Race Ing Art History

Race-ing Art History is the first comprehensive anthology to place issues of racial representation squarely on the canvas. Art produced by non-Europeans has naturally been compared to Western art and its study, which refers to a binary way of viewing both. Each essay in this collection is a response to this vision, to the distant mirror of looking at the other.

What is socially engaged art history? Art history is typically understood as a discipline in which academics produce scholarship for consumption by other academics. Today however, an increasing number of art historians are seeking to broaden their understanding of art historical praxis and look beyond the academy and towards socially engaged art history. This is the first book-length study to focus on these growing and significant trends. It presents various arguments for the social, pedagogical, and scholarly benefits of alternative, community-engaged, public-facing, applied, and socially engaged art history. The international line up of contributors includes academics, museum and gallery curators as well as arts workers. The first two sections of the book look at socially engaged art history from theoretical, pedagogical, and contextual perspectives. The concluding part offers a range of provocative case studies that highlight the varied and rigorous work that is being done in this area and provide a variety of inspiring models. Taken together the chapters in this book provide much-needed disciplinary recognition to socially engaged art history, while also serving as a springboard to further theoretical and practical work.

Innovative and lavishly illustrated, Painting the Gospel offers an indispensable contribution to conversations about African American art, theology, politics, and identity in Chicago. Kymberly N. Pinder escorts readers on an eye-opening odyssey to the murals, stained glass, and sculptures dotting the city's African American churches and neighborhoods. Moving from Chicago's oldest black Christ figure to contemporary religious street art, Pinder explores ideas like blackness in public, art for black communities, and the relationship of Afrocentric art to Black Liberation Theology. She also focuses attention on art excluded from scholarship due to racial or religious particularity. Throughout, she reflects on the myriad ways private black identities assert public and political goals through imagery. Painting the Gospel includes maps and tour itineraries that allow readers to make conceptual, historical, and geographical connections among the works.

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.

Malvin Gray Johnson, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Max Weber were three New York City artists whose work was popularly assigned to the category of "racial art" in the interwar years of the twentieth century. The term was widely used by critics and the public at the time, and was an unexamined, unquestioned category for the work of non-whites (such as Johnson, an African American), non-Westerners (such as Kuniyoshi, a Japanese-born American), and ethnicized non-Christians (such as Weber, a Russian-born Jewish American). The discourse on racial art is a troubling chapter in the history of early American modernism that has not, until now, been sufficiently documented. Jacqueline Francis juxtaposes the work of these three artists in order to consider their understanding of the category and their stylistic responses to the expectations created by it, in the process revealing much about the nature of modernist art practices. Most American audiences in the interwar period disapproved of figural abstraction and held modernist painting in contempt, yet the critics who first expressed appreciation for Johnson, Kuniyoshi, and Weber praised their bright palettes and energetic pictures--and expected to find the residue of the minority artist's heritage in the work itself. Francis explores the flowering of racial art rhetoric in criticism and history published in the 1920s and 1930s, and analyzes its underlying presence in contemporary discussions of artists of color. Making Race is a history of a past phenomenon which has ramifications for the present.

The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education is the first edited volume to examine how race operates in and through the arts in education. Until now, no single source has brought together such an expansive and interdisciplinary collection in exploration of the ways in which music, visual art, theater, dance, and popular culture intertwine with racist ideologies and race-making. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, contributing authors bring an international perspective to questions of racism and anti-racist interventions in the arts in education. The book’s introduction provides a guiding framework for understanding the arts as white property in schools, museums, and informal education spaces. Each section is organized thematically around historical, discursive, empirical, and personal dimensions of the arts in education. This handbook is essential reading for students, educators, artists, and researchers across the fields of visual and performing arts education, educational foundations, multicultural education, and curriculum and instruction.

The first monographic study of the painter Agostino Brunias, this book offers a compelling, original analysis of his representation of race in the British colonial West Indies, reconsidering the way in which the artist's oeuvre has previously been understood.

Testing the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology invites readers to reconsider the contents and agendas of the art historical and world-culture canons by looking at one of their most historically enduring components: the art and archaeology of the ancient Near East. Ann Shafer, Amy Rebecca Gansell, and other top researchers in the field examine and critique the formation and historical transformation of the ancient Near Eastern canon of art, architecture, and material culture. Contributors flesh out the current boundaries of regional and typological sub-canons, analyze the technologies of canon production (such as museum practices and classroom pedagogies), and voice first-hand heritage perspectives. Each chapter, thereby, critically engages with the historiography behind our approach to the Near East and proposes alternative constructs. Collectively, the essays confront and critique the ancient Near Eastern canon's present configuration and re-imagine its future role in the canon of world art as a whole. This expansive collection of essays covers the Near East's many regions, eras, and types of visual and archaeological materials, offering specific and actionable proposals for its study. Testing the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology stands as a vital benchmark and offers a collective path forward for the study and appreciation of Near Eastern cultural heritage. This book acts as a model for similar inquiries across global art historical and archaeological fields and disciplines.