Archibald Motley Jr. and Racial Reinvention

Archibald Motley Jr. and Racial Reinvention PDF Author: Phoebe Wolfskill
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252099702
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
An essential African American artist of his era, Archibald Motley Jr. created paintings of black Chicago that aligned him with the revisionist aims of the New Negro Renaissance. Yet Motley's approach to constructing a New Negro--a dignified figure both accomplished and worthy of respect--reflected the challenges faced by African American artists working on the project of racial reinvention and uplift. Phoebe Wolfskill demonstrates how Motley's art embodied the tenuous nature of the Black Renaissance and the wide range of ideas that structured it. Focusing on key works in Motley's oeuvre, Wolfskill reveals the artist's complexity and the variety of influences that informed his work. Motley's paintings suggest that the racist, problematic image of the Old Negro was not a relic of the past but an influence that pervaded the Black Renaissance. Exploring Motley in relation to works by notable black and non-black contemporaries, Wolfskill reinterprets Motley's oeuvre as part of a broad effort to define American cultural identity through race, class, gender, religion, and regional affiliation.

Archibald Motley Jr. and Racial Reinvention

Archibald Motley Jr. and Racial Reinvention PDF Author: Phoebe Wolfskill
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252099702
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book

Book Description
An essential African American artist of his era, Archibald Motley Jr. created paintings of black Chicago that aligned him with the revisionist aims of the New Negro Renaissance. Yet Motley's approach to constructing a New Negro--a dignified figure both accomplished and worthy of respect--reflected the challenges faced by African American artists working on the project of racial reinvention and uplift. Phoebe Wolfskill demonstrates how Motley's art embodied the tenuous nature of the Black Renaissance and the wide range of ideas that structured it. Focusing on key works in Motley's oeuvre, Wolfskill reveals the artist's complexity and the variety of influences that informed his work. Motley's paintings suggest that the racist, problematic image of the Old Negro was not a relic of the past but an influence that pervaded the Black Renaissance. Exploring Motley in relation to works by notable black and non-black contemporaries, Wolfskill reinterprets Motley's oeuvre as part of a broad effort to define American cultural identity through race, class, gender, religion, and regional affiliation.

Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs

Lovable Racists, Magical Negroes, and White Messiahs PDF Author: David Ikard
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022649263X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
Dismantles popular white supremacist tropes, which effectively devalue black life and trivialize black oppression. Ikard investigates the tenacity and cultural capital of white redemption narratives in literature and popular media from Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Help. He invalidates the fiction of a postracial society while awakening us to the sobering reality that we must continue to fight for racial equality or risk losing the hard-fought gains of the Civil Rights movement. Through his close reading of novels, films, journalism, and political campaigns, Ikard analyzes willful white blindness and attendant master narratives of white redemption--arguing powerfully that he who controls the master narrative controls the perception of reality. The book sounds the alarm about seemingly innocuous tropes of white redemption that abound in our society and generate the notion that blacks are perpetually indebted to whites for liberating, civilizing, and enlightening them. --From publisher description.

Archibald J. Motley Jr

Archibald J. Motley Jr PDF Author: Amy M. Mooney
Publisher: Pomegranate Communications
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
Extraordinary artist whose social consciousness extended beyond his paintings. Book jacket.

Jazz Age Chicago

Jazz Age Chicago PDF Author: Joseph Gustaitis
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
ISBN: 1439674361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
When people imagine 1920s Chicago, they usually (and justifiably) think of Al Capone, speakeasies, gang wars, flappers and flivvers. Yet this narrative overlooks the crucial role the Windy City played in the modernization of America. The city's incredible ethnic variety and massive building boom gave it unparalleled creative space, as design trends from Art Deco skyscrapers to streamlined household appliances reflected Chicago's unmistakable style. The emergence of mass media in the 1920s helped make professional sports a national obsession, even as Chicago radio stations were inventing the sitcom and the soap opera. Join Joseph Gustaitis as he chases the beat of America's Jazz Age back to its jazz capital.

Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance

Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance PDF Author: Richard A. Courage
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252051912
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
The Black Chicago Renaissance emerged from a foundational stage that stretched from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition to the start of the Great Depression. During this time, African American innovators working across the landscape of the arts set the stage for an intellectual flowering that redefined black cultural life. Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed have brought together essays that explore the intersections in the backgrounds, education, professional affiliations, and public lives and achievements of black writers, journalists, visual artists, dance instructors, and other creators working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Organized chronologically, the chapters unearth transformative forces that supported the emergence of individuals and social networks dedicated to work in arts and letters. The result is an illuminating scholarly collaboration that remaps African American intellectual and cultural geography and reframes the concept of urban black renaissance. Contributors: Richard A. Courage, Mary Jo Deegan, Brenda Ellis Fredericks, James C. Hall, Bonnie Claudia Harrison, Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey Jr., Amy M. Mooney, Christopher Robert Reed, Clovis E. Semmes, Margaret Rose Vendryes, and Richard Yarborough

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism PDF Author: Denise Murrell
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 1588397734
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Beginning in the 1920s, Upper Manhattan became the center of an explosion of art, writing, and ideas that has since become legendary. But what we now know as the Harlem Renaissance, the first movement of international modern art led by African Americans, extended far beyond New York City. This volume reexamines the Harlem Renaissance as part of a global flowering of Black creativity, with roots in the New Negro theories and aesthetics of Alain Locke, its founding philosopher, as well as the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Featuring artists such as Aaron Douglas, Charles Henry Alston, Augusta Savage, and William H. Johnson, who synthesized the expressive figuration of the European avant-garde with the aesthetics of African sculpture and folk art to render all aspects of African American city life, this publication also includes works by lesser known contributors, including Laura Wheeler Waring and Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr., who took a more classical approach to depicting Black subjects with dignity, interiority, and gravitas. The works of New Negro artists active abroad are also examined in juxtaposition with those of their European and international African diasporan peers, from Germaine Casse and Ronald Moody to Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, and Pablo Picasso. This reframing of a celebrated cultural phenomenon shows how the flow of ideas through Black artistic communities on both sides of the Atlantic contributed to international conversations around art, race, and identity while helping to define our notion of modernism.

Beholding Christ and Christianity in African American Art

Beholding Christ and Christianity in African American Art PDF Author: James Romaine
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271077741
Category : African American art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A collection of essays exploring prominent African American artists' engagement with Christian themes. Essays examine the ways in which an artist's engagement with religious symbols can be an expression of concerns related to racial, political, and socio-economic identity.

The Routledge Companion to African American Art History

The Routledge Companion to African American Art History PDF Author: Eddie Chambers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351045172
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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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.

Designing a New Tradition

Designing a New Tradition PDF Author: Rebecca VanDiver
Publisher: Penn State University Press
ISBN: 9780271086040
Category : African diaspora in art
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
A critical analysis of the art and career of African American painter Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998). Examines Jones's engagement with African and Afrodiasporic themes as well as the challenges she faced as a black woman artist.

The Black Chicago Renaissance

The Black Chicago Renaissance PDF Author: Darlene Clark Hine
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252094395
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Beginning in the 1930s, Black Chicago experienced a cultural renaissance that lasted into the 1950s and rivaled the cultural outpouring in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The contributors to this volume analyze this prolific period of African American creativity in music, performance art, social science scholarship, and visual and literary artistic expression. Unlike Harlem, Chicago was an urban industrial center that gave a unique working class and internationalist perspective to the cultural work being done in Chicago. This collection's various essays discuss the forces that distinguished the Black Chicago Renaissance from the Harlem Renaissance and placed the development of black culture in a national and international context. Among the topics discussed in this volume are Chicago writers Gwendolyn Brooks and Richard Wright, The Chicago Defender and Tivoli Theater, African American music and visual arts, and the American Negro Exposition of 1940. Contributors are Hilary Mac Austin, David T. Bailey, Murry N. DePillars, Samuel A. Floyd Jr., Erik S. Gellman, Jeffrey Helgeson, Darlene Clark Hine, John McCluskey Jr., Christopher Robert Reed, Elizabeth Schlabach, and Clovis E. Semmes.