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This article investigates the centrality of Black art collectors in the dissemination of Black art and culture as the art world became less accessible to Black artists, ironically, during the 1980s art boom. The essay chronicles the controversy over a proposed move of the Studio Museum in Harlem to Museum Mile on the predominantly White Upper East Side, investigates the importance of cultivating a Black art-buying constituency, and assesses the quest of Black visual artist Romare Bearden and his allies for mainstream recognition at the cost of a Black arts institution. This article draws on newspaper articles, personal correspondence, and organizational records to examine the politics of Black middle-class patronage networks and their impact on Black artists and art institutions as the art world became financialized in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I conceptualize the term "black op art" to consider how black artists are centralizing speculative sensory effects as both object and subject within their work and therefore as dynamic interventions within the political, hyper-racialized, and dispossessing field of visuality. I consider themes of dispossession through a studied meditation of two works that similarly play and push on the edges of optical effects: James Baldwin (2018) by Nekisha Durrett and Requiem for Charleston (2016) by Lava Thomas. Black op art is neither about what is knowable nor enigmatic through the visual field, but rather about what lengths black artists must go to in order to work within it, as well as the ciphered language of mattering and meanings embedded within their works of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pós: Revista do Programa de POS-Graduacao Em Artes - EBA/UFMG is the property of Pos - Programa de Pos-graduacao em Artes (PPG-Artes) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The author discusses the 1960s Black Arts Movement, its artists and their impact on contemporary arts as of 2023. Topics covered include the artists' challenge of prevailing cultural norms and encouragement of Black self-expression of their own experiences, and the pivotal roles of visual artists Wadsworth Jarrell and Jae Jarrell who respectively founded an artists' collective, and empowered fashion via the "Revolutionary Suit." Also noted is the movement's influence on artists like Nick Cave.

Globalizing histories of art and design and contesting historical narratives that overlook and marginalize the art and material culture of the African diaspora have become increasingly popular in recent years. The artworks selected predominately date from circa 2019 but the book also includes artworks from as early as 1970, reflecting the rich cultural heritage and artistic traditions brought together in the collection. What began as a small collection of recent art by regional artists has expanded to include traditional African art and artworks by internationally acclaimed artists (xiv). [Extracted from the article]

This study examines the work of two queer Black artists, Richard Bruce Nugent and Marlon Riggs, within the historical and sociopolitical contexts of the Harlem Renaissance and cultural backlash of the late 1980s. Through comparative textual analyses, the author explores fluctuations of Black queer cultural production during the twentieth century and considers how each artist subverts dominant racist and heteronormative ideologies in mainstream society and Black communities. Engaging tools from the fields of critical race theory, queer theory, critical legal studies, and cultural representations of race and sexuality, the author analyzes "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" and Tongues Untied structurally and historically, suggesting that both offer valuable strategies for survival in and resistance against an anti-Black and homophobic society. The works of Nugent and Riggs constitute queer interventions in the larger movement toward racial equality, making visible racial and sexual oppression and positing connections between racial justice and queer liberation. Moreover, positioning Riggs within the legacy of Nugent and the Harlem Renaissance points to the generative potential of radical and transgressive queer Black art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore how a widely celebrated African philosophy of being, Ubuntu, is artistically expressed and imagined. I provide a formative theorisation of Ubuntu aesthetics, or an aesthetics of Ubuntu, through an analysis of selected artworks produced by black artists depicting urban black life in South Africa during the twentieth century. The complicated and polarised experiences of black people who resided in colonial and apartheid cities provide a persuasive case for understanding the creative visualities of Ubuntu. To navigate the segregation of the colonial and apartheid city, black people adopted forms of existence that obscured and questioned the centrality of Ubuntu as part of the modern African experience. Nevertheless, equally undeniable is that the characteristics of the artworks created by black artists who captured and documented urban black life throughout the previous century were some of the most salient aesthetic embodiments of Ubuntu at work. In the main, I argue that the creative choices and visual languages adopted by the black artists discussed here are imbued with an Ubuntu sensibility or an Ubuntu aesthetics that reveals the nuance of humanity among urbanised black people. I also discuss an artwork that complicates the performance of Ubuntu in the urban context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arte & Ensaio is the property of Arte & Ensaio and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Arte & Ensaio is the property of Arte & Ensaio and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Arte & Ensaio is the property of Arte & Ensaio and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Historically white art museums have adopted policies of diversity and inclusion that are not reflected in their leadership, curatorial ranks. and representation of Black artists in collections and exhibitions. Mission statements welcoming diversity and inclusion are only symbolic because museums have not adopted the structural changes that will lead to diverse and inclusive artistic representation. Even if museums claim they are implementing diverse and inclusive hiring processes and exhibition strategies, the people at the top of the power and wealth hierarchy at museums are board members who are predominantly white men who want to fund museums that reflect their interests, namely, exchanging money and gifts of art for positive public image and influence over the works and messages shown b), museums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pitágoras 500 is the property of Universidade Estadual de Campinas - Portal de Periodicos Eletronicos Cientificos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The British artist Sonia Boyce was a central figure in the British Black Arts Movement and has in recent years achieved widespread critical acclaim within the field of British art. Although she is now known for her performative and collaborative approach to art making, she began her career making figurative oil pastel and charcoal portraits that have become synonymous with black artistic practices of the 1980s. This article presents a new reading of three of these iconic portraits— Auntie Enid–The Pose (1985), Missionary Position II (1985), and Big Women's Talk (1984). The new reading respects, but diverges from, previous interpretations that have typically focused on representations of black domestic life and the politics of identity. Taking direction from several interviews with the artist, including one conducted by the author in 2015, the article uses a formal analysis to propose the hitherto unacknowledged or under-appreciated interplay with modernism and other art movements within the three artworks in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reprint of an article first published in "Feminist Arts News" in Autumn 1988 is presented. The article explores black creativity and its relationship to political change. Other topics discussed include the problem of cramped living conditions for artists, the significance of slavery and how creativity is needed to link the past to the future through the "difficult present."

