Adrienne L. Childs – författare

Exploring the role the decorative arts played in the representation of Black people in European visual and material culture  This revelatory look at European decorative arts addresses the long-ignored implications of the depiction of Black bodies on luxury objects from the Baroque period through the nineteenth century. Adrienne L. Childs traces the complex history of the vogue for representing the Black body as an ornamental motif throughout spaces of wealth and refinement. Objects such as furniture, porcelain, clocks, silver, light fixtures, and more conveyed the taste for exoticism and portrayed the laboring Black body in the guise of décor. These objects also express larger ideas about the concept of race, romantic notions of distant lands, the harsh realities of slave labor in the colonies, the presence of Black servants in wealthy European households, and the culture of luxury consumption.  Ornamental Blackness demonstrates how seemingly benign decorative objects can embody the complexities of race, slavery, and representation. Childs examines the tensions inherent in the system of codes in which the Black body can be enslaved, reviled, feared, subjugated, and assaulted on one hand and a symbol of opulence on the other. In this important volume she establishes a framework for understanding the racialized aesthetics of luxury.

Riffs and Relations: African-American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition presents works by African-American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries together with works by the early-twentieth-century European artists with whom they engaged. Black artists have investigated, interrogated, invaded, entangled, annihilated, or immersed themselves in the aesthetics, symbolism, and ethos of European art for more than a century. The powerful push and pull of this relationship constitutes a distinct tradition for many African-American artists who source the master narratives of art history to critique, embrace, or claim their own space. This groundbreaking catalog--accompanying a major exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.--connects the work of artists such as Romare Bearden with Pablo Picasso; Renee Cox and Robert Colescott with Edouard Manet; Norman Lewis with Paul Klee; and Leonardo Drew with Piet Mondrian. The volume explores how blackness has often been conceived from the standpoint of these international connections and presents the divergent and complex works born of these important dialogues.

Compelling and troubling, colorful and dark, black figures served as the quintessential image of difference in nineteenth-century European art; the essays in this volume further the investigation of constructions of blackness during this period. This collection marks a phase in the scholarship on images of blacks that moves beyond undifferentiated binaries like ’negative’ and ’positive’ that fail to reveal complexities, contradictions, and ambiguities. Essays that cover the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century explore the visuality of blackness in anti-slavery imagery, black women in Orientalist art, race and beauty in fin-de-siècle photography, the French brand of blackface minstrelsy, and a set of little-known images of an African model by Edvard Munch. In spite of the difficulty of resurrecting black lives in nineteenth-century Europe, one essay chronicles the rare instance of an American artist of color in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. With analyses of works ranging from Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, to portraits of the American actor Ira Aldridge, this volume provides new interpretations of nineteenth-century representations of blacks.

Compelling and troubling, colorful and dark, black figures served as the quintessential image of difference in nineteenth-century European art; the essays in this volume further the investigation of constructions of blackness during this period. This collection marks a phase in the scholarship on images of blacks that moves beyond undifferentiated binaries like ’negative’ and ’positive’ that fail to reveal complexities, contradictions, and ambiguities. Essays that cover the late eighteenth through the early twentieth century explore the visuality of blackness in anti-slavery imagery, black women in Orientalist art, race and beauty in fin-de-siècle photography, the French brand of blackface minstrelsy, and a set of little-known images of an African model by Edvard Munch. In spite of the difficulty of resurrecting black lives in nineteenth-century Europe, one essay chronicles the rare instance of an American artist of color in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. With analyses of works ranging from Géricault's Raft of the Medusa, to portraits of the American actor Ira Aldridge, this volume provides new interpretations of nineteenth-century representations of blacks.

Since he started collecting in the 1990s, Eric Key's intent has always been to help preserve America's Black experience in the arts, and to benefit the many communities of which he has been a part-opening gateways for artists, African Americans, and conversations about race, identity, and America. Featured in the volume are selected works by some of the most recognizable contemporary African American artists, including Sam Gilliam, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, William Artis, Samella Lewis, and Renee Stout. Together, these artists work to dispel the many stereotypes and misunderstandings about African American art and people, but also remain a form of personal narrative. As Eric Key states, the works in his collection are an extension of himself, a Black man in a still mostly white art world; they are an extension of the country in which he lives and an extension of the artists who created them.

Vivian Browne's(1929-1993) varied career spanned more than three decades, from her earlyportraits and landscapes in the late 1950s and early '60s, her Little Menseries of 1966-69, to her final San Joaquin and King's Canyon paintings of thevery early 1990s, completed just before her death. This highly active careerwas framed by Browne's lasting political engagement and activism, that includedbeing an initial director of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC),born out of a response to the Metropolitan Museum's failure to include a singleBlack Harlem-based artist in its 1969 exhibition, Harlem on My Mind, and heractive memberships of Where We At (WWA), the Women's Caucus for Art (WCA), andthe feminist art collective Heresies, from the early 1970s until her death in1993.This volume presentsabout 62 paintings, prints, and works on paper across several major bodies ofwork, alongside ephemera highlighting Browne's enduring activism and teachingwork. Drawing upon previously unknown works and archives that have recently becomeavailable, this is a significant contribution to the history of twentiethcentury American art.