Artwork Page for The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture
The Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture
1986
Jacob Lawrence, Lou Stovall Workshop, Inc., Amistad Research Center
(American, 1917–2000)
America
See Also
Visually Similar by AI
CMA Store
The Black Index
by Bridget R Cooks (Editor), Sarah Watson (Editor)The artists featured in The Black Index—Dennis Delgado, Alicia Henry, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, Titus Kaphar, Whitfield Lovell, and Lava Thomas—build upon the tradition of Black self-representation as an antidote to colonialist images. Their translations of photography challenge the medium’s long-assumed qualities of objectivity, legibility, and identification. Using drawing, sculpture, and digital technology to transform the recorded image, these artists question our reliance on photography as a privileged source for documentary objectivity and historical understanding. The works featured here offer an alternative practice—a Black index. In the hands of these six artists, the index still serves as a finding aid for information about Black subjects, but it also challenges viewers’ desire for classification and, instead, redirects them toward alternative information. 128 pagesPublished November 2nd, 2021
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.
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
American Struggle: Teens Respond to Jacob Lawrence
by Peabody Essex Museum "A fresh lens for viewing Jacob Lawrence's art: through the perspective of teens of color... An invaluable resource amplifying marginalized teen voices and conveying Lawrence's relevance to their own lives." ―Kirkus Reviews In the mid-1950s, as Brown v. Board of Education felled the ideology of “separate but equal,” the great African American artist Jacob Lawrence saw the need for a version of American history that reckoned with its complexities and contradictions yet was shared by all its citizens. The result was his monumental work Struggle. . . from the History of the American People. Lawrence, the best known black American artist of the 20th century, developed the series of thirty panels, each measuring 12 × 16 inches, over the course of two years. Lawrence created the panels as history you could hold in your hands and intended to reproduce the images in a book that he never realized. The paintings depict signal moments in the American Revolution and the early decades of the American republic, and feature the words and actions of founding fathers, enslaved people, women, and Native Americans. In January 2020, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is mounting the landmark exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle. The show, which unites the panels in one place for the first time in nearly half a century, then travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., on a two-year national tour. In the spirit of Lawrence’s project, this collection includes brief interpretive texts written by teens in response to the Struggle series. This illustrated book features a chorus of thirty singular young adult voices expressing how Lawrence and his Struggle series speaks to them on a personal, emotional level. The young writers come from a broad variety of races and ethnicities, nationalities, religions, genders, sexualities, and abilities, and underrepresented voices. As Jacob Lawrence mined American history to reflect upon events, he saw happening around him in segregation-era America, these young adults use these panels to comment on their experiences in today’s America. 200 pages Published January 21, 2020
Contact us
The information about this object, including provenance, may not be currently accurate. If you notice a mistake or have additional information about this object, please email collectionsdata@clevelandart.org.
To request more information about this object, study images, or bibliography, contact the Ingalls Library Reference Desk.
All images and data available through Open Access can be downloaded for free. For images not available through Open Access, or any image with a color bar, request a digital file from Image Services.