Hale Woodruff, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, and the Academy


Book Description

African American artists Hale Woodruff and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet both worked in Paris before they become colleagues in Atlanta. When Woodruff began teaching drawing and painting at Atlanta University in 1931 he opened a new era of art instruction. After Prophet arrived to teach sculpture in 1934, the art offerings expanded exponentially. By the mid-1930s, the Coordinated Art Program at Atlanta University Center was the place in the southeast for African Americans to study art. This generously illustrated book considers the artists' lives and their impact as teachers and mentors. Hale Woodruff (1900-1980) was born in Cairo, Illinois. After briefly attending the Herron Art School and the Art Institute of Chicago, he took a job at the Senate Avenue YMCA in Indianapolis, where he met some of the leading figures of the time, including W. E. B. DuBois, Charles S. Johnson, Walter White, and Countee Cullen. After winning several prizes for his drawings, he left for Paris in 1927. When he joined the newly formed Atlanta University Center, he viewed teaching as his chance to impart a sense of cultural and social responsibility to his students and encouraged them to portray black experience in America honestly. The annual exhibition he initiated became the most important national exhibition for African American artists. Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890-1960) was born and raised in Warwick, Rhode Island, and in 1918 became the first African American to graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1922 she went to Paris, where she studied under the acclaimed sculptor Victor Joseph Jean Ambrose Segoffin and received the prestigious Otto Kahn and Greenough prizes. She was associated with the New Negro Movement, which called on African American artists to learn from African practitioners and to develop their own cultural style. Her arrival in Atlanta added the three-dimensional component necessary for the Atlanta University Center to initiate a degree-granting program in art. Amalia K. Amakiis the curator of the Paul R. Jones Collection and assistant professor of art and Black American studies at the University of Delaware.Andrea D. Barnwellis the director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta.




Nancy Elizabeth Prophet


Book Description

"This book explores the career and legacy of Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890-1960), whose figural sculptures embody her uncompromising sovereignty over her work and life. Through original essays, catalogue entries on Prophet's major works, and an illustrated chronology of her remarkable life, this book demonstrates how Prophet continues to inspire a new generation of artists and viewers today. Contributors trace her transatlantic career, from Parisian ateliers to Spelman College, and consider topics such as the art institutions Prophet navigated, the stylistic connections between her figurative sculpture and the work of her modernist contemporaries, and how she resisted predetermined conceptions of her cultural identity."--




Congo Love Song


Book Description

In his 1903 hit "Congo Love Song," James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song's title may appear consistent with that narrative, it also invokes the site of King Leopold II of Belgium's brutal colonial regime at a time when African Americans were playing a central role in a growing Congo reform movement. In an era when popular vaudeville music frequently trafficked in racist language and imagery, "Congo Love Song" emerges as one example of the many ways that African American activists, intellectuals, and artists called attention to colonialism in Africa. In this book, Ira Dworkin examines black Americans' long cultural and political engagement with the Congo and its people. Through studies of George Washington Williams, Booker T. Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, and other figures, he brings to light a long-standing relationship that challenges familiar presumptions about African American commitments to Africa. Dworkin offers compelling new ways to understand how African American involvement in the Congo has helped shape anticolonialism, black aesthetics, and modern black nationalism.




The Routledge Companion to African American Art History


Book Description

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.




The Unforgettables


Book Description

Eminent art historian Charles C. Eldredge brings together top scholars to celebrate forgotten artists and create a more inclusive history of American art. Why do some artists become canonical, while others, equally respected in their time, fall into obscurity? This question is central to The Unforgettables, a vibrant collection of essays by leading experts on American art. Each contributor presents a brief for an artist deserving of new or renewed attention, including artists from the colonial era to recent years working in a wide variety of mediums. Histories of American art have traditionally highlighted the work of a familiar roster of artists, largely white and male. The achievements of their peers, notably women and artists of color, have gone uncelebrated. The essays in this volume provide a new and richer understanding of American art, expanding the canon to include many worthy talents. A number of these artists were acclaimed in their day; others, having missed that acclaim, may achieve it now. With contributions from major scholars and museum professionals, The Unforgettables rescues and revises reputations as it enhances and enriches the history of American art.




