Art History

The Routledge Companion to Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century brings together a wide range of geographical, cultural, historical, and conceptual perspectives in a single volume of new essays that facilitate a deeper understanding of the field of art activism as it stands today and as it looks towards the future. The book is a resource for multiple fields, including art activism, socially engaged art, and contemporary art, that represents the depth and breadth of contemporary activist art worldwide.

We Make Each Other Beautiful focuses on woman of color and queer of color artists and artist collectives who engage in direct political action as a part of their art practice.

Based on interviews with currently and formerly incarcerated artists, prison visits, Marking Time shows how the imprisoned turn ordinary objects into elaborate works of art. Their bold works, many of which are being published for the first time in this volume, have opened new possibilities in American art. As the movement to reform the country's criminal justice system grows, art provides the imprisoned with a political voice.

Examines radical reinventions of traditional practices, ranging from a queer reclamation of the Jewish festival of Purim to an Indigenous remixing of musical traditions. Supposedly outmoded modes of doing and making--from music and religious rituals to crafting and cooking--are flourishing, both artistically and politically, in the digital age. In a time of political reaction and mass uprisings, the subversion of the traditional is galvanizing artists, activists, musicians, and people in everyday life.

"AFRICOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) was a multidisciplinary collective of black artists who created socially conscious art in Chicago during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960's and 1970's. In this volume, Wadsworth Jarrell, one of the founding members of the AFRICOBRA collective, offers an account of the history of the group and it's founding aesthetic and political principles.

Keith Haring’s Line unites performance studies, critical race studies, and queer theory in an exploration of cross-racial desire in Haring’s life and art. Examining Haring’s engagements with artists such as dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones, graffiti artist LA II, and iconic superstar Grace Jones, Montez confronts Haring’s messy relationships to race-making and racial imaginaries, highlighting scenes of complicity in order to trouble both the positive connotations of inter-racial artistic collaboration and the limited framework of appropriation.

Signaling such recent activist and aesthetic concepts in the work of Kara Walker, Childish Gambino, BLM, Janelle Monae, 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.

An authoritative, richly illustrated history of six centuries of global protest art. Throughout history, artists and citizens have turned to protest art as a means of demonstrating social and political discontent. From the earliest broadsheets in the 1500s to engravings, photolithographs, prints, posters, murals, graffiti, and political cartoons, these endlessly inventive graphic forms have symbolized and spurred on power struggles, rebellions, spirited causes, and calls to arms.

The Black Arts Movement (BAM) encompassed a group of artists, musicians, novelists, and playwrights whose work combined innovative approaches to literature, film, music, visual arts, and theatre. With a heightened consciousness of black agency and autonomy--along with the radical politics of the civil rights movement, the Black Muslims, and the Black Panthers--these figures represented a collective effort to defy the status quo of American life and culture.

this book examines the use of art-and love-as a resource amid the recent wave of shootings by American police of innocent black women and men. Darby English attends to a cluster of artworks created in or for our tumultuous present that address themes of racial violence and representation idiosyncratically, neither offering solutions nor accommodating shallow narratives about difference.

This book seeks to open a conversation about the cultural turn in art therapy to explore the critical intersection of social change and social justice. By moving the practice of art therapy beyond standard individualized treatment models, the authors promote scholarship and dialogue that opens boundaries; they envision cross disciplinary approaches with a focus on intersectionality through the lens of black feminism, womanism, antiracism, queer theory, disability studies, and cultural theory.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Chicago witnessed a remarkable flourishing of visual arts associated with the Black Arts Movement. From the painting of murals as a way to reclaim public space and the establishment of independent community art centers to the work of the AFRICOBRA collective and Black filmmakers, artists on Chicago's South and West Sides built a vision of art as service to the people. Rebecca Zorach traces the little-told story of the visual arts of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, showing how artistic innovations responded to decades of racist urban planning that left Black neighborhoods sites of economic depression, infrastructural decay, and violence.

