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One of the greatest American artists of the twentieth century, Charles White (1918-1979) --with amazing spirit, vision, and brilliance--devoted both his life and work to portraying the African American community. With pencil and brush, in black and white or in color, he captured not only the poverty, strife, and despair of the black people but their strength of community, the joy of enlightenment, and the tenderness of kinship as well, rejecting the usual stereotypes of black people as inferior. His canvases, woodcuts, monumental drawings, and murals convey his strong social consciousness and impart the inherent dignity of his subjects.Andrea Barnwell chronicles the highlights of White's career, discusses several of the artist's famous works, and introduces many works from private collections that never before have been examined. Although White's works are in the collections of major museums and libraries, including Hampton University Museum, Hampton, Virginia; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Flint Institute of Art, his place in the annals of art history has never been fully realized.
The Companion to Contemporary Black British Culture is the first comprehensive reference book to provide multidisciplinary coverage of the field of black cultural production in Britain. The publication is of particular value because despite attracting growing academic interest in recent years, this field is still often subject to critical and institutional neglect. For the purpose of the Companion, the term 'black' is used to signify African, Caribbean and South Asian ethnicities, while at the same time addressing the debates concerning notions of black Britishness and cultural identity. This single volume Companion covers seven intersecting areas of black British cultural production since 1...
Examination of the relation between visual artists and the American communist movement in the first half of the twentieth century, from the rise in prestige of the party during the Great Depression to its decline in the 1950s. Account of how left-wing artists responded to the party's various policy shifts: the communist party exerted a powerful force in American culture.
Rhapsodies in Black takes a fresh look at the Harlem artistic renaissance, contesting narrow interpretations of the movement and recognising its global significance.
The result of a collaborative, multiyear project, this groundbreaking book explores the interpretive worlds that inform religious practice and derive from sensory phenomena. Under the rubric of "making sense," the studies assembled here ask, How have people used and valued sensory data? How have they shaped their material and immaterial worlds to encourage or discourage certain kinds or patterns of sensory experience? How have they framed the sensual capacities of images and objects to license a range of behaviors, including iconoclasm, censorship, and accusations of blasphemy or sacrilege? Exposing the dematerialization of religion embedded in secularization theory, editor Sally Promey proposes a fundamental reorientation in understanding the personal, social, political, and cultural work accomplished in religion’s sensory and material practice. Sensational Religion refocuses scholarly attention on the robust material entanglements often discounted by modernity’s metaphysic and on their inextricable connections to human bodies, behaviors, affects, and beliefs.
In Beyond “The Chinese Connection,” Crystal S. Anderson explores the cultural and political exchanges between African Americans, Asian Americans, and Asians over the last four decades. To do so, Anderson examines such cultural productions as novels (Frank Chin’s Gunga Din Highway [1999], Ishmael Reed’s Japanese by Spring [1992], and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle [1996]); films (Rush Hour 2 [2001], Unleashed [2005], and The Matrix trilogy [1999-2003]); and Japanese animation (Samurai Champloo [2004]), all of which feature cross-cultural conversations. In exploring the ways in which writers and artists use this transferal, Anderson traces and tests the limits of how Afro-Asian ...
Child of the Fire is the first book-length examination of the career of the nineteenth-century artist Mary Edmonia Lewis, best known for her sculptures inspired by historical and biblical themes. Throughout this richly illustrated study, Kirsten Pai Buick investigates how Lewis and her work were perceived, and their meanings manipulated, by others and the sculptor herself. She argues against the racialist art discourse that has long cast Lewis’s sculptures as reflections of her identity as an African American and Native American woman who lived most of her life abroad. Instead, by seeking to reveal Lewis’s intentions through analyses of her career and artwork, Buick illuminates Lewis’s...
Why the rise of redundant precision in architecture and the accompanying fear of error are key to understanding the discipline's needs, anxieties and desires. When architects draw even brick walls to six decimal places with software designed to cut lenses, it is clear that the logic that once organized relations between precision and material error in construction has unraveled. Precision, already a promiscuous term, seems now to have been uncoupled from its contract with truthfulness. Meanwhile error, and the always-political space of its dissent, has reconfigured itself. In The Architecture of Error Francesca Hughes argues that behind the architect's acute fetishization of redundant precis...
The Muse in Bronzeville, a dynamic reappraisal of a neglected period in African American cultural history, is the first comprehensive critical study of the creative awakening that occurred on Chicago's South Side from the early 1930s to the cold war. Coming of age during the hard Depression years and in the wake of the Great Migration, this generation of Black creative artists produced works of literature, music, and visual art fully comparable in distinction and scope to the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance. This highly informative and accessible work, enhanced with reproductions of paintings of the same period, examines Black Chicago's "Renaissance" through richly anecdotal profiles of such figures as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Charles White, Gordon Parks, Horace Cayton, Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, and Katherine Dunham. Robert Bone and Richard A. Courage make a powerful case for moving Chicago's Bronzeville, long overshadowed by New York's Harlem, from a peripheral to a central position within African American and American studies.