of Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. In addition to these essays, a portfolio section features twenty-nine images, with informative, brief entries examining each work. This important publication presents an overview of the concerns surrounding race in art, celebrates the achievements of a number of gifted African American artists, and provides a broad, multifaceted view of American art and culture.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date May 1999 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300114799
EISBN 9780300236859
Illustrations 95 Illus.
Print Status out of print
Description: Alain Locke and the Visual Arts
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00339
Alain Locke (1885–1954), leading theorist of the Harlem Renaissance, maintained a lifelong commitment to the visual arts. Offering an in-depth study of Locke’s writings and art world interventions, Kobena Mercer focuses on the importance of cross-cultural entanglement. This distinctive approach reveals Locke’s vision of modern art as a dynamic space where images and ideas generate new forms under the fluid conditions of diaspora.

Positioning the philosopher as an advocate for an Afromodern aesthetic that drew from both formal experiments in Europe and the iconic legacy of the African past, Mercer shows how Aaron Douglas, Loïs Mailou Jones, and other New Negro artists acknowledged the diaspora’s rupture with the ancestral past as a prelude to the rebirth of identity. In his 1940 picture book, The Negro in Art, Locke also explored the different ways black and white artists approached the black image. Mercer’s reading highlights the global mobility of black images as they travel across national and ethnic frontiers. Finally, Mercer examines how Locke’s investment in art was shaped by gay male aestheticism. Black male nudes, including works by Richmond Barthé and Carl Van Vechten, thus reveal the significance of queer practices in modernism’s cross-cultural genesis.

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Print publication date September 2022 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300247268
EISBN 9780300272949
Illustrations 119
Print Status in print
Description: American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00342
Visual texts uniquely demonstrate the contested terms of American identity. In American Archives Shawn Michelle Smith offers a bold and disturbing account of how photography and the sciences of biological racialism joined forces in the nineteenth century to offer an idea of what Americans look like — or “should” look like. Her varied sources, which include the middle-class portrait, baby picture, criminal mugshot, and eugenicist record, as well as literary, scientific, and popular texts, enable her to demonstrate how new visual paradigms posed bodily appearance as an index to interior “essence.” Ultimately we see how competing preoccupations over gender, class, race, and American identity were played out in the making of a wide range of popular and institutional photographs.

Smith demonstrates that as the body was variously mapped and defined as the key to essentialized identities, the image of the white middle-class woman was often held up as the most complete American ideal. She begins by studying gendered images of middle-class domesticity to expose a transformation of feminine architectures of interiority into the “essences” of “blood,” “character,” and “race.” She reads visual documents, as well as literary texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pauline Hopkins, and Theodore Dreiser, as both indices of and forms of resistance to dominant images of gender, class, race, and national identity. Through this analysis Smith shows how the white male gaze that sought to define and constrain white women and people of color was contested and transformed over the course of the nineteenth century.

Smith identifies nineteenth-century visual paradigms that continue to shape debates about the terms of American belonging today. American Archives contributes significantly to the growing field of American visual cultural studies, and it is unprecedented in explaining how practices of racialized looking and the parameters of “American looks” were established in the first place.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date December 1999 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691004778
EISBN 9780300273175
Illustrations 56
Print Status in print
Description: Architecture and Empire in Jamaica
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00257
Through Creole houses and merchant stores to sugar fields and boiling houses, Jamaica played a leading role in the formation of both the early modern Atlantic world and the British Empire. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica offers the first scholarly analysis of Jamaican architecture in the long 18th century, spanning roughly from the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 to Emancipation in 1838. In this richly illustrated study, which includes hundreds of the author’s own photographs and drawings, Louis P. Nelson examines surviving buildings and archival records to write a social history of architecture.