This books reflects on three specific incidents in the long and troubled history of art and race in America. It lays bare how the art world--no less than the country at large--has persistently struggled with the politics of race, and the ways this struggle has influenced how museums, curators and artists wrestle with notions of free speech and the specter of censorship.

Examines range of visual expressions of Black Power across American art and popular culture from 1965 through 1972. It begins with case studies of artist groups, including Spiral, OBAC and AfriCOBRA, who began questioning Western aesthetic traditions and created work that honored leaders, affirmed African American culture, and embraced an African lineage. Also showcased is an Oakland Museum exhibition of 1968 called "New Perspectives in Black Art," as a way to consider if Black Panther Party activities in the neighborhood might have impacted local artists' work. The concluding chapters concentrate on the relationship between selected Black Panther Party members and visual culture, focusing on how they were covered by the mainstream press, and how they self-represented to promote Party doctrine and agendas.

Focusing on the work of black women artists, this exhibition catalog examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism. It is the first exhibition to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color--distinct from the primarily white, middle-class mainstream feminist movement--in order to reorient conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period.

Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics. Crawford zooms in on the 1970s second wave of the Black Arts Movement and shows the connections between this final wave of the Black Arts movement and the early years of twenty-first century black aesthetics. She uncovers the circle of black post-blackness that pivots on the power of anticipation, abstraction, mixed media, the global South, satire, public interiority, and the fantastic

This exhibition catalog surveys a crucial period in American art history, bringing to light previously neglected histories of twentieth-century Black artists, including Sam Gilliam, Melvin Edwards, Jack Whitten, William T. Williams and Frank Bowling. It also explores the art historical and social contexts with subjects including black feminism; AfriCOBRA and other artist-run groups; the role of museums in the debates of the period; and where visual art sat in relation to the Black Arts Movement.

This book explores the contemporary legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki following the passage of three quarters of a century, and the role of art and activism in maintaining a critical perspective on the dangers of the nuclear age.

This book is a collection of articles that reflect on various connectivities between art and social justice and media which are pertinent to studying contemporary societies. How different forms of media and art, in the broadest possible meaning of these terms, reflect on, relate to, and campaign for social justice is an important topic to consider as artists, academics and activists.

Explores an important and little-studied side of the NAACP's activism in the cultural realm. In openly supporting African American artists, writers, and musicians in their creative endeavors, the organization aimed to change the way the public viewed the Black community. By overcoming stereotypes and the belief of the majority that African Americans were physically, intellectually, and morally inferior to whites, the NAACP believed it could begin to defeat racism. Illuminating important protests, from the fight against the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation to the production of anti-lynching art during the Harlem Renaissance, this insightful volume examines the successes and failures of the NAACP's cultural campaign from 1910 to the 1960s.

Does media representation advance racial justice? While the past decade has witnessed a push for increased diversity in visual media, Asians on Demand grapples with the pressing question of whether representation is enough to advance racial justice.

Places art history in terms of politics, social struggles, and the fight for justice from the colonial era through the present day. This book combines historical sweep with detailed examinations of individual artists and works in a politically charged narrative that spans the conquest of the Americas, the American Revolution, slavery and abolition, western expansion, the suffragette movement and feminism, civil rights movements, environmental movements, LGBT movements, antiglobalization movements, contemporary antiwar movements, and beyond.

This book focuses on four Black artists—Renée Green, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, and Fred Wilson—who have dominated and shaped the field of American art over the past two decades through large-scale installations that radically departed from prior conventions for representing the enslaved.

art historian Bridget R. Cooks analyzes the curatorial strategies, challenges, and critical receptions of the most significant museum exhibitions of African American art. 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 difference that continue to challenge art history, historiography, and American museum exhibition practices.

Francis explores the flowering of racial art rhetoric in criticism and history published in the 1920s and 1930s, and analyzes its underlying presence in contemporary discussions of artists of color.

A comprehensive anthology published in the early 200s which places issues of racial representation squarely on the canvas. Richly illustrated, this pioneering volume lays the groundwork for a better understanding of the complex and shifting category of race and its significance in our visual culture and everyday lives.