
John Ott has published his new book, Mixed Media: The Visual Cultures of Racial Integration, with the University of California Press.
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/mixed-media/paper
This volume investigates Black and white artists’ efforts toward racial integration, from the infamous 1931 Scottsboro Boys trial until Brown v. Board’s 1954 desegregation of public schools. Individual chapters investigate the nationwide public art initiatives of the New Deal, the imagery and cultural programs of the multiracial Popular Front, graphics produced for CIO-member labor unions, Jacob Lawrence’s war paintings and other visual propaganda of the armed forces, and the struggle of New York abstract painters of African descent to navigate the criticism, galleries, and markets of the mainstream art world.
Ott is Professor of Art History at James Madison University in Virginia.