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Theatricality in the Art of the Cuban Diaspora: The Progression of Tropes

Ricardo Pau-Llosa

in Picturing Cuba: Art, Culture, and Identity on the Island and in the Diaspora

Art critic and collector Ricardo Pau-Llosa proposes that certain “tropes of identity”—common metaphors inherited from previous generations of modern Cuban artists—continue to shape the work of ... More

Art critic and collector Ricardo Pau-Llosa proposes that certain “tropes of identity”—common metaphors inherited from previous generations of modern Cuban artists—continue to shape the work of contemporary Cuban-American artists. Pau-Llosa underlines the trope of theatricality as a form of representing “the poetics of shelter (from time, history, persecution, and other forces).” The early work in exile of Mario Carreño and Cundo Bermúdez launched a diasporic sensibility in Cuban art that still resonates in the more recent work of Emilio Sánchez, María Brito, and José Bedia. From this perspective, theatricality ties together several generations of Cuban modern artists and those who left the island after 1959.Less

“Who Are You America but Me?”: The American Negro Exposition, 1940

Jeffrey Helgeson

in The Black Chicago Renaissance

This chapter considers the 1940 American Negro Exposition in Chicago, the first black-organized world's fair that sought to showcase African American artists on a national stage. It delineates the ... More

This chapter considers the 1940 American Negro Exposition in Chicago, the first black-organized world's fair that sought to showcase African American artists on a national stage. It delineates the diversity of voices and competing visions of racial progress that defined the character of the Black Chicago Renaissance. Historians have described the exposition as a failure; the event did not attract mass audiences, and it did not create a broader public debate about the meanings of black identity, legacies of slavery, or contemporary discrimination in the United States. Yet, by examining the exposition as presented, rather than what it failed to be, the chapter uncovers important and sometimes surprising influences on the fair's messages.Less

Tourism

Courtney Lewis

in Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty

To ignore the obvious proliferation of tourism-based small businesses on the Qualla Boundary is to ignore a principal element of the EBCI’s economy and its rich history of business owner ship. ... More

To ignore the obvious proliferation of tourism-based small businesses on the Qualla Boundary is to ignore a principal element of the EBCI’s economy and its rich history of business owner ship. Furthermore, the importance of the tourism industry for Native Nations across the United States has been growing in recent years, as seen, for example, in the institution of the 2016 Native American Tourism and Improving Visitor Experience (NATIVE) Act. It is for this reason that I dedicate an entire chapter to this topic. Here, the differences between the town of Cherokee and the rest of the Qualla Boundary are clearest, as almost all of the tourism that takes place on the Qualla Boundary is concentrated in Cherokee proper. This chapter focuses on the concept of authenticity, what is “authentic” in tourist’s eyes, and how the EBCI have asserted their representation from the times of nostalgia tourism to the cultural and heritage tourism of today, a change that is financially supported by the casino. This tourism discussion includes topics such as the development of the Qualla Co-operative and branding, such as the “authentically Cherokee” brand.Less

13 Emerson, Dante, and American Nationalism

Kathleen Verduin

in Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century: Nationality, Identity, and Appropriation

This chapter considers how Dante as national poet was presented as a model for the American artist, and how Ralph Waldo Emerson's reading of the Italian poet reflected, on the one hand, a will to ... More

This chapter considers how Dante as national poet was presented as a model for the American artist, and how Ralph Waldo Emerson's reading of the Italian poet reflected, on the one hand, a will to assert national distinction and independence, and on the other, an impulse toward cultural continuity.Less

‘Death to any one that puts his foot in No Man[’s] Land’: ‘Afromodernist’ Reimagining and Aesthetic Experimentation in Horace Pippin’s World War I Manuscripts and Paintings

Celeste-Marie Bernier

in Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem and the Avant-Garde

This chapter analyzes the experienced and representative significance of World War I to the work of African American artists and writers who rejoined the civilian population following the end of the ... More

