The David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park is proud to announce its spring exhibition, Shifting: African American Women Artists and the Power of Their Gaze. The exhibition, organized by the Driskell Center, is curated by the David C. Driskell Center’s Executive Director, Professor Curlee R. Holton, assisted by Deputy Director, Dorit Yaron. The exhibition will be on display at the Driskell Center from Thursday, March 2, 2017 through Friday, May 26, 2017, with an opening reception on Thursday, March 2nd, from 5-7PM.
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Q&A with Lubaina Himid–“Black British Art,” Then and Now
Lubaina Himid, The Rapid Effects of Abolition, from the Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service series (2007), an assortment of overpainted plates, bowls and terrines at A-N.
Lubaina Himid is enjoying two one-artist exhibitions in the UK this year. Check out her interview with A-N and her piece in Frieze on her influences. About time!
Lubaina Himid’s grandmother, MaShulan, photographed in Zanzibar in 1954, and reproduced as a poster for the exhibition ‘New Robes for MaShulan – Lubaina Himid, Work Past and Present’, Rochdale Art Gallery, 1987. Courtest: the artist at Frieze
How Ya Like Me Now?
Last week The Guardian reported on this ridiculously dumb blunder (a euphemism for what it really was).
Richard Dyer, more than twenty years ago, wrote about the position of whiteness as the norm, and this incident reminds us that theories trickle down at variable rates.
Hard not to think of David Hammons’ bitingly incisive How Ya Like Me Now? (1988), a piece that generated its own complicated response. As is the case with so many Hammons’ projects, How Ya Like Me Now? seems to speak to our moment, too.
New ACRAH website feature!
The Association of Critical Race Art History (ACRAH) is excited to announce a new feature on our website: a bibliographic resource devoted to issues of race, ethnicity, art, and visual culture. Please visit Bibliographies to view.
In conjunction with the launch of this resource, a series of reading groups are being organized in New York, the Bay Area, Washington D.C., and Boston. The primary purpose of these groups are to give area scholars an opportunity to discuss key texts pertaining to the visualization and representation of races and the project of racialization in art and visual culture. If you are interested in participating in an established group, or would like to start a group in your area, please visit Reading Groups for additional information.
John W. Mosley’s Mid-20th Century Photos of Black Philadelphia
Check out @hyperallergic’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/hyperallergic/status/813744006114971648?s=09
The Sounds of Race
Cultures and ethnicities are represented–visually, orally, and in other ways as well.
Joseph Beuys proposed that speech is sculptural, and certainly, we do perceive the body “behind” the words that form them.
Asked the question “What can I do for you?” what image is formed in our minds?
[Voice over American actor Susan Bennett provides the voice of Siri for Apple.]
Color portraits of immigrants at Ellis Island – in pictures | Culture | The Guardian
Visualizing a US White Racial Identity
Photo by Chris Arnade from The Guardian
Chris Arnade‘s piece in today’s Guardian is interesting for what this New York-based photojournalist writes and who he photographs in Prestonsburg, Kentucky. In a town that proclaims its ethno-racial homogeneity–an adjective often summoned to characterize Iceland and Japan–and its socio-economic ethos as well, we have to wonder who wasn’t interviewed, photographed, or seen. Who doesn’t make it into the final account?
Who owns the Hardee’s franchise, the now-closed mine, and the strip mall? Where do these proprietors live and where do their children go to school? How do they identify socially, ethnically, racially, and class-wise? How do they look and how do they present their looks? The Petersboro resident quoted in the story’s last paragraphy seems confident in knowing how he and his neighbors will be presented.
Life in Appalachia: Walmart, church, politics and a tight community – in pictures
Arnade’s essay and its photos prompt me to think about “then-and-now” issues: they follow on the heels of my visit to a University of San Francisco colleague’s “Black US Cinema” class last night. She screened The Blood of Jesus and Within Our Gates for her students. We had a good discussion that touched on Doris Ulmann’s photos of the rural South and Appalachia, Cabin in the Sky, and The Green Pastures. Has the lens trained on rural America changed much since the first half of the twentieth century?
Ed Smith: The Untold Story Of A Black Video Game Pioneer
Summertime — Genealogy Time
Art historian and visual cultural studies scholar Judith Wilson has brought our attention to the exhibition of a black woman’s portrait at the Middlesex County Historical Society in Connecticut.
This unattributed pastel on paper image (circa 1904) depicts Anna M. Warmsley (circa 1870s/1880s-1944). Warmsley (née Steadman [sp?]) lived in Middletown, Conn.
Judith saw Carla Halloway’s Facebook posting about this portrait last week. Ms. Halloway of East Hartford, Connecticut wrote that the portrait had been “rescued from the trash” and given to the historical society.
Ms. Halloway’s post generated a lively FB discussion, including comments from a descendant of Anna Warmsley and her husband Herbert Elmer Warmsley (1878/1881-1954). The historical society also has a portrait of Herbert Warmsley.
In online public records (US Federal Census, etc.) and others on ancestry.com, the Warmsley’s family name sometimes appears as “Warmesley.” In early records, Anna is termed a “Negro” and Herbert, whose listed profession was a “galvanizer” in a foundry, a “mulatto.” Anna was a housekeeper for “a private family. She married Herbert when she was about 21. (No marriage certificate appears online. But the US Federal Census of 1910 states that they had been married for five years.)
Who might have painted the Warmsley couple around 1904? They were people of some means and were respected in their community. Did they commission their portraits? White or other non-black artists may have taken up this job. And what about the possibility that the portraits were done by one of the several East Coast artists of color whose names and works we know today?
John G. (Gwynne) Chaplin (1828-1907) worked in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and painted representational mythological and Biblical themes, and portraits. A man of mixed ethnicity–European-American and African-American–Chaplin traveled to Germany and had a studio in Dusseldorf before returning to the US to settle in Youngstown, Pennsylvania. (The actor Charlie Chaplin [1889-1977] was once told that he was related to the artist Chaplin.)
Black Hartford native Nelson E. Primus (1842-1916) made his reputation as a portraitist. But he moved to San Francisco in 1895, so it seems unlikely that he painted the Warmsleys.
Charles Ethan Porter (1847-1923) was a black artist from Hartford. Porter’s still lifes and realist landscapes were admired in the late 19th and early 20th century, and they’re sought after now by collectors of African-American artists’ production. His brushy style seems quite different from the linear approach of the Warmsley portrait. Sounds like a good time to return to the monograph exhibition catalogues on Porter by Helen Krieble et al. (1987) and the New Britain Museum of American Art (2008).
Annie E.A. Walker (1855-1929) was born in Brooklyn, and appears to have spent her younger years in Alabama and in Dallas, Texas. She studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC, and graduated from the Cooper Union School for the Advancement of Science and Art in 1895. (See this account of her Cooper Union years.) Afterward, she traveled to France and studied at the Academie Julian in Paris for several years. Her best known work is the Salon-exhibited pastel on paper called La Parisienne (Howard University Art Gallery). She returned the US in the first decade of the 20th century and worked in Washington, DC. Her career and activities were researched by James V. Herring (1942), James A. Porter (1967), Lowery Sims (1978), Andrew Cosentino and Henry H. Glassie (1983), Tritobia Hayes Benjamin (1993), and others. Yet Walker is an artist about whom we don’t know enough. Works are attributed to her here and there, including in some files I haven’t looked at in years. Time to blow the dust off those. More to come…
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