Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts

Arts & Photography

Childs, Adrienne L.

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

David C. Driskell is one of America's most treasured artists and citizens. This catalog accompanies the 2007-2008 exhibition of the same name organized by the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland. In addition to reproducing the exhibition's seventy-six artworks, the catalog contains a comprehensive checklist of all Driskell prints to date. Essays by three scholars of African American art--Adrienne L. Childs, Ruth Fine, and Deborah Willis--offer insights into the artist's techniques, subject matter, inspirations, and influences.

Evolution: Five Decades of Printmaking by David C. Driskell

Pomegranate

In Margo Humphrey, Adrienne L. Childs explores the career of one of the most inspiring artists and printmakers of our time. Best known for her "sophisticated naïve" style, Margo Humphrey (b. 1942) transforms personal experiences into narratives that speak to the human spirit. Bold colors and flat planes intertwine using the artist's unique iconography to address issues of race, gender, spirituality, and relationships. Part autobiography and part fantasy, Humphrey's work alludes to the correlation between the temporal and the spiritual as they coexist in her world.
 Humphrey employs visual metaphors to channel her experience growing up as an African American woman. Everyday objects become recurring symbols in her prints: zebras embody the strength of her heritage; a plate of yams represents nourishment or survival. Whether celebrating her childhood or confronting her personal fears, Humphrey's artwork navigates her life story to convey hope, possibility, and love.
 Margo Humphrey presents over forty-five color plates, from the artist's early abstract art through her groundbreaking lithographs in the figurative narrative style. The text by Adrienne L. Childs considers the memories and events that inspired Humphrey's powerful oeuvre, and the foreword by David C. Driskell places Humphrey in the forefront of contemporary printmaking.
 Since Humphrey's first solo exhibition in 1965, her art has been exhibited and collected worldwide and now resides in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Humphrey has lectured and taught across the world and is currently a tenured professor of art at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Margo Humphrey (The David C. Driskell Series of African American Art)

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. - connects the work of artists such as Romare Bearden with Pablo Picasso; Renee Cox and Robert Colescott with Édouard Manet; Norman Lewis with Paul Klee; and Leonardo Drew with Piet Mondrian. The volume explores how blackness has often been conceived from the standpoint of these international connections and presents the divergent and complex works born of these important dialogues.

Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition

Rizzoli Electa

Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century

Compelling and troubling, colorful and dark, black figures served as the quintessential image of difference in nineteenth-century European art; the essays in this volume further the investigation of constructions of blackness during this period. This collection marks a phase in the scholarship on images of blacks that moves beyond undifferentiated binaries like ’negative’ and ’positive’ that fail to reveal complexities, contradictions, and ambiguities. Essays that cover the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century explore the visuality of blackness in anti-slavery imagery, black women in Orientalist art, race and beauty in fin-de-siècle photography, the French brand of blackface minstrelsy, and a set of little-known images of an African model by Edvard Munch. In spite of the difficulty of resurrecting black lives in nineteenth-century Europe, one essay chronicles the rare instance of an American artist of color in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. With analyses of works ranging from Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, to portraits of the American actor Ira Aldridge, this volume provides new interpretations of nineteenth-century representations of blacks.

Routledge

Gateways: African American Art from the Key Collection

Taha, Halima

GILES

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