Constructing Belonging: Class, Race, and Harlems Professional Workers (Studies in African American H

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The folds in the canvases, however, were not created at random but instead reflect Gilliam's specific idea about how he wanted his paintings to be installed. Relative , while still hung on a wall, becomes a part of its setting and interacts with and within that space.

Lighting in the room affects the way shadows from the canvas fall on the wall. Physical movement around the painting can cause the fabric to stir, altering our perception of it. The ample folds demonstrate the painting's flexible properties, highlighting nuances of stained colors and hinting at what the creases conceal.

Viewers can indulge in the continuous play between action and stillness, bright color and dark shadow. Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. Also like Thomas, he was a member of the Washington Color School and the larger color field movement. Gilliam's experimentations with color and abstraction resulted from an interest in moving away from figurative imagery to adopt color as the main subject of his paintings. Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris offers a tripled image, its single subject captured as if in a time lapse.

Whether with eyes closed meditatively on the left or gazing into space on the right , Sir Charles is alternately thoughtful and vigilant. Larger than life-size, this imposing figure clearly signals s fashion, pop culture, and the assertion of black identity in the generation following the civil rights era.

Barkley Hendricks cast his friends, lovers, family members, and men and women he met on the street as portrait subjects. Stark and monumental against a monochromatic ground, his portraits fix acutely on the individuality and self-expression of his subjects. Hendricks said that a painting he saw in while visiting the National Gallery in London—a portrait by Flemish master Anthony van Dyck featuring a red velvet coat—was a point of departure for this work. Intending to make a replica of the Van Dyck image, Hendricks received permission to paint as a copyist in the museum.

But once in the process, he realized he could not copy another artist's work, "no matter how much I like it," he said. Years later, he painted Sir Charles with Van Dyck's red coat in mind. Other writers have likened Sir Charles to the iconic three graces—artistic muses usually female as portrayed by European old masters such as Botticelli and Rubens in three different attitudes, one usually with her back toward the viewer. It might be said that Hendricks's artistic muses relate to classical Western art history as well as sources personal to the artist.

He taught at Connecticut College. Birth of the Cool. The unevenly spaced, staccato brushstrokes on the white canvas form a visual rhythm, as if the artist had painted a cantata, a type of musical composition. Tremendous delicacy is shown in the play of space and color, with the white "background" as important to the overall effect as the red bursts of color. The harmonic color field is no accident; the compositional and color structure of Red Rose Cantata derives from Alma Thomas 's interest in nature and music, in its linear organization with organic variations.

Thomas came into the professional art world late in life, after teaching art for 35 years in the Washington, DC, public schools. Her age, however, did not prevent her from gaining recognition as an artist. She and other artists, Gilliam among them, are associated with the larger color field movement, which probed the use of solid color in abstract paintings.

Studies in African American History and Culture

Thomas continued painting in her signature style, drawing on nature and music for inspiration, until her death in at age Untitled, 20 is a collage both intricate and seemingly precarious in its construction. Hundreds of small circular pieces, remnants from a hole-puncher, cover the surface of the paper. Some lie flat while others cluster in piles or hang off the edges. A grid created by monofilament provides a substructure for the outwardly haphazard composition, and a light coating of powder imparts an iridescent quality.

Although numbered, each piece is randomly placed. The use of numbers and a grid suggests a mathematical and perhaps methodical approach to balancing randomness and premeditation. Howardena Pindell was born in Philadelphia in Throughout her career, Pindell has used a variety of techniques and materials in her art, including fabric and video. Like Untitled, 20 , her other work explores structure and texture in the process of making art.

The woman in African Nude , wearing only a large necklace, reclines on an overstuffed settee. Her alluring position is similar to the pose found in classic images of odalisques—enslaved women in the Ottoman Empire whose identities became sexualized and popularized during the 19th century.

Collection Highlights: African American Artists

Yet unlike the seductive odalisque seen in Western art, whose gaze challenges by staring directly at the viewer, the nude in Wells 's work, with eyes downcast, appears unhappily submissive and ill at ease amid the oversize lush plants and gala colors of the background. The viewer is thus left unsettled, as if unwelcome despite the outwardly inviting scene.

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He had a long career in printmaking, first participating in the Federal Art Project, which encouraged the development of art in the United States during the Great Depression, and then teaching at Howard University in Washington, DC, for almost four decades. Wells was active in the civil rights movement and often depicted the struggles of African Americans in his work.

African Nude , which Wells created late in life, reflects his printmaking skill, interest in traditional African aesthetics, and commitment to representing African American history and experiences. In the sweeping silhouette of Lever No. While Martin Puryear 's sculptures often recall familiar forms, they encourage individual interpretations.

This work explores a delicate balance between the heavy, solid-looking "body" and the elegant, weightless reach of the giraffe-like "neck. While the central form of Lever No. The sculpture is stained light gray, which unifies its appearance but also creates a somewhat uneven patina that emphasizes its hand-crafted quality.