Nelson begins with an overview of the architecture of the West African slave trade then moves to chapters framed around types of buildings and landscapes, including the Jamaican plantation landscape and fortified houses to the architecture of free blacks. He concludes with a consideration of Jamaican architecture in Britain. By connecting the architecture of the Caribbean first to West Africa and then to Britain, Nelson traces the flow of capital and makes explicit the material, economic, and political networks around the Atlantic. 
Print publication date March 2016 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300211009
EISBN 9780300214352
Illustrations 250
Print Status in print
Description: Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00018
Coinciding with the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade, this multi-disciplinary volume chronicles the iconography of sugar, slavery, and the topography of Jamaica from the beginning of British rule in 1655 to the aftermath of emancipation in the 1840s. Focusing on the visual and material culture of slavery and emancipation in Jamaica, it offers new perspectives on art, music, and performance in Afro-Jamaican society and on the Jewish diaspora in the Caribbean. Central to the book is Sketches of Character (1837–38)—a remarkable series of lithographs by the Jewish Jamaican artist Isaac Mendes Belisario—the earliest visual representation of the masquerade form Jonkonnu. Innovative scholarship traces the West African roots of Jonkonnu through its evolution in Jamaica and continuing transformation today; offers a unique portrait of Jamaican culture at a pivotal historical moment; and provides a new model for interpreting the visual culture of empire.
Print publication date December 2007 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300116618
EISBN 9780300248067
Illustrations 440
Print Status out of print
Description: Black Artists in America: From the Great Depression to Civil Rights
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00312
This insightful book surveys the varied ways in which Black American artists responded to the political, social, and economic climate of the United States from the time of the Great Depression through the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision. Featuring paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by artists including Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippin, Augusta Savage, Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett, Norman Lewis, Walter Augustus Simon, Loïs Mailou Jones, and more, the book recognizes the contributions Black artists made to Social Realism and abstraction as they debated the role of art in society and community. Black artists played a vital part in midcentury art movements, and the inclusive policies of government programs like the Works Progress Administration brought more of these artists into mainstream circles.

Earnestine Jenkins discusses the work of Black artists during this period; the perspective of Black women artists with a focus on the sculpture of Augusta Savage; and the pedagogy of Black American art through the art and teaching of Walter Augustus Simon.

Published by Yale University Press in association with the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis

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Print publication date January 2022 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300260908
EISBN 9780300269932
Illustrations 130
Print Status in print
Description: Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00277
Winner of the George Wittenborn Memorial Book Award, sponsored by the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA)

In 1916, John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) met Thomas Eugene McKeller (1890–1962), a young African American elevator attendant, at Boston’s Hotel Vendome. McKeller became the principal model for Sargent’s murals in the new wing of the city’s Museum of Fine Arts, among the painter’s most ambitious works. Sargent’s nude studies and sketches from this project attest to a close collaboration between the two men that unfolded over nearly ten years. Featuring drawings given by Sargent to Isabella Stewart Gardner and published in full for the first time, a portrait of McKeller, and archival materials reconstructing his life and relationship with Sargent, this book opens new avenues into artist-model relationships and transforms our understanding of Sargent’s iconic American paintings. Essays offer the first biography of McKeller and a window onto African American life in early-20th-century Boston. They also address the artist’s sexuality, his models, and questions of race and identity.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Print publication date February 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300249866
EISBN 9780300266146
Illustrations 136
Print Status in print
Description: Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery
Clifton Ellis (Editor), Rebecca Ginsburg (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00291
Archaeological and historical scholarship completed over the past decade has revealed much about the built environments of slavery and the daily lives of enslaved workers in North America. Cabin, Quarter, Plantation is the first book to take this new research into account and comprehensively examine the architecture and landscapes of enslavement on plantations and farms.

This important work brings together the best writing in the field, including classic pieces on slave landscapes by W. E. B. Du Bois and Dell Upton, alongside new essays on such topics as the building methods that Africans brought to the American South and information about slave family units and spiritual practices that can be gathered from archaeological remains. Through deep analysis of the built environment the authors invite us to reconsider antebellum buildings, landscapes, cabins, yards, and garden plots, and what these sites can teach us about the real conditions of enslavement. The starting point in any study of slavery and the built environment, this anthology makes essential contributions to our understanding of American slavery and to the fields of landscape history and architectural history.

The essay by Cheryl Janifer LaRoche in this volume has been revised and expanded for the A&AePortal.

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Author
Clifton Ellis (Editor), Rebecca Ginsburg (Editor)
Print publication date June 2010 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300120424
EISBN 9780300267723
Illustrations 52
Print Status out of print
Description: Circulation
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00191
As a category in art history, circulation is rooted in the contemporary context of Internet culture and the digital image. Yet circulation, as a broader concept for the movement of art across time and space in vastly different cultural and media contexts, has been a factor in the history of the arts in the United States since at least the eighteenth century.

The third volume in the Terra Foundation Essays series, Circulation brings together an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars, including Thierry Gervais, Tom Gunning, J. M. Mancini, Frank Mehring, and Hélène Valance, who map the multiple planes where artistic meaning has been produced by the circulation of art from the eighteenth century to the present. The book looks at both broad historical trends and the successes and failures of particular works of art from a wide variety of artists and styles. Together, the contributions significantly expand the conceptual and methodological terrain of scholarship on American art.

