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The extraordinary struggle, achievement, loss and reclamation of three brilliant African American artists of the 1800s
Five years after the Civil War, North Carolina Republican state senator John W. Stephens was found murdered inside the Caswell County Courthouse. Stephens fought for the rights of freedpeople, and his killing by the Ku Klux Klan ultimately led to insurrection, Governor William W. Holden's impeachment, and the early unwinding of Reconstruction in North Carolina. In recounting Stephens's murder, the subsequent investigation and court proceedings, and the long-delayed confessions that revealed what actually happened at the courthouse in 1870, Drew A. Swanson tells a story of race, politics, and social power shaped by violence and profit. The struggle for dominance in Reconstruction-era rural No...
In this volume, Bedell examines received ideas about sentimental art. Countering its association with trite and saccharine Victorian kitsch, she argues that major American artists--from John Trumbull and Charles Willson Peale in the eighteenth century and Asher Durand and Winslow Homer in the nineteenth to Henry Ossawa Tanner and Frank Lloyd Wright in the early twentieth--produced what was understood in their time as sentimental art: art intended to develop empathetic bonds and to express or elicit social affections, including sympathy, compassion, nostalgia, and patriotism.
The history of racism in America is also the history of ordinary Black Americans who accomplished extraordinary things in their pursuit of freedom. Faced with oppression throughout their journey, they built vibrant communities and lived purposeful lives. Pieces of Freedom: The Emancipation Sculptures of Edmonia Lewis and Meta Warrick Fuller brings that history to life by analyzing the first fifty years of Black freedom through the emancipation sculptures of two nineteenth-century African American sculptors, Mary Edmonia Lewis (1844–1909) and Meta Warrick Fuller (1877–1968). Lewis's and Fuller’s sculptures—and their visual narrative of a people’s strength and humanity in the face of...
By studying multiple cultural expressions of Blackness throughout different regions of the Americas, the chapters of this book consider the relationship that social and historical processes such as sovereignty and colonialism have on cultural productions made by and about Black Latin American women. Rosita Scerbo analyzes a range of power dynamics as represented in different artistic media of the Afro-Latin/x American community, including photography, muralism, performance, paintings, and digital art. The book acknowledges that racial and gender equity cannot exist without Intersectionality and that is why the entirety of the chapters focus on cultural and visual productions exclusively crea...
From the award-winning author of Dressing Up, a riveting and diverse history of women’s hair that reestablishes the cultural power of hairdressing in nineteenth-century America. In the nineteenth century, the complex cultural meaning of hair was not only significant, but it could also impact one’s place in society. After the Civil War, hairdressing was also a growing profession and the hair industry a mainstay of local, national, and international commerce. In Beyond Vanity, Elizabeth Block expands the nascent field of hair studies by restoring women’s hair as a cultural site of meaning in the early United States. With a special focus on the places and spaces in which the hair industry...
This book examines Afrofuturism in African American art, focusing specifically on images of black women and how those images expand the discourse of representation in visual culture of the United States. This volume defines a visual language of Afrofuturism that includes materiality, temporality, and black liberation. Elizabeth Hamilton discusses the visual progenitors of Afrofuturism. In the artworks of Pierre Bennu, Sanford Biggers, Alison Saar, Mequitta Ahuja, Robert Pruitt, Renee Cox, Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Alma Thomas, and Harriet Powers, the fantastic narratives of Afrofuturism are uncovered through in-depth case studies. These case studies engage with Afrofuturism as a black feminist visual theory that helps to unburden the images of black women from the stereotypical visual scripts that are so common in contemporary visual culture of the United States. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, American literature, gender studies, popular culture, and African American studies.
This first full-length study fosters a greater understanding of Hovenden's gifts as a painter and of his stylistic contribution to art. Chronologically organized, it is both a retrospective of Hovenden's work and a critical biography of the artist.
This work explores a generational history from America's Colonial period to the United States of contemporary times. A novel historical approach will rely on generational markers every 15th year, rather than yearly astronomical dates. This method will make history more accessible and its patterns more apparent. Identified from cultures presented in an earlier volume, the phasings are: 1) "Invisible" Beginnings; 2) Establishment and Testing; 3) Novel Consolidation and Opening Up, 4) Crisis and Creativity; 5) Empire and Inclusion, and 6) Rigidification or Renewal. This history does not seek to hide or obscure the shadow side of America, nor does it fail to present beauty and light, especially ...
This is a critical biography of Aloysius O'Kelly's career as a painter, illustrator and committed Fenian which uncovers a world hardly known hitherto except in the most caricatured versions.