Puryear was born in Washington, DC, in After earning his BA there from Catholic University, he joined the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, where he had the chance to study woodworking techniques such as basketry and carpentry. Puryear then attended the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and independently continued his studies in woodworking.

In the Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized a year retrospective exhibition of his work.

Martin Puryear, Lever No. In Untitled Two Necklines , identical photographs of an unidentified African American woman, shown from mouth to breastbone, hang in circular frames, between them a list of words engraved on plaques. The double image suggests tranquility and composure: But the plaques feature words describing circularity and enclosure that are ominously electrified by text on the final plaque, which reads, "feel the ground sliding from under you.

Like this one, her images are often truncated, replicated, and annotated with words that force the viewer to interpret. Here, the framed photographs and words inscribed on plaques are literally and metaphorically black and white; the background of the final plaque is a haunting blood red. One is hard pressed to deny the implications of this personal yet dehumanized image and its attendant language of racial pathology. Simpson's interest in the relationship between text and images began during her career as a documentary photographer.

She is recognized as one of America's ranking masters of potent, poetic work in photography and film. The densely layered image of Slum Gardens No. A large tree with a thick, spiked vine winding its way up the trunk defines the right side of the work. Weeds and flowers blanket the bottom half of the image, almost obscuring the wooden shack left and the staircase.

Plants invade a picket fence and piece of railing in the lower foreground. We sense that the vegetation will soon overtake the entire area, turning the "garden" into a neighborhood menace. The muscularity of the work, emboldened by thick, heavy lines of black charcoal, contributes to the intimidating quality of the plant life.

Joseph Norman frequently uses landscape imagery to convey meaning. For this work he drew on his experiences growing up in Chicago and on a trip to Costa Rica, where he witnessed the effects of poverty on various neighborhoods. Here, the overgrowing landscape serves as a metaphor for the lack of attention paid to impoverished neighborhoods. Not only are the physical environments of such areas neglected, but, as Norman's drawing suggests, its social and economic problems are ignored as well. Norman was born in Chicago in Joseph Norman, Slum Gardens No.

Foundation in memory of Dorothea L. The imprints of six steam irons mark this work on paper. Beneath each silhouette, in large capital letters, is the name of an iron manufacturer—Casco, General Mills, Monarch, Silex, Presto, with one "unknown. For the past 20 years Willie Cole has selected and transformed particular items discarded from our vast consumer culture, such as irons, shoes, and lawn jockeys, into objects that resonate with metaphorical meaning—particularly cross-referencing African cultural history and the African Diaspora.

The iron silhouettes in Domestic ID, V call up the slave era in America, when African women served as forced domestic laborers, and the period after emancipation, when they took in laundry as one of the few lines of work open to them. The irons' singed imprints also evoke the rituals of scarification, practiced within certain African and other cultures, and branding, which expunged identity to mark humans as slave property—perhaps reinforced by the iron marked "unknown. Mounting his image in a window, Cole literally reframes history in a way that summons the readymade art of surrealist and Dada artists such as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.

Such wry yet serious correspondences of history, art, and racial politics anchor Cole's reputation in the art world. African American artists working in the s and s often focused on black identity as culturally and socially constructed. Artists including Glenn Ligon moved from using the black figure to employing text as a way to explore perceptions and understandings of race. Selections from both literary works are written in the first person, often repeating the word "I.

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Four Etchings [A] above and [B] repeat, over and over, sentences from Hurston's essay: As the viewer reads, the texts become increasingly difficult to decipher. Smudged and broken type interferes with legibility, suggesting the viewer's literal and intellectual struggle to read the sentence and understand its implications. Etchings [C] and [D] , both black type on black paper, also make the reader work to comprehend the meaning.

Their nearly identical texts taken from Ellison's monumental novel are almost indiscernible—"invisible" like the story's protagonist. I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus side-shows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.

When they approach me they see only themselves, or figments of their imagina- Text [D] is the same, except that it ends: Artistically speaking, those with power are usually those who assign a subject's identity. And once such identity has been given, it accumulates historical authority as years, decades, and centuries ensue. Central to this phenomenon is the role of gaze—the idea that viewers have the power to define what they see. In the art of our times, however, the authority of gaze has been tested and upended. Here, Lorna Simpson weighs in. The artist presents two binoculars and, between them, a series of phrases.

You might pick up one of these looking devices—perhaps to spy? But Simpson has placed the binoculars face down, simultaneously promising and frustrating vision. Text and binoculars each furnish only partial knowledge, underscoring the inherent problem of relying on only written or visual information to understand a person or situation. Simpson has examined the relationship between text and image over many years, challenging concepts of truth, history, and identity. Here, gaze is thwarted by its instruments, and knowledge is crippled by incompleteness.

You may assign meaning to this image, but Simpson reminds the viewer: In Walker 's cut-paper silhouettes, troubling narratives of violence, lust, and exoticism play out. Her work draws upon imagery common in the antebellum South and is controversial for its use of racial stereotypes of both blacks and whites. Walker focuses on the role of stereotypes in shaping history and their complex function in American race relations today. By suggesting narratives that complicate distinctions between fact and fantasy, victim and predator, black and white, Walker's work confronts the viewer with the uncomfortable challenge of self-reflection.