Terra Foundation Essays
Volume 3
Author
Print publication date June 2017 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780932171610
EISBN 9780300256826
Illustrations 57
Print Status in print
Description: Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00260
One of the most iconic images of slavery is a schematic wood engraving depicting the human cargo hold of a slave ship. First published by British abolitionists in 1788, it exposed this widespread commercial practice for what it really was--shocking, immoral, barbaric, unimaginable. Printed as handbills and broadsides, the image Cheryl Finley has termed the "slave ship icon" was easily reproduced, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was circulating by the tens of thousands around the Atlantic rim. Committed to Memory provides the first in-depth look at how this artifact of the fight against slavery became an enduring symbol of black resistance, identity, and remembrance.

Finley traces how the slave ship icon became a powerful tool in the hands of British and American abolitionists, and how its radical potential was rediscovered in the twentieth century by black artists, activists, writers, filmmakers, and curators. Finley offers provocative new insights into the works of Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, and many others. She demonstrates how the icon was transformed into poetry, literature, visual art, sculpture, performance, and film—and became a medium through which diasporic Africans have reasserted their common identity and memorialized their ancestors.

Committed to Memory features works from around the world, taking readers from the United States and England to West Africa and the Caribbean. It shows how contemporary black artists and their allies have used this iconic eighteenth-century engraving to reflect on the trauma of slavery and come to terms with its legacy.
Print publication date July 2018 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691136844
EISBN 9780300265712
Illustrations 151
Print Status in print
Description: Elizabeth Catlett: In the Image of the People
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00044
Painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Elizabeth Catlett (b. 1915) played an influential role in America's African American and Mexico's revolutionary art communities in the mid-twentieth century. Catlett studied at the University of Iowa (where she briefly worked with Grant Wood), the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Art Students League in New York before moving to Mexico in 1947.

Focusing on Catlett’s evocative Negro Woman series from 1946–47, this book reveals Catlett’s commitment to social and political issues. All of the fifteen linoleum prints are featured together address the harsh reality of black women’s labor; renowned historical heroines such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Phillis Wheatley; and the fears, struggles, and achievements of ordinary African American women. Other notable works by Catlett are also included, and an absorbing essay by distinguished scholar Melanie Anne Herzog analyzes the artist’s powerful work from a biographical perspective.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date February 2006 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300116120
EISBN 9780300235821
Illustrations 26 Illus.
Print Status out of print
Description: Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00220
In the decades following the French Revolution, four artists—Girodet, Gros, Géricault, and Delacroix—painted works in their Parisian studios that vividly expressed violent events and issues in faraway, colonial lands. This highly original book examines six of these paintings and argues that their disturbing, erotic depictions of slavery, revolt, plague, decapitation, cannibalism, massacre, and abduction chart the history of France’s empire and colonial politics.

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby shows that these paintings about occurrences in the West Indies, Syria, Egypt, Senegal, and Ottoman Empire Greece are preoccupied not with mastery and control but with loss, degradation, and failure, and she explains how such representations of crises in the colonies were able to answer the artists’ longings as well as the needs of the government and the opposition parties at home. Empire made painters devoted to the representation of liberty and the new French nation confront liberty’s antithesis: slavery. It also forced them to contend with cultural and racial differences. Young male artists responded, says Grigsby, by translating distant crises into images of challenges to the self, making history painting the site where geographic extremities and bodily extremities articulated one another.

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Print publication date May 2002 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300088878
EISBN 9780300259100
Illustrations 221
Print Status out of print
Description: Going There: Black Visual Satire
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00221
In this groundbreaking study, Richard J. Powell investigates the visual forms of satire produced by black artists in 20th- and 21st-century America. Underscoring the historical use of visual satire as antiracist dissent and introspective critique, Powell argues that it has a distinctly African American lineage. Taking on some of the most controversial works of the past century—in all their complexity, humor, and provocation—Powell raises important questions about the social power of art.

