Acknowledgments

Mercer, Kobena

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Acknowledgments

Kobena Mercer

Alain Locke and the Visual Arts

Acknowledgments

Author

Kobena Mercer

PublisherYale University Press

PublisherHutchins Center for African & African American Research

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-23236

Acknowledgments

The pages that follow grew from the Richard D. Cohen Lectures on African & African American Art that I presented at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research in February 2018. Converting spoken words into written form, I now realize this is a book I have long wanted to write. For this extraordinary creative opportunity, my heartfelt thanks go to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who has warmly supported my work over many years. That neither Skip nor I can recall when we first actually met shows how present he has been throughout my career, a presence I value dearly. When I returned to Harvard’s Barker Center in 2018, with fond memories of the Alain Locke Lectures I had presented at Skip’s invitation in 2009, and where Skip and David Bindman had hosted contributors to The Image of the Black in Western Art in 2012, it was a pleasure to see Marcyliena Morgan, Lawrence Bobo, Karen Dalton, and Sheldon Cheek again. I would like to thank my introducers—Sarah Lewis, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, and Jenny Sharpe—as well as Abby Wolf and Matt Weinberg, who made my visit to the Hutchins Center so enjoyable.

In 1980s London—Goldsmiths College Library, to be precise—when I first encountered The Critical Temper of Alain Locke, the anthology edited by Jeffrey C. Stewart, I could never have foreseen that the leading Locke scholar would become a valued friend. I am therefore delighted by the twists and turns of diaspora that have welcomed me into many African American Studies departments, and I thank Jeffrey for the chance to share my work at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014. I am hugely indebted to the many custodians of Alain Locke’s life and work and thank Joellen ElBashir, Raymond Maxwell, and Sonja Woods at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center; Melissa Barton and Nancy Kuhl at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York; the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia; and the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University. As well as my Yale colleagues in African American Studies and History of Art, I would like to thank the following for hosting lectures in which I developed the arguments put forward in this book: Susan Cahan, dean of the Tyler School of Art, Temple University; Romy Golan at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; Leigh Raiford at University of California, Berkeley; and the Yale History of Art graduate students behind the 2015 “Works in Progress” talks. My thanks go to the museums, collections, and organizations that kindly granted permission for the art featured in this book, and to Amy Canonico and Raychel Rapazza at Yale University Press for guiding it toward completion. Special thanks to Jenny Tang for her invaluable work as research assistant.

My engagement with Locke’s work has been deepened by numerous conversations with artists, friends, and fellow scholars. Huge thanks go to Renée Green and Javier Anguera, Isaac Julien and Mark Nash, Kellie Jones and Guthrie Ramsey, and Jonathan Weinberg and Nick Boshnack. I am grateful to Renée Ater, James Smalls, and Margaret Vendryes for their invaluable help and to the two anonymous readers whose reports on my initial lectures were critically indispensable to the work that follows. For sharing their insights over the years, my thanks go to the late Camille Billops, the late Thomas Wirth, and to George Chauncey, Richard Dyer, Jane Gaines, Michael Ann Holly, Keith Moxey, Caryl Phillips, and Richard Powell. Words cannot quite convey how exhilarating it was to be part of the Black Gay Renaissance circa 1989—this book goes into the world with love and affection for Blackberri, Brian Freeman, Essex Hemphill, Cornelius Moore, Marlon Riggs, Colin Robinson, Ron Simmons, and Jerry Wright.

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