The article explores the work of the black visual artist Derrick Adams. Noted are his contributions to performance art and to how black visual artists have impacted the medium. Other topics include how is work compares to that of artist Benjamin Patterson, Adams' training at the Pratt Institute and Columbia University, his work in sculpture, mixed media collage and photography, and the themes presented in his work, including blackness.

Building on José Esteban Muñoz's theorization of ecstasy as a site of queer of color desire, relational practice, and utopic possibility, this essay conceptualizes what I call the black ecstatic as a hermeneutic for analyzing post–civil rights black queer poetics. My theorization of the black ecstatic attends specifically to the interrelation of political terror, social abjection, and aesthetic abstraction in contemporary black queer cultural production. As an affective and aesthetic practice, the black ecstatic eschews both the heroism of black pasts and the promise of liberated black futures in order to proffer new relational and representational modes in the ongoing catastrophe that constitutes black life in modernity. Against the backdrop of civil rights retrenchment, the War on Drugs, the AIDS crisis, and the US carceral state, this essay analyzes the recent film Moonlight and the poetry of Essex Hemphill, a black gay writer and AIDS activist. In so doing, it shows how, across literary genres and media platforms, the black ecstatic instantiates formal innovations to black queer expressive forms and encourages willful exuberance as an affective disposition and relational ethic that enables black life and liberation in the catastrophic present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his 2001Different: Contemporary Photography and Black IdentityStuart Hall, writing on black arts in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, commented on the emergence of the “black body” as a subject of visibility and identity which challenged the racialised body which for so long had been produced and reproduced by racial discourse. “On the site of the body”, he wrote, “racial discourses had long undertaken the work of systematically reducing history to biology, culture to nature”, but it was also a “surface … of resistance from which alternative counter-narratives can be produced”. Cultural identities have histories and are subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture, and power. This paper will: (1) document the history of how artists, photographers, and filmmakers in the 1970s and 1980s deconstructed and challenged the stereotyped black body of racialised discourse to produce counter-visual narratives of the “black body”; (2) map the different mechanisms through which these counter-visual narratives were presented, circulated, discussed, appropriated, and used; (3) explore how the history of these counter-visual narratives “intertwined and overlapped” with the history of the broader “politics of representation” and anti-racist politics in education in particular; and (4) finally determine how successful these counter-visual narratives were in displacing the racialised black body in and of history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Responding to the BBC 4 documentary, The Hip Hop World News, the author examines a number of debates that the programme, narrated by Rodney P, a pioneer of British rap music, and a believer in the revolutionary potential of hip hop culture, throws up. For hip hop also has many reactionary elements and has become big business for the corporations and rap 'stars' involved in its production. Beyond just pointing to individual rappers who have been 'conscious' political voices, such as Public Enemy's Chuck D, we are shown structures embedded in the origins and 'elements' of hip hop that continue to make it a 'voice of the voiceless'. Some people, like Lord Jamar, who is interviewed on the documentary, have argued that hip hop as a black art form can only be performed by black artists, yet, as Rodney P points out, hip hop has been adopted everywhere to express and transmit the situations and struggles of marginalised and oppressed groups all over the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the contribution of chairman Jeff Donaldson on the Black art in the Howard University Department of Art. Topics discussed include activity of Donaldson in hiring African Diaspora scholar-artists; hiring of international faculty by Donaldson to initiate the Annual Faculty Exhibitions; and inheritance of Dr. Alain Locke's vast collection of African art in 1955 by the Department of Art.

Black art was a widely used category in the late 1970s and 1980s to describe the artwork of British people of South Asian, African or African-Caribbean descent. There are numerous problems associated with the collective labelling of such a group, not least because of the lack of stability as to what the term refers. This article addresses the inherent problems with this category and proffers alternative ways of thinking about Black art in terms that encompass broader identity issues. The concept of diaspora aesthetics, for instance, is presented as a more satisfactory alternative that resists the claim that culture develops along ‘ethnically absolute lines’, to use a phrase by Paul Gilroy, and instead encompasses the lived realities of identity positions as well as the heterogeneity of cultural experience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reflects on the art work of Haitian-born artist Jean-Ulrick Désert. Topics discusssed include his art work Negerhosen2000; reproduction of painter Édouard Manet's Olympia of 1863 and postcards of the Dutch black-faced Zwarte Piet and issues of abuse of LGBT Africans and Désert's art practices.

The article discusses the importance of African American or Hispanic American history museum for representing black art by black people. It informs that college education is the biggest predictor of museum attendance. It also informs about the National Endowment of the Arts Participation Survey in 2012 which reveals decline in arts attendance among college-educated Americans.

The article discusses art work of black British artist Barbara Walker include Private Face, Louder Than Words and Show and Tell. It highlights her views on social, political, and cultural issues in relation to history and contemporary practice. It also highlights Walker's visual and textual resistances to the intersecting relationships between black masculinity and stereotyping, criminalization and racial profiling.

The article reports on the photographic series "Queen Nanny of the Maroons" of artist Renée Cox. It informs that the artist embodies iconic Jamaican figure of Queen Nanny representation of sensual, sexually sophisticated and intelligent Black woman representing the Caribbean. It also highlights the issue of cultural separatism between Maroon society and Jamaican society.

The article reflects on the art work and portraits of black painter Kerry James Marshall. It informs about his self-portraiture including "A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self," "Two Invisible Men Naked" and "Two Invisible Men." It also informs about the portraits of black women painters made by him.