ARTS 217: History of African-American Art From 1619 to the Present (HC)

The best-selling guide to writing about art   Sylvan Barnet's A Short Guide to Writing About Art guides students through every aspect of writing about art. Students are shown how to analyze pictures (drawings, paintings, photographs), sculptures and architecture, and are prepared with the tools they need to present their ideas through effective writing. Coverage of essential writing assignments includes formal analysis, comparison, research paper, review of an exhibition, and essay examination. New to the 11th edition is a chapter on "Virtual Exhibitions: Writing Text Panels and Other Materials."  

Here is a magnificent account of a past rich in beauty and creativity, but also in tragedy and trauma. Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter blends a vivid narrative based on the latest research with a wonderful array of artwork by African American artists, works which add a new depth to ourunderstanding of black history.Painter offers a history written for a new generation of African Americans, stretching from life in Africa before slavery to today's hip-hop culture. The book describes the staggering number of Africans--over ten million--forcibly transported to the New World, most doomed to brutal servitudein Brazil and the Caribbean. Painter looks at the free black population, numbering close to half a million by 1860 (compared to almost four million slaves), and provides a gripping account of the horrible conditions of slavery itself. The book examines the Civil War, revealing that it only slowlybecame a war to end slavery, and shows how Reconstruction, after a promising start, was shut down by terrorism by white supremacists. Painter traces how through the long Jim Crow decades, blacks succeeded against enormous odds, creating schools and businesses and laying the foundations of ourpopular culture. We read about the glorious outburst of artistic creativity of the Harlem Renaissance, the courageous struggles for Civil Rights in the 1960s, the rise and fall of Black Power, the modern hip-hop movement, and two black Secretaries of State. Painter concludes that African Americanstoday are wealthier and better educated, but the disadvantaged are as vulnerable as ever.Painter deeply enriches her narrative with a series of striking works of art--more than 150 in total, most in full color--works that profoundly engage with black history and that add a vital dimension to the story, a new form of witness that testifies to the passion and creativity of theAfrican-American experience.* Among the dozens of artists featured are Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Beauford Delaney, Jacob Lawrence, and Kara Walker* Filled with sharp portraits of important African Americans, from Olaudah Equiano (one of the first African slaves to leave a record of his captivity) and Toussaint L'Ouverture (who led the Haitian revolution), to Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X

A standard survey. Useful features are the timeline (page 300) and the Bibliographic Essay (page 283). Only drawback is that it was published in 1998.

Offers a current and comprehensive history that contextualizes black artists within the framework of American art as a whole with an emphasis both on racial identity and visual analysis.

Bernier analyzes the work of twenty-one artists, including Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, William Edmondson, Howardena Pindell, Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Betye Saar, Horace Pippin, and Kara Walker.

Note the bibliography starting on page 252.

Drawing from historical and private collections around the country, Samella Lewis has gathered an impressive representation of the work of African American artists, from the 18th century to the present. For this edition she has provided a new chapter on art of the last decade. Handsomely and generously illustrated, this book reveals a rich legacy of work by African American painters, sculptors, and graphic artists. "Art historical scholarship is greatly advanced by Samella Lewis's African American Art and Artists in that it foregrounds the work of artists who have been influencing the texture of art in the United States during the last two decades of the 20th century. Throughout African American Art and Artists, Lewis interrogates the issue of identity by presenting the biographical sketch, which locates the individual artistic personality within a specific cultural background with its own peculiar dynamics, giving a face to two cities of Black American art. Without polemics Lewis presents women artists--Edmonia Lewis to Allison Saar--as principal players in constructing an African American visual arts legacy. Here Lewis sufficiently defines the visual arts in order that they may assume their rightful place alongside African American music, literature and folklore as cultural expressions that have helped to give American culture its distinct character."--from the foreword by Floyd Coleman, Harvard University.

The first comprehensive history of black photographers. Published in 2000.

The first comprehensive history of African-American women artists.

Radical Presence chronicles the emergence of black performance practices in contemporary art.