Alien Huddle
1993–95
Martin Puryear
(American, b. 1941)
America
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Collusions of Fact and Fiction
by Ilka Saal Collusions of Fact and Fiction traces a generational shift in late twentieth-century African American cultural engagements with the history and legacies of transatlantic slavery. With a focus on works by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and visual artist Kara Walker, the book explores how, in comparison to the first wave of neo-slave narratives of the 1970s and 1980s, artists of the 1990s and early 2000s tend to approach the past from the vantage point of a liberal entanglement of fact and fiction as well as a highly playful, often humorous, and sometimes irreverent signifying on entrenched motifs, iconographies, and historiographies. Saal argues that the attempt to reconstruct or recuperate the experience of African Americans under slavery is no longer at stake in the works of artists growing up in the post–Civil Rights era. Instead, they lay bare the discursive dimension of our contemporary understanding of the past, and address the continued impact of its various verbal and visual signs upon contemporary identities. In this manner, Parks and Walker stake out new possibilities for engaging the past and inhabiting the present and future. Published 2021
Instill and Inspire
by Grace Stanislaus Foreword by Jonathan Green For over fifty years, John and Vivian Hewitt visited galleries, artists' studios, and exhibitions in the United States, the Caribbean, and elsewhere in the Americas, collecting hundreds of paintings, etchings, and sketches. The John and Vivian Hewitt Collection of African-American Art represents fifty-eight works that celebrate the expression and passion of twenty artists, including Romare Bearden, Margaret Burroughs, Jonathan Green, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Ann Tanksley, and Henry Ossawa Tanner. The Hewitts believed that sharing their collection with the public would enhance the visibility of artists of African descent and showcase their cultural contributions. The Hewitt Collection was subsequently acquired by the Bank of America and generously donated to The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts and Culture in Charlotte, North Carolina. This book contains all fifty-eight works from the collection, exquisitely reproduced in full color. Grace C. Stanislaus provides a text on the significance of the collection that is supplemented by interviews with Vivian Hewitt, David Taylor of the Gantt Center, and art collectors Harmon and Harriett Kelley, and Nancy Washington. 240 pages Published 2017
African American Art 2025 Wall Calendar
African American artists have made monumental contributions to the world of art, producing an influential body of work informed by the Black experience. Celebrated here is the art of Emma Amos, Grafton Tyler Brown, Keshida Layone, Loïs Mailou Jones, Whitfield Lovell, Dominique Ramsey, Charles White, Laura James, Charles Ethan Porter, Romare Bearden, Laura Wheeler Waring, and Aaron Douglas—some of whom are very well known and others who aren’t but should be. Working in diverse styles, techniques, and media, many of these artists have created memorable images laced with social commentary, cultural affirmation, myth and history, and simple love for people in all their beauty, folly, and nobility. Others have discarded the constraints of representational imagery for a semi-abstracted language that challenges viewers to consider the familiar and the unknown from new perspectives. Twelve superb works of art have been selected for this calendar.
Perceptual Drift
By Key Jo Lee A powerful reframing of the study of Black art and the historical and contemporary status of Black livesPerceptual Drift offers a new interpretive model drawing on four key works of Black art in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection. In its chapters, leading Black scholars from multiple disciplines deploy materialist approaches to challenge the limits of canonic art history, rooted as it is in social and racial inequities. The opening essay by Key Jo Lee introduces the concept of “perceptual drift”: a means of exploring the matter of Blackness, or Blackness as matter in art and scholarship. Christina Sharpe examines Rho I (1977) by Jack Whitten; Lee explores Lorna Simpson’s Cure/Heal (1992); Robin Coste Lewis analyzes Ellen Gallagher’s Bouffant Pride (2003); and Erica Moiah James considers Simone Leigh’s Las Meninas (2019). This approach seeks to transform how art history is written, introduce readers to complex objects and theoretical frameworks, illuminate meanings and untold histories, and simultaneously celebrate and open new entry points into Black art. Published 2022 80 pages, 53 color + b-w illus.
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