Review of Kienholz’s work, including the important anti-racist installation of 1969-72,
Five-Car Stud
Category: reviews
Strange Cargo: Jane Alexander at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine
Okwui Enwezor described the ephemera of Africa that arrived in European docks as “strange cargo”: as it was unloaded from ship to warehouse by longshoremen, as it was bid on, sold, and displayed in wealthy homes, lost and rediscovered, each object shaped European visions of Africa. ‘Africa’ as we imagine it now, was shaped by that strange cargo. Later in his essay in the January 1996 issue of frieze, Enwezor asked, “Why do we never consider the achievements of those artists who at great professional cost and individual isolation have not only transcended but have equally transfigured the borders constituting the notion of Africanity?” South African artist Jane Alexander’s work, now positioned throughout the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighbourhood, is part of the tradition of Africa’s strange cargo, but it is freight that – possibly at the cost of easy audience engagement, and…
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ACRAH Update | Website Launch: www.acrah.org
ACRAH has a new web address: www.acrah.org
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Empowered by Birmingham’s Struggles
Photojournalism: Restaveks, the “Ultimate Have-Nots in a Society of Have-Nots”
Exhibition Review: Los Carpinteros’ Playful Impertinence
Photographer highlights Jacmel (Haiti) life, culture
Art in Times of Quake and Cholera: Edouard Duval Carrié
The Naked Truth
“Past is never dead. It’s not even past.”—William Faulkner
Black-on-black commentary is only slightly an inside story. For under the halo of “Negro Sunshine,” at the entrance to Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, I experienced moments of real cultural nostalgia. My mother and the dream book and the endless numbers racket, with its weird logic and odd asymmetrical poetry, were somehow lodged in Glenn Ligon’s magical series of numbered paintings. Apart from the unusually personal in Ligon’s piercing vision, conceptualism—that somewhat elusive creature—seems to find its most complete expression in his oeuvre. Ligon is prepared to stream unflinchingly through various media, extracting elegantly exquisite beauty swathed in a tireless drama of inventions. Here the iniquities of history are refracted and recast. The heroes and heroines are unknown, enfeebled, and lost in time. Irony is legible and graphic, taking the form of a children’s coloring book. He places specificity within our universal…
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REV: Andrews, Blackness in the White Nation: A History of Afro-Uruguay
George Reid Andrews. Blackness in the White Nation: A History of Afro-Uruguay. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. xiii + 241 pp. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-3417-6; $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8078-7158-4.
Reviewed by Matthew F. Rarey (Department of Art History, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Published on H-AfrArts (August, 2011)
Commissioned by Jean M. Borgatti
Uruguay as Race and Nation
As the landscape of cultural studies scholarship increasingly favors transnational, translocal, and global analytical frameworks, George Reid Andrews’s Blackness in the White Nation: A History of Afro-Uruguay, offers a refreshingly nuanced and successful statement on the continuing importance of nation-specific analyses in the study of blackness and black history. Andrews contrasts Uruguayan social and cultural histories with those of other American nations, particularly in terms of black consciousness and racial (in)equality. At the same time, his careful research and use of primary sources hold the reader firmly inside Uruguay for the entire book. Andrews offers a wide range of case studies that speak to the roles played by political, social, and labor movements; sexuality; music; gender; race and minstrelsy; and carnivalesque performance in the formation of Uruguayan national understandings of blackness, whiteness, and the conception of racial democracy. What emerges is a complex yet highly accessible work, characterized by even-handed conclusions drawn from careful research and the foregrounding of primary sources. Blackness in the White Nation fills a major gap in Spanish- and English-language scholarship in the history of Latin America and the African diaspora, and should be of interest to scholars in fields as diverse as sociology and performance studies. Andrews’s work should also prove useful to advanced undergraduates and graduate students as well as to specialists in social and cultural history, music, dance, and performance, gender and women’s studies, and those interested in the continuing validity of national frameworks for working through African diasporic histories.
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31323
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