Expansive in both historical reach and breadth of media presented, Going There interweaves discussions of such works as the midcentury cartoons of Ollie Harrington, the installations of Kara Walker, the paintings of Robert Colescott, and the movies of Spike Lee. Other artists featured in the book include David Hammons, Arthur Jafa, Beverly McIver, Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar, and Carrie Mae Weems. Thoroughly researched and rich in context, Going There is essential reading in the history of satire, racial politics, and contemporary art.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date November 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300245745
EISBN 9780300259650
Illustrations 120
Print Status in print
Description: Horace Pippin, American Modern
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00211
"Horace Pippin shines in the midst of an overdue racial reckoning in the United States, to which it makes a substantial scholarly contribution." —Clara Barnhart, caa.reviews

Arguably the most successful African American artist of his day, Horace Pippin (1888–1946) taught himself to paint in the 1930s and quickly earned international renown for depictions of World War I, black families, and American heroes Abraham Lincoln, abolitionist John Brown, and singer Marian Anderson, among other subjects. This volume sheds new light on how the disabled combat veteran claimed his place in the contemporary art world. Organized around topics of autobiography, black labor, artistic process, and gift exchange, it reveals the range of references and critiques encoded in his work and the racial, class, and cultural dynamics that informed his meteoric career.

Horace Pippin, American Modern offers a fresh perspective on the artist and his moment that contributes to a more expansive history of art in the 20th century. Featuring over 60 of Pippin’s paintings, this volume also includes two previously unknown artist’s statements—“The Story of Horace Pippin as told by Himself” and “How I Paint”—and an exhibition history and list of artworks drawn from new research.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date February 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300243307
EISBN 9780300257533
Illustrations 121
Print Status in print
Description: Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00357
Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction is a fascinating examination of the multifaceted career of artist, activist, curator, and writer Howardena Pindell (b. 1943). It offers a fresh perspective on her abstract practice from the late 1960s through the early 1980s—a period in which debates about Black Power, feminism, and modernist abstraction intersected in uniquely contentious yet generative ways. Sarah Louise Cowan not only asserts Pindell’s rightful place within the canon but also recenters dominant historical narratives to reveal the profound and overlooked roles that Black women artists have played in shaping modernist abstraction. Pindell’s career acts as a springboard for a broader study of how artists have responded during periods of heightened social activism and used abstraction to convey political urgency. With works that drew on Ghanaian textiles, administrative labor, cosmetics, and postminimalism, Pindell deployed abstraction in deeply personal ways that resonated with collective African diasporic and women’s practices. In her groundbreaking analysis, Cowan argues that such work advanced Black feminist modernisms, diverse creative practices that unsettle racist and sexist logics.

“A deeply informative, inventive monograph that adroitly traces Pindell’s multi-media practice, the intermingling evolution of her aesthetic and political positions, and the critical context in which her work was received and evaluated.”—Blake Oetting, caa.reviews

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date November 2022 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300264296
EISBN 9780300275537
Illustrations 110
Print Status in print
Description: Humans
BOOKHumans
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00289
Humans are organisms, but “the human being” is a term referring to a complicated, self-contradictory, and historically evolving set of concepts and practices. Humans explores competing versions, constructs, and ideas of the human being that have figured prominently in the arts of the United States. These essays consider a range of artworks from the colonial period to the present, examining how they have reflected, shaped, and modeled ideas of the human in American culture and politics. The book addresses to what extent artworks have conferred more humanity on some human beings than others, how art has shaped ideas about the relationships between humans and other beings and things, and in what ways different artistic constructions of the human being evolved, clashed, and intermingled over the course of American history. Humans both tells the history of a concept foundational to US civilization and proposes new means for its urgently needed rethinking.

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Print publication date December 2021 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780932171726
EISBN 9780300267594
Illustrations 50
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00136
The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art asks how the black figure was depicted by artists from the non-Western world. Beginning with ancient Egypt—positioned properly as part of African history—this volume focuses on the figure of the black as rendered by artists from Africa, East Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. The aesthetic traditions illustrated here are as diverse as the political and social histories of these regions. From Igbo Mbari sculptures to modern photography from Mali, from Indian miniatures to Japanese prints, African and Asian artists portrayed the black body in ways distinct from the European tradition, even as they engaged with Western art through the colonial encounter and the forces of globalization.

This volume complements the vision of art patrons Dominique and Jean de Menil who, during the 1960s, founded an image archive to collect the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. A half‐century later, Harvard University Press and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research completed the historic publication of The Image of the Black in Western Art—ten books in total—beginning with Egyptian antiquities and concluding with images that span the twentieth century. The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art reinvigorates the de Menil family’s original mission and reorients the study of the black body with a new focus on Africa and Asia.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date February 2017 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674504394
EISBN 9780300244731
Illustrations 265
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume I: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00137
In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