This chapter analyzes the experienced and representative significance of World War I to the work of African American artists and writers who rejoined the civilian population following the end of the war. It explores the interwoven aesthetic intricacies of the manuscripts and paintings of Horace Pippin, and other writers and artists of his generation and experience, who provided first-hand aesthetic reflections of the terrible nature of modern warfare, which were often written out of this most significant of modern events — one frequently configured as a white European tragedy. Grappling with a context in which black military experiences were caricatured or erased in white mainstream representations, their artistic and literary production confirms the Great War as the ‘locus of Afromodernism par excellence’.Less

Designing Radicalism: The Popular Front, Modernist Aesthetics, and the Problem of Patronage

Shannan Clark

in The Making of the American Creative Class: New York's Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism

Chapter 4 turns to efforts to transform the material and visual cultures of consumer capitalism during the 1930s and early 1940s. One of the most important of these endeavors was the Design ... More

Chapter 4 turns to efforts to transform the material and visual cultures of consumer capitalism during the 1930s and early 1940s. One of the most important of these endeavors was the Design Laboratory, which opened in 1935 in New York City as the country’s first comprehensive school of modernist design. Initiated under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project, the Laboratory attracted left-leaning faculty and students who disapproved of the streamlined style that typified much of the material culture of consumer capitalism at the time. In contrast, they developed a functionalist modernism that reflected their social-democratic ideals of utility, affordability, and sustainability. White-collar unions in New York as well as Consumers Union promoted this aesthetic of social consumerism as well. Public patronage for cultural initiatives like the Design Laboratory proved unreliable, however, especially as the federal government turned its attention from the Great Depression to the Second World War.Less

I New Forms and Captive Knights in the Age of Jim Crow and Mechanical Reproduction

James Smethurst

in The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance

This book endeavors to delineate some of the ways that the establishment of Jim Crow as a national system, albeit with considerable regional and local variations, and the response of African American ... More

This book endeavors to delineate some of the ways that the establishment of Jim Crow as a national system, albeit with considerable regional and local variations, and the response of African American artists and intellectuals, especially Paul Laurence Dunbar, to this profound ideological, political, economic, spatial, and cultural event deeply marked American notions of modernity—and, ultimately, modernism—for both African Americans and white Americans. By looking at some of the different strands in the development of a modern African American literature between the end of Reconstruction and the onset of the New Negro Renaissance, we can discern how some black writers came to feel a need for the creation of a distinct African American literature representing, channeling, and serving some notion of a black “people” or “nation.”Less

Modernism and the Affects of Racial Blackness

Lindon Barrett

Justin A. Joyce, Dwight A. Mcbride, and John Carlos Rowe (eds)

in Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity

This chapter focuses on the dispute between two important figures of the Harlem Renaissance: George Schuyler and Langston Hughes. Schuyler's critique of the African American avant-garde in his essay ... More

This chapter focuses on the dispute between two important figures of the Harlem Renaissance: George Schuyler and Langston Hughes. Schuyler's critique of the African American avant-garde in his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926) and Hughes's response in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) provide a focus point to understand how African American artists and intellectuals imagined their relationship both to Western modernization and avant-garde cultural modernism. This chapter stands as a separate essay from Barrett's surviving manuscript, as it appears to be intended for a different publication; its inclusion here is meant to supplement discussion from the previous chapters, although Schuyler and Hughes did not tackle the gender and sexuality aspects of Barrett's arguments so far posited in this book.Less

Drawing and Discovering

Cathy Curtis

in A Generous Vision: The Creative Life of Elaine de Kooning

Elaine de Kooning’s mother was a formative influence in her life, introducing her to art and literature at an early age. Her mother’s outlandish, autocratic personality—and her institutionalization ... More

