African American Art

Discusses African American folk art, decorative art, photography, and fine arts.

Drawing from historical and private collections around the country, Samella Lewis has gathered an impressive representation of the work of African American artists, from the 18th century to the present. For this edition she has provided a new chapter on art of the last decade. Handsomely and generously illustrated, this book reveals a rich legacy of work by African American painters, sculptors, and graphic artists. "Art historical scholarship is greatly advanced by Samella Lewis's African American Art and Artists in that it foregrounds the work of artists who have been influencing the texture of art in the United States during the last two decades of the 20th century. Throughout African American Art and Artists, Lewis interrogates the issue of identity by presenting the biographical sketch, which locates the individual artistic personality within a specific cultural background with its own peculiar dynamics, giving a face to two cities of Black American art. Without polemics Lewis presents women artists--Edmonia Lewis to Allison Saar--as principal players in constructing an African American visual arts legacy. Here Lewis sufficiently defines the visual arts in order that they may assume their rightful place alongside African American music, literature and folklore as cultural expressions that have helped to give American culture its distinct character."--from the foreword by Floyd Coleman, Harvard University.

"Drawn entirely from the Smithsonian American Art Museum's rich collection of African American art, the works include paintings by Benny Andrews, Jacob Lawrence, Thornton Dial Sr., Romare Bearden, Alma Thomas, and Lois Mailou Jones, and photographs by Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, Roland Freeman, Marilyn Nance, and James Van Der Zee. More than half of the artworks in the exhibition are being shown for the first time"--Publisher's website.

Ten essays that examine four key issues in American art--portraiture and realism in relation to abstract expressionism, the implications of color, the role of narrative, and the concept of multiple originals--come together in this resource on the works of African-American art included in the Paul R. Jones collection. Simultaneous.

African American Visual Arts: From Slavery to the Present

Presents African American artists, identifies dealers, and offers practical advice on insurance, framing, and tax and estate planning.

A timely consideration of African-American artists' rich engagement with the history of art from the twentieth century, this book is the winner of the James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award for African American Art History. Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition presents works by African American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries together with works by the early-twentieth-century European artists with whom they engaged. Black artists have investigated, interrogated, invaded, entangled, annihilated, or immersed themselves in the aesthetics, symbolism, and ethos of European art for more than a century. The powerful push and pull of this relationship constitutes a distinct tradition for many African American artists who source the master narratives of art history to critique, embrace, or claim their own space. This groundbreaking catalog--accompanying a major exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.--explores the connections and frictions around modernism in the works of artists such as Romare Bearden, Pablo Picasso, Faith Ringgold, Renee Cox, Robert Colescott, Norman Lewis, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems and Henri Matisse. The volume explores how blackness has often been conceived from the standpoint of these international and intergenerational connections and presents the divergent and complex works born of these important dialogues.