The new edition of From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire offers a comprehensive look at the fascinating and controversial subject of the representation of black people in the ancient world. Classic essays by distinguished scholars are aptly contextualized by Jeremy Tanner’s new introduction, which guides the reader through enormous changes in the field in the wake of the “Black Athena” story.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date November 2010 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052710
EISBN 9780300244465
Illustrations 396
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume II: From the Early Christian Era to...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00139
In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood, written largely by noted French scholar Jean Devisse, has established itself as a classic in the field of medieval art. It surveys as never before the presence of black people, mainly mythical, in art from the early Christian era to the fourteenth century. The extraordinary transformation of Saint Maurice into a black African saint, the subject of many noble and deeply touching images, is a highlight of this volume. The new introduction by Paul Kaplan provides a fresh perspective on the image of the black in medieval European art and contextualizes the classic essays on the subject.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date November 2010 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052567
EISBN 9780300244472
Illustrations 183
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume II: From the Early Christian Era to...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00138
In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World, written by a small team of French scholars, has established itself as a classic in the field of medieval art. The most striking development in this period was the gradual emergence of the black Magus, invariably a figure of great dignity, in the many representations of the Adoration of the Magi by the greatest masters of the time. The new introduction by Paul Kaplan provides a fresh perspective on the image of the black in medieval European art and contextualizes the classic essays on the subject.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date November 2010 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052581
EISBN 9780300244489
Illustrations 279
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00142
In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

The Eighteenth Century features a particularly rich collection of images of Africans representing slavery’s apogee and the beginnings of abolition. Old visual tropes of a master with adoring black slave gave way to depictions of Africans as victims and individuals, while at the same time the intellectual foundations of scientific racism were established.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date November 2011 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052635
EISBN 9780300244687
Illustrations 294
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00141
In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

Europe and the World Beyond focuses geographically on peoples of South America and the Mediterranean as well as Africa—but conceptually it emphasizes the many ways that visual constructions of blacks mediated between Europe and a faraway African continent that was impinging ever more closely on daily life, especially in cities and ports engaged in slave trade.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date November 2011 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052628
EISBN 9780300244748
Illustrations 273
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00140
In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

The much-awaited Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque has been written by an international team of distinguished scholars, and covers the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rise of slavery and the presence of black people in Europe irrevocably affected the works of the best artists of the time. Essays on the black Magus and the image of the black in Italy, Spain, and Britain, with detailed studies of Rembrandt and Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, all presented with superb color plates, make this new volume a worthy addition to this classic series.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date November 2010 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052611
EISBN 9780300244496
Illustrations 193
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume IV: From the American Revolution to...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00144
In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten classic books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

Black Models and White Myths examines the tendentious racial assumptions behind representations of Africans that emphasized the contrast between “civilization” and “savagery” and the development of so-called scientific and ethnographic racism. These works often depicted Africans within a context of sexuality and exoticism, representing their allegedly natural behavior as a counterpoint to inhibited European conduct.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date May 2012 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052604
EISBN 9780300244700
Illustrations 209
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume IV: From the American Revolution to...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00143
In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

Slaves and Liberators looks at the political implications of the representation of Africans, from the earliest discussions of the morality of slavery, through the rise of abolitionism, to the imposition of European imperialism on Africa. Popular imagery and great works, like Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa and Turner’s Slave Ship, are considered in depth, casting light on widely differing European responses to Africans and their descendants.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date May 2012 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052598
EISBN 9780300244694
Illustrations 203
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V: The Twentieth Century, Part 1: The...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00145
In the 1960s, art patrons Dominique and Jean de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. Highlights from the image archive, accompanied by essays written by major scholars, appeared in three large-format volumes, consisting of one or more books, that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to have republished five of the original books and to present five completely new ones, extending the series into the twentieth century.

The Impact of Africa, the first of two books on the twentieth century, looks at changes in the Western perspective on African art and the representation of Africans, and the paradox of their interpretation as simultaneously “primitive” and “modern.” The essays include topics such as the new medium of photography, African influences on Picasso and on Josephine Baker’s impression of 1920s Paris, and the influential contribution of artists from the Caribbean and Latin American diasporas.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date February 2014 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052673
EISBN 9780300244717
Illustrations 226
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V: The Twentieth Century, Part 2: The...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00146
In the 1960s, art patrons Dominique and Jean de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. Highlights from the image archive, accompanied by essays written by major scholars, appeared in three large‐format volumes, consisting of one or more books, that quickly became collector’s items. A half‐century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to have republished five of the original books and five completely new ones, extending the series into the twentieth century.