Elaine de Kooning’s mother was a formative influence in her life, introducing her to art and literature at an early age. Her mother’s outlandish, autocratic personality—and her institutionalization for child neglect when Elaine was six years old—also served as a cautionary example. Praised by teachers for her drawing skills and active in school sports, Elaine was highly competitive from an early age. After excelling at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, New York, she enrolled at Hunter College. But she soon left to attend an art school in Manhattan. Her boyfriend, artist Milton Resnick, encouraged her to switch to the more radically progressive American Artists School. Another artist boyfriend introduced her to Willem de Kooning, who had emigrated from the Netherlands. Elaine was instantly smitten with him and with his paintings.Less

Working All the Time: Artistic Citizenship in the 21st Century

Diane Mullin

in Artistic Citizenship: Artistry, Social Responsibility, and Ethical Praxis

This chapter critically examines selected American artists to consider the possibilities and limits of the ideas of the common and the equal as democratic strategies for artistic work. Key is the ... More

This chapter critically examines selected American artists to consider the possibilities and limits of the ideas of the common and the equal as democratic strategies for artistic work. Key is the notion of the centrality of work in its verb form as an organizing and defining principle for a democratic art. Practice in this scheme becomes the game changer. This chapter reviews the theory of “dematerialization of the object” in the 1960s and considers its nascent claims to a democratic vision. It lays out an idea that proposes a redefinition of the object as the product of work while also broadening the idea of the object as both material and immaterial. The chapter argues, in keeping with Kateb’s theses about the role of action, decision, and responsibility in democracy, that the democratic aspect of art resides in its living activity—the work of the artist, not the artwork.Less

A California Detour on the Road to Italy: The Hubcap Ranch, the Napa Valley, and Italian American Identity

Laura E. Ruberto

in Sabato Rodia's Towers in Watts: Art, Migrations, Development

This chapter focuses on the Hubcap Ranch, located in the heart of Pope Valley, near Napa, in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Constructed by Emanuele “Litto” Damonte, the Hubcap Ranch is one of at ... More

This chapter focuses on the Hubcap Ranch, located in the heart of Pope Valley, near Napa, in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Constructed by Emanuele “Litto” Damonte, the Hubcap Ranch is one of at least four Italian American site-specific vernacular architecture constructions in California that still exists, at least in part, today. It argues that the Hubcap Ranch reveals a decidedly California Italian American culture and suggests how one man's approach to negotiating his immigrant identity intersects with a larger culture of immigrant-community place making. For Damonte, the Hubcap Ranch seems to have functioned as a middle-landscape, or retreat away from urban San Francisco and away from (and in a sense curiously also back to) rural Italy. As such, the Hubcap Ranch can be reread and thus understood as a creative process of Italian immigrant place making.Less

Harlem Renaissance Women and 580 St. Nicholas Avenue

Ethelene Whitmire

in Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian

This chapter looks at how Regina became part of the Harlem Renaissance upon her arrival in New York City. Events collided to put Regina at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement ... More

This chapter looks at how Regina became part of the Harlem Renaissance upon her arrival in New York City. Events collided to put Regina at the forefront of the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement marked by increased literary, musical, and artistic creativity by African American artists who wanted to challenge the prevailing stereotypical representation of their image. Writers and artists came from all over the United States to participate. In Los Angeles, writer Wallace Thurman encouraged fellow post-office worker Arna Bontemps to go to Harlem. Opportunity editor Charles S. Johnson encouraged Zora Neale Hurston to move to New York City. All of these great thinkers, writers, and artists would pass through the 135th Street Branch, where Regina was assigned.Less

Muddying Clear Waters: Carolyn Rodgers’s Black Art

Carmen L. Phelps

in Visionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement

This chapter discusses Carolyn Rodgers’s poetic works in her poetry collections, including Paper Soul (1968) and Songs of a Black Bird (1969). It explains that Rodgers’ poetry showed that the concept ... More

