Author: Jacqueline Francis
Writer, researcher, educator, curator, arts consultant, and occasional artist in San Francisco, California. I'm Dean of the Humanities and Science Division at California College of the Arts.
Inge Hardison’s Realist Sculpture– ” more in-depth scholarship needed”
“A Sculptor of Black Heroes Leaves a Legacy”HIDDEN FIGURES and the genre of “race” film
Taraji P. Henson’s question at the end of this preview feature piece, “Rocket Science, Race and the ’60s,” published in today’s Times is provocative:
“I hate when I do a film, and it has a lot of African-Americans and they call it a black film,” Ms. Henson said. “I don’t wake up and go, ‘Let’s see, this weekend, I’m going to see a Chinese film, I’m going to see a black film, no I’m going to see a while film with a black person in it.’ Who does that?”
(Hmmm, everyone.)
Malevich’s BLACK SQUARE–race/racialization as underpinnings of modernism
In Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America, I wrote that “race was discursively central to modernity” and that “modernism depended on the the conceptualization of race in ethnocultural, social, and national terms.” Moreover, I argued that “the idea of the essential subject, as a construct, allowed for the preservation of racist and limiting terms used by admirers and detractors.”
The book’s focus were the conditions of early twentieth-century American modernism. Yet, it’s well-established that some of the ethno-racial preoccupations of US modernism had parallels in Europe. Christian Weikop’s and Esther Schreuder’s research, published in The Image of the Black in Western Art: The Twentieth Century—The Impact Images of Africa, are recent additions to the scholarship as it concerned the modernists of Western and Northern Europe and the modern images of those regions.
But what of Russia and Eastern Europe during the same period? The time is now.
“Russia Discovers Two Secrets Under Avant-Garde Masterpiece”
Art Historians Find Racist Joke Hidden Under Malevich’s BLACK SQUARE
Call for Research
From Art Historian and Critic Judith Wilson-Paes:
Somebody needs to research a book/ organize an exhibition on the West’s black community photographers–i.e., Oakland’s E.F. Joseph, San Francisco’s David Johnson, and the two LA women photojournalists who are in Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s book on black women photographers.
These California photographers are our Van Der Zees and W.S. Robertses in the western US. And as Joy Byrd’s Facebook post makes clear, they documented a little-known chapter of African American history–the flowering of 20th-c. West Coast black communities.
ACRAH 