The Rise of Black Artists, the second of two books on the twentieth century and the final volume in The Image of the Black in Western Art, marks an essential shift in the series and focuses on representation of blacks by black artists in the West. This volume takes on important topics ranging from urban migration within the United States to globalization, to Négritude and cultural hybridity, to the modern black artist’s relationship with European aesthetic traditions and experimentation with new technologies and media. Concentrating on the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean, essays in this volume shed light on topics such as photography, jazz, the importance of political activism to the shaping of black identities, as well as the post-black art world.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date October 2014 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052697
EISBN 9780300244724
Illustrations 220
Print Status in print
Description: Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00341
Ecocriticism is an interdisciplinary mode of inquiry that examines the environmental significance of art, literature, and other creative endeavors. In Implication: An Ecocritical Dictionary for Art History, Alan C. Braddock, a pioneer in art historical ecocriticism, presents a fascinating group of key terms and case studies to demonstrate that all art is ecological in its interconnectedness with the world.

The book adopts a dictionary-style format, although not in a conventional sense. Drawing inspiration from French surrealist writer Georges Bataille, this dictionary presents carefully selected words that link art history to the environmental humanities—not only ecocriticism, but also environmental history, science, politics, and critical animal studies. A wide array of creative works from different cultures and time periods reveal the import of these terms and the inescapable entanglement of art with ecology. Ancient Roman mosaics, Song dynasty Taihu rocks, a Tlaxcalan lienzo, early modern European engravings and altarpieces, a Kongo dibondo, nineteenth-century landscape paintings by African American artist Edward Mitchell Bannister, French Impressionist urban scenes, and contemporary activist art, among other works, here disclose the intrinsic ecological conditions of art.

 
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
“Its enlightening and eclectic case studies in the visual arts suggest that this is a thoroughly mature book in the sense that it doesn’t pretend to (or need to) introduce the field but seeks rather to deepen and expand its reach, its implications.”—Mark A. Cheetham, Professor of Art History, University of Toronto
EISBN 9780300271881
Illustrations 168
Print Status in print
Description: Nourish and Resist: Food and Feminisms in Contemporary Global Caribbean Art
A revelatory exploration of the food, feminisms, and visual culture of the global Caribbean

Food is more than what we eat; it nourishes us. For women of the global Caribbean, the evocation of food makes visible histories and ideas that remain obscured: domestic labor, community and care, generational knowledge, cultural memory, artistic expression, and acts of resistance. In this interdisciplinary and comparative volume, scholars and artists engage with foodways through decolonial and intersectional feminist lenses, addressing the resonance of these themes in contemporary art. As such, they represent new scholarly and creative interventions on Caribbean and Caribbean-diasporic contemporary art in a global context.

This anthology harnesses the potential of food to create, negotiate, and analyze the visual languages emergent from a region grappling with political occupation, tourism, and ecological crises. Contributors lend a vital perspective into feminisms, the global Caribbean, tropical visuality, cookery, and consumption and feature discussions of such artists as María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Renluka Maharaj, Joiri Minaya, Victoria Ravelo, and Tania Bruguera.


“This exciting volume represents a significant cross-over of food studies, feminism, and art making while charting a new direction to cut across the art of this region.”—Katherine Manthorne, Graduate Center, City University of New York

“One of [the book’s] many strengths is its use of archipelagic thinking, which broadens our understanding of what constitutes the Caribbean. The connections between chapters make for interesting, non-linear reading, ideal for a digital environment, that heighten the volume’s thrust to emphasize crossings and networked relations.”—Marsha Pearce, University of the West Indies

This born-digital book is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.
Author
Hannah Ryan (Editor), Lesley A. Wolff (Editor)
EISBN 9780300272819
Illustrations 107, plus 5 videos
Print Status in print
Description: Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00354
This timely and eloquent book tells a new history of American art: how enslaved people mobilized portraiture for acts of defiance. Revisiting the origins of portrait painting in the United States, Jennifer Van Horn reveals how mythologies of whiteness and of nation building erased the aesthetic production of enslaved Americans of African descent and obscured the portrait’s importance as a site of resistance.

Moving from the wharves of colonial Rhode Island to antebellum Louisiana plantations to South Carolina townhouses during the Civil War, the book illuminates how enslaved people’s relationships with portraits also shaped the trajectory of African American art post-emancipation. Van Horn asserts that Black creativity, subjecthood, viewership, and iconoclasm constituted instances of everyday rebellion against systemic oppression.

Portraits of Resistance is not only a significant intervention in the fields of American art and history but also an important contribution to the reexamination of racial constructs on which American culture was built.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date November 2022 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300257632
EISBN 9780300275155
Illustrations 139
Print Status in print