A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance


Book Description

A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance presents a comprehensive collection of original essays that address the literature and culture of the Harlem Renaissance from the end of World War I to the middle of the 1930s. Represents the most comprehensive coverage of themes and unique new perspectives on the Harlem Renaissance available Features original contributions from both emerging scholars of the Harlem Renaissance and established academic “stars” in the field Offers a variety of interdisciplinary features, such as the section on visual and expressive arts, that emphasize the collaborative nature of the era Includes “Spotlight Readings” featuring lesser known figures of the Harlem Renaissance and newly discovered or undervalued writings by canonical figures




Encyclopedia of African American Artists


Book Description

African American heritage is rich with stories of family, community, faith, love, adaptation and adjustment, grief, and suffering, all captured in a variety of media by artists intimately familiar with them. From traditional media of painting and artists such as Horace Pippin and Faith Ringgold, to photography of Gordon Parks, and new media of Sam Gilliam and Martin Puryear (installation art), the African American experience is reflected across generations and works. Eight pages of color plates and black and white images throughout the book introduce both favorite and new artists to students and adult readers alike. African American heritage is rich with stories of family, community, faith, love, adaptation and adjustment, grief, and suffering, all captured in a variety of media by artists intimately familiar with them. From traditional media of painting and artists such as Horace Pippin and Faith Ringgold, to photography of Gordon Parks, and new media of Sam Gilliam and Martin Puryear (installation art), the African American experience is reflected across generations and works. Eight pages of color plates and black and white images throughout the book introduce both favorite and new artists to students and adult readers alike. A sampling of the artists included: Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Achamyele Debela, and Melvin Edwards.




Transmodern


Book Description

How can we reconfigure our picture of modern art after the postcolonial turn without simply adding regional art histories to the Eurocentric canon? Transmodern examines the global dimension of modern art by tracing the crossroads of different modernisms in Asia, Europe and the Americas. Featuring case studies in Indian modernism, the Harlem Renaissance and post-war abstraction, it demonstrates the significance of transcultural contacts between artists from both sides of the colonial divide. The book argues for the need to study non-western avant-gardes and Black avant-gardes within the west as transmodern counter-currents to mainstream modernism. It situates transcultural art practices from the 1920s to the 1960s within the framework of anti-colonial movements and in relation to contemporary transcultural thinking that challenged colonial concepts of race and culture with notions of syncretism and hybridity.




Southern/Modern


Book Description

Inspired by a companion exhibition, Southern/Modern is the first book to survey progressive art created in the American South during the first half of the twentieth century. Featuring twelve essays, this lavishly illustrated volume includes all the works from the exhibition and assesses a broader body of contextual pieces to offer a fascinating, multipronged look at modernism's thriving presence in the South—until now, something largely overlooked in histories of American art. Contributors take a broad view of the region, considering artists working in the states below the Mason-Dixon Line and those bordering the Mississippi River. It examines the central roles played by women and artists of color, providing a fuller, richer, and more accurate overview of the artistic activity in the region than has been previously presented. The book is structured around key themes, including the embrace of "high" modernism, the importance of emerging university programs and artist colonies, the depiction of rural and urban modern life, and the role of artists from the South who left and artists from outside the region who came to the South seeking new subjects. Contributors are Daniel Belasco, Katelyn D. Crawford, William Underwood Eiland, William R. Ferris, Shawnya Harris, Todd A. Herman, Karen Towers Klacsmann, Leo G. Mazow, Christopher C. Oliver, Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, Martha R. Severens, Jonathan Stuhlman, Rebecca VanDiver, and Jonathan Frederick Walz.




Humanities


Book Description




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