The Art of Remembering: Essays on African American Art and History
The Art of Remembering: Essays on African American Art and History
by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw
Duke University Press, 2024 Cloth: 978-1-4780-2592-4 | Paper: 978-1-4780-3017-1 | eISBN: 978-1-4780-5916-5 Library of Congress Classification N6538.B53S54 2024
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In The Art of Remembering art historian and curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw explores African American art and representation from the height of the British colonial period to the present. She engages in the process of "rememory"—the recovery of facts and narratives of African American creativity and self-representation that have been purposefully set aside, actively ignored, and disremembered. In analyses of the work of artists ranging from Scipio Moorhead, Moses Williams, and Aaron Douglas to Barbara Chase-Riboud, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, and Deana Lawson, Shaw demonstrates that African American art and history may be remembered and understood anew through a process of intensive close looking, cultural and historical contextualization, and biographic recuperation or consideration. Shaw shows how embracing rememory expands the possibilities of history by acknowledging the existence of multiple forms of knowledge and ways of understanding an event or interpreting an object. In so doing, Shaw thinks beyond canonical interpretations of art and material and visual culture to imagine “what if,” asking what else did we once know that has been lost.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, author of Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, also published by Duke University Press, and Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century.
REVIEWS
“The essays in The Art of Remembering show Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw to be a sophisticated thinker with a capacious interest in American art and culture and how it represents Black people. Her voice is both hard-hitting and subtle, unafraid of tackling meaningful and challenging topics.”
-- Cherise Smith, Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and Art History, University of Texas at Austin
“Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is fearless. At a moment in art history and criticism when consensus muddles clarity of perception, Shaw not only takes on subjects that otherwise would be neglected or overlooked in the pursuit of knowledge but also avoids expected and required analyses. Her laser-sharp perspective is particularly important in this age that professes a commitment to expanding the scope and depth of our knowledge of persons and events—all in the name of newfound fairness—but delivers accommodation and conciliation.”
-- Lowery Stokes Sims, author of Challenge of the Modern: African-American Artists, 1925–1945
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 Part I. Past As Prelude 15 1. Facing Phillis Wheatley: Portraiture and Publishing in the Era of the American Revolution 19 2. Profiling Moses Williams: Silhouettes and Race in the Early Republic 42 3. The Freedom to Marry for All: Painting Interracial Families During the Era of the Civil War 62 4. Landscapes of Labor: Race, Religion, and Rhode Island in the Painting of Edward Mitchell Bannister 73 Part II. Modern Blackness 85 5. “This Gifted Sculptress of the Race”: The Intersectional Art of May Howard Jackson 91 6. Singing Saints: Sargent Johnson’s Modern Blackness 111 7. Norman Lewis’s Dan Mask: The Challenge of the African “Thing” in the 1930s 127 8. “Bolshevized by Conditions”: African American Artists and Mexican Muralism 135 9. Malcolm X Rising: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Phenomenological Art 144 10. Richard Yarde’s Mojo Blues 161 Part III. Beginning Again 187 11. Remembering the Remnants: Contemporary Art and Hurricane Katrina 191 12. The Wandering Gaze of Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louisiana Project 203 13. Ten Years of 30 Americans 213 14. “No Man Is an Island”: The Diasporic Performances of Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz and Sheldon Scott 229 15. What Deana Lawson Wants 237 Notes 247 Bibliography 277 Index 289
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