Her transition from an integrated town to the racially divided atmosphere of the South had a profound impact on her. At age 27, Walker received a John D. Her first retrospective exhibition was at the Whitney Museum of American Art in In this striking photograph, DeCarava turned away from common displays of political demonstration—placards and crowds—to capture the confidence, interiority, and stoicism of an isolated marcher.

I wanted to pay homage to that person, that spirit. Celebrated as one of the first African American photographers to embrace and explore the black experience in his art, DeCarava spent much of his career chronicling daily life in Harlem, the civil rights movement, and jazz musicians. May Flowers , a compelling photograph of three young African American girls, succinctly addresses the issues of race, class, and gender that the American artist Carrie Mae Weems has explored for decades.

Befitting these themes, May Flowers depicts girls from working-class families in Syracuse, New York, wearing floral-print dresses. Weems intensified this historical character by printing the photograph in sepia tones and placing it in a circular frame like those gracing the walls of 19th-century parlors.

Further complicating and enriching the work, Weems glazed it with a piece of convex glass of the type commonly used in 18th- and 19th-century mirrors, as if to suggest that the image represents a reflection of the world at large. Moses and Fern M. Her altar—composed of statues of St. Martin de Porres, St. Anthony, and Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, as well as two elephants, two crucifixes, candles, and a rosary—intermingles with her everyday life reflected in the mirror. Through her open window, a Coca-Cola delivery truck and lush summer foliage are visible at the intersection of 11th and P Streets, in northwest Washington.

Over the course of a month, the photographer Gordon Parks created a series of about 90 pictures of Watson, including his most iconic photograph, Washington, D. Government Charwoman American Gothic , in which he posed her with a broom and a mop before an American flag.

Parks purchased his first camera in late while working as a waiter for the Northern Pacific Railway. By the early s he was immersed in some of the most important artistic circles and dynamic photographic projects of his generation. By Jin Ping Wu. Edited by Daniel E. This interdisciplinary and creative study examines how African American culture is presented in American films and other media, and is a provocative re-reading of the historiography of black culture.

The author examines and interprets a number of cultural texts deriving memory as interpreted by…. By Lundeana Marie Thomas.

By Mary Jane Brown. By Jinx Coleman Broussard. This work describes the journalism careers of four black women within the context of the period in which they lived and worked. By Pearlie Mae Fisher Peters. From the colonial period through the early nineteenth century, Father Thomas J. Murphy writes a compelling chronology and in depth analysis of Jesuit slaveholding in the state of Maryland.

Edited by Graham Russell Hodges. By Patrick Neal Minges. This work explores the dynamic issues of race and religion within the Cherokee Nation and to look at the role of secret societies in shaping these forces during the nineteenth century. This fascinating text examines the union of Africans and American Indians in Virginia during colonial times.

As both a preeminent scholar of Balck Angelican and Episcopalians and devout parishoner, the late James Hewitt writes an illuminus hsitory of one of the most famous black congregrations in America. From its humble beginnings, St. Philip's originated from classes conducted by Elais Neau and other…. Based on careful reading of Du Bois' writings and with a combination of analytical and narrative approaches, the author probes the reasons and dynamics behind the changes of Du Bois strategies concerning the solution to the American race problem.

Disability is often mentioned in discussions of slave health, mistreatment and abuse, but constructs of how "able" and "disabled" bodies influenced the institution of slavery has gone largely overlooked. This volume uncovers a history of disability in African American slavery from the primary…. This study investigates the emergence of powerful female leadership in New Orleans' Voodoo tradition. It provides a careful examination of the cultural, historical, economic, demographic and socio-political factors that contributed both to the feminization of this religious culture and its strong….

With this population increase came an increase in racial discrimination directed at…. The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South provides the first detailed examination of the Universal Negro Improvement Association's rise, maturation, and eventual decline in the urban South between and It examines the ways in which Southern black workers fused…. This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of how contemporary American prison narratives reflect and produce ideologies of masculinity in the United States, and in so doing, compellingly engages popular culture in order to demonstrate the profound ways in which implicit understandings of….

Audience, Agency and Identity in Black Popular Culture analyses black cultural representations that appropriate anti-black stereotypes. Using examples from literature, media, and art, Worsley examines how these cultural products do not rework anti-black stereotypes into seemingly positive images. This book examines how cultural and ideological reactions to activism in the post-Civil Rights Black community were depicted in fiction written by Black women writers, — By recognizing and often challenging prevailing cultural paradigms within the post-Civil Rights era, writers such as….

Courting Communities focuses on the writing and oratory of nineteenth-century African-American women whose racial uplift projects troubled the boundaries of race, nation and gender. In particular, it reexamines the politics of gender in nationalist movements and black women's creative response…. This study examines the leadership of three African-American women administrators in higher education, and how they have used their spirituality as a lens to lead in the academy.

The central questions in this case study include: How do African-American women make meaning of their spiritual selves…. Wilson First published in

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