This chapter discusses Carolyn Rodgers’s poetic works in her poetry collections, including Paper Soul (1968) and Songs of a Black Bird (1969). It explains that Rodgers’ poetry showed that the concept of Black Art was not a “fixed” one, but rather, something that varies and changes its form, function, and meaning with each piece of work produced by African American artists. In her first poetic works, Rodgers pointed out that the goal of defining the role of the Black Arts writer continued to be an essential preoccupation for self-acclaimed Black Arts Movement participants, as the movement wanted writers to position themselves within unwavering spaces of political expression and cultural representation.Less

From Black Belt to Bronzeville

Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach

in Along the Streets of Bronzeville: Black Chicago's Literary Landscape

This chapter traces the complex interplay of race, geography, and cultural criticism that permeated the Renaissance as a whole. Beginning with the categorization of the neighborhood as the Black Belt ... More

This chapter traces the complex interplay of race, geography, and cultural criticism that permeated the Renaissance as a whole. Beginning with the categorization of the neighborhood as the Black Belt and ending with heralding itself as “Bronzeville,” the chapter examines the interaction of newly arrived migrants with previously settled African Americans that bloomed into an exciting community. It specifically analyzes two popular intersections in the South Side of Chicago—the “Stroll” district (the intersection of 35th and State Streets) during the early 1920s, and the intersection at 47th and South Parkway. This intersection, along with the Stroll, served as foundations and sources of work for famed African American musicians, artists, and writers, such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks.Less

Conclusion: Queering Representation

GerShun Avilez

in Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

This concluding chapter discusses the significance of the concept of representation to nationalist discourse. Representation in the political world and the idea of cultural representation both appear ... More

This concluding chapter discusses the significance of the concept of representation to nationalist discourse. Representation in the political world and the idea of cultural representation both appear to demand a stable point of reference. However, cultural producers disruptively inhabit frameworks of representation as an element of their aesthetic radical practices. The chapter then examines visual artist Howardena Pindell alongside lesbian filmmaker Cheryl Dune because they produce works in which Black bodies become visually inaccessible. The reluctance to represent is a vital component of these artists' respective projects. Ultimately, the chapter documents how cultural producers challenge the idea that social realities oblige African American artists to produce work engaged in progressive politics.Less

The Revolution Will Be Visualized: Black Panther Artist Emory Douglas

Colette Gaiter

in West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977

This chapter examines the work of artist Emory Douglas. In 1967, a young man barely in his twenties, Douglas was named Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party. His visual skills, combined ... More

This chapter examines the work of artist Emory Douglas. In 1967, a young man barely in his twenties, Douglas was named Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party. His visual skills, combined with the Panther leaders’ sharp verbal rhetoric, resulted in the graphically explosive Black Panther newspaper that embodied the group’s concept of revolution through self-empowerment. Over the course of his tenure as Minister of Culture, which ended in the early 1980s, Douglas used revolutionary art to empower African Americans in a post-Civil Rights Act, everyday-in-the-streets struggle. In concert with the goals of the Panther Party, Douglas’s body of work played a major role in two formations that continue to grow—black cultural liberation and the increasing dominance of images over words in cultural production.Less

New York

Cathy Curtis

in Alive Still: Nell Blaine, American Painter

Her first stop in New York was the Hans Hofmann School of Art. His precepts and open-minded approach would guide her work from then on. An abandoned industrial loft served as her home and studio. In ... More

Her first stop in New York was the Hans Hofmann School of Art. His precepts and open-minded approach would guide her work from then on. An abandoned industrial loft served as her home and studio. In 1942, the war cast a pall on New York, but exhibitions enabled her to see work by exiled European painters that would have a major influence on her own work. Painter Leland Bell—whom she introduced to his future wife, painter Louisa Matthíasdóttir—convinced her to follow the austere style of Mondrian. Her marriage to a musician, Robert Bass, was an impulsive move that would end in divorce a few years later. In 1944, she became the youngest member of American Abstract Artists. While working at part-time jobs, she would paint all night and party with friends who shared her love for jazz; her painting Lester Leaps was a tribute to Lester Young.Less