Subject Guides: Featured Ebooks: African American Artists

Welcome

February is Black History Month! This month's featured books focus on African American artists and the beautiful and creative works they have contributed to the world. Take a moment to read a book and become inspired to create.

Contemporary Poetry Books

Black Comics

Winner of the 2014 Will Eisner Award for Best Scholarly/Academic Work Bringing together contributors from a wide range of critical perspectives, Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation is an analytic history of the diverse contributions of Black artists to the medium of comics. Covering comic books, superhero comics, graphic novels, and cartoon strips from the early 20th century to the present, the book explores how Black comic artists grappled with themes such as the Black experience, gender identity, politics, and social media. Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation introduces students to such key texts as The work of Jackie Ormes, Black women superheroes from Vixen to Black Panther Aaron McGruder's strip The Boondocks.

Exhibiting Blackness

In 1927, the Chicago Art Institute presented the first major museum exhibition of art by African Americans. Designed to demonstrate the artists' abilities and to promote racial equality, the exhibition also revealed the art world's anxieties about the participation of African Americans in the exclusive venue of art museums. Places where blacks had historically been barred from visiting, let alone exhibiting. Since then, America's major art museums have served as crucial locations for African Americans to protest against their exclusion and attest to their contributions to the visual arts. In Exhibiting Blackness, art historian Bridget R. Cooks analyzes the curatorial strategies, challenges, and critical receptions of African American art's most significant museum exhibitions. Tracing two dominant methodologies used to exhibit art by African Americans? An ethnographic approach that focuses more on artists than their art and a recovery narrative aimed at correcting past omissions? Cooks exposes the issues involved in exhibiting cultural differences that continue to challenge art history, historiography, and American museum exhibition practices. By further examining the unequal and often contested relationship between African American artists, curators, and visitors, she provides insight into art museums' complex role and accountability to the cultures they represent.

Under a Bad Sign

What accounts for the persistence of the figure of the black criminal in popular culture created by African Americans? Unearthing the overlooked history of art that has often seemed at odds with the politics of civil rights and racial advancement, Under a Bad Sign explores the rationale behind this tradition of criminal self-representation from the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary gangsta culture. In this lively exploration, Jonathan Munby takes a uniquely broad view of how the criminal appears within and moves among literary, musical, and visual arts. Munby traces the legacy of Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes's detective fiction and Claude McKay, Julian Mayfield, and Donald Goines's urban experience writing. From Peetie Wheatstraw's gangster blues to gangsta rap, he also examines criminals in popular songs. Turning to the screen, the underworld films of Oscar Micheaux and Ralph Cooper, the 1970s blaxploitation cycle, and the 1990s movie also come under his microscope. Ultimately, Munby concludes that this tradition has been a misunderstood aspect of African American civic life and that, rather than undermining black culture, it forms a rich and enduring response to being an outcast in America.

Navigators

Navigators vividly brings to life the stories of twelve African American artists who teach music, dance, and visual arts at colleges and universities traditionally viewed as White institutions. In this captivating and moving book, Theresa Jenoure shows that there's a great deal to be learned from the experience of these teachers. She explores their visions and callings as creative artists and how they function in higher education. In so doing, she presents relevant ideas about the development and sustenance of creativity. As the twelve teachers' stories unfold, they share their hearts generously and speak their minds frankly, offering kaleidoscopic glimpses into their biographies. They talk about the various paths that led them to become artists and teachers, honoring special people and incidents that have aided them. They identify how they became politicized, aware, or even positioned in social and political terms, giving names to forces that have shaped their views on social group membership. These are the stories we need to hear. Their voices resonate powerfully, presenting a rare opportunity to be moved and changed. Much more than merely an objective look at African Americans and the arts, Navigators is as alive and vibrant as the music, art, and dance it describes. Jenoure includes profiles and riffs to serve as bridges between the chapters. The profiles offer closer looks at four teachers, and the riffs, much like highly creative jazz compositions from which the word is borrowed, are interjected between the chapters, helping to merge fact with fiction.

African American Art

Here is a visual celebration of African American Art from its beginnings in Colonial America to today. From early folk art to contemporary paintings, prints, and sculpture, 107 full-color illustrations present the remarkable history of America's Black artistic heritage.

African American Arts

Signaling such recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monáe, and Kendrick Lamar, and marking the exit of the Obama Administration and the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, this anthology explores the role of African American arts in shaping the future and further informing new directions we might take in honoring and protecting the success of African Americans in the U.S. The essays African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity engage readers in critical conversations by activists, scholars, and artists reflecting on national and transnational legacies of African American activism as an element of artistic practice, mainly as they concern artistic expression and race relations, and the intersections of creative processes with economic, sociological, and psychological inequalities. Scholars from the fields of communication, theater, queer studies, media studies, performance studies, dance, visual arts, and fashion design, to name a few, collectively ask: What are the connections between African American arts, the work of social justice, and creative processes?

The Life and Art of Felrath Hines

Felrath Hines (1913-1993), the first African American man to become a professional conservator for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, was born and raised in the segregated Midwest. Leaving their home in the South, Hines's parents migrated to Indianapolis with hopes for a better life. While growing up, Hines was encouraged by his seamstress mother to pursue his early passion for art by taking Saturday classes at Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. He moved to Chicago in 1937, where he attended the Art Institute of Chicago to pursue his dreams. The Life and Art of Felrath Hines: From Dark to Light chronicles the life of this exceptional artist who overcame numerous obstacles throughout his career and refused to be pigeonholed because of his race. Author Rachel Berenson Perry tracks Hines's determination and success as a contemporary artist on his terms. She explores Hines's life in New York City in the 1950s and 60s, where he created a close friendship with jazz musician Billy Strayhorn and participated in the African American Spiral Group of New York and the equal rights movement. Hines's relationship with Georgia O'Keeffe, as her private paintings restorer, and a lifetime of creating increasingly esteemed Modernist artwork tell the story of one man's remarkable journey in 20th-century America. Featuring exquisite color photographs, The Life and Art of Felrath Hines explores the artist's life, work, and significance as an artist and an art conservator.

The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry

The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry offers a close examination of the literary culture in which the Black Arts Movement's poets (including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Larry Neal, Haki Madhubuti, Carolyn Rodgers, and others) operated and of the small presses and literary anthologies that first published the movement's authors. The book also describes the role of the Black Arts Movement in reintroducing readers to poets such as Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Phillis Wheatley. Focusing on the material production of Black Arts poetry, the book combines genetic criticism with cultural history to shed new light on the period, its publishing culture, and its participants' writing and editing practices. Howard Rambsy II demonstrates how significant the circulation and format of black poetic texts--not simply their content--were to the formation of an artistic movement. The book examines other vital influences on forming Black Arts discourse, including factors such as an emerging nationalist ideology and figures such as John Coltrane and Malcolm X.