African American visual aesthetics

the long version

In this collection of ground-breaking essays, five prominent curators and scholars - Ann Gibson, Keith Morrison, Sharon F. Patton, Richard J. Powell, and Lowery Strokes Simsexplore postmodernism's influence on African American art during the last thirty years. Covering the works of such contemporary artists as Renee Stout, Joe Overstreet, David Hammons, Beverly Buchanan, and Martha Jackson-Jarvis, the book revisits the questions, posed in the 1930s by critics Alain Locke and James Herring, about how to define and to interpret African American art. The contributors address such interrelated issues as an African American aesthetic identity, personal experiences of culture, the relationship between art and politics, and the blurring of the distinction between "art" and "craft." They describe the new aesthetic of pan-African art, analyze individual works of art, and argue that the multicultural embrace of the 1990s misappropriates African American culture. Illustrated with photographs of the works discussed, the book is the first to explore the provocative issues raised at the confluence of two of contemporary art's most richly layered movements. It also provides an insightful survey of the relationships between individual works of art, postmodern theory, and a nascent African American aesthetic.