Black Artists in Their Own Words

"A keen and insightful window into a rich artistic legacy."—Publishers Weekly 

The first book to center Black artists' voices on Black aesthetics, revealing a century of evolving relationships to race, identity, and art.
 
What is Black art? No one has thought harder about that question than Black artists, yet their perspectives have been largely ignored. Instead, their stories have been told by intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, who defined "a school" of Black art in the early twentieth century. For the first time, Black Artists in Their Own Words offers an insightful corrective.
 
Esteemed art historian Lisa Farrington gathers writing spanning a century across the United States, the Caribbean, and the African continent—including from renowned artists Henry Tanner, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Romare Bearden, Wifredo Lam, Renee Cox, and many more—that reveals both evolutions and equivocations. Many artists, especially during the civil rights era, have embraced Black aesthetics as a source of empowerment. Others prefer to be artists first and Black second, while some have rejected racial identification entirely. Here, Black artists reclaim their work from reductive critical narratives, sharing the motivations underlying their struggles to create in a white-dominated art world.

Lisa Farrington is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the City University of New York, past Associate Dean of Fine Arts at Howard University, and author of Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists and African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History.

Contents
 
Acknowledgments
 
Introduction
 
1. THE MAKING OF A BLACK AESTHETIC
 
Henry Tanner
The Story of an Artist's Life I: Early Years (1909)
The Story of an Artist's Life II: Recognition (1909)
Letter to Eunice Tietjens (1914)
 
Alain Locke
The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts (1925)
 
2. THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
 
Hale Woodruff
My Meeting with Henry O. Tanner in 1928 (1970)
 
Meta Warrick Fuller
Letter to Freeman Henry Morris Murray (1915)
 
May Howard Jackson
Letter to Alain Locke (1929)
Obituary by W.E.B. Du Bois (1933)
 
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet
Diary: Paris, France (1922–1934)
 
Augusta Savage: Fontainebleau School of Fine Arts Scholarship Rejection
Letter from Ernest Peixotto to Ernestine Rose (1923)
Letter from Augusta Savage to the New York World (1923)
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Technique of Race Prejudice (1923)
Letter from Augusta Savage to W.E.B. Du Bois (1929)
 
Romare Bearden
The Negro Artist and Modern Art (1934)
 
Aaron Douglas
The Negro in American Culture (1936)
 
Harlem Artists' Guild
A Statement (1936)
 
Jacob Lawrence
Interview with Carroll Greene (1968)
 
James Porter
The Negro Artist and Racial Bias (1937)
 
3. THE BLACK DIASPORA I: NÉGRITUDE AND INDIGENISM
 
Ben Enwonwu
Problems of the African Artist Today (1956)
 
Ronald Moody
The Background of African Art (1957)
 
Kofi Antubam
Heritage in Universally Known Forms of Art (1963)
 
Gerard Sekoto
Responsibility and Solidarity in African Culture (1959)
 
Wifredo Lam
On Haiti, Interview with Max Pol Fouchet (1976)
My Painting Is an Act of Decolonization, Interview with Gerardo Mosquera (1980)
 
Lois Mailou Jones
Interview with Charles H. Rowell (1989)
 
4. ABSTRACTION
 
Bob Thompson
Letter to Cecile & Holmes & Chipper & Buster & C.C. (ca. 1960)
Artist Statement (1965)
Robert Thompson and the Old Masters, by Jeanne Siegel (1967)
 
Alma Thomas
Autobiographical Account (ca. 1964)
Earth Paintings (ca. 1970–1978)
 
Al Loving
Artist's Statement (1969)
 
Sam Gilliam
Hanging Loose: An Interview with Donald Miller (1973)
 
David Driskell
Artist's Statement (1973)
Interview with Curlee Holton and Faith Ringgold (2005)
 
Martin Puryear
Interview with Hugh M. Davies and Helaine Posner (1984)
 
Barbara Chase-Riboud
Letter to President Bill Clinton (1994)
 
5. THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT
 
Elizabeth Catlett
The Negro People and American Art at Mid-Century (1961)
Address to Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art (1970)
 
Spiral
Group Statement (1965)
 
Raymond Saunders
Black Is a Color (1967)
 
Ishmael Reed
The Black Artist: Calling a Spade a Spade (1967)
 
Charles White
Art and Soul (1969)
Wanted Poster Series Statement (1969)
 
Benny Andrews and Cliff Joseph
Black Emergency Cultural Coalition Metropolitan Museum Protest (1969)
 
The Whitney Museum Protest
Benny Andrews and Henri Ghent, Black Emergency Cultural Coalition Statement (1971)
Nigel Jackson, Rebuttal to the Whitney Museum Exhibition (1971)
Black Artists Refuse to Participate in the Whitney Exhibition: John Dowell, Sam Gilliam, Daniel Johnson, Joe Overstreet, Melvin Edwards, Richard Hunt, and William T. Williams (1971)
 
Dana Chandler
Proposal to Eradicate Institutional Racism at the Boston Museum (1970)
 
Jeff Donaldson
10 in Search of a Nation: African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists (1970)
 
David Hammons
Interview with Joseph E. Young (1970)
Artist's Statement (1970)
 
6. THE BLACK DIASPORA II: POSTCOLONIAL ART AND FESTAC
 
Skunder Boghossian
On His Use of Ancient African Legends, Customs, and Symbols (1962)
 
Vincent Akwete Kofi
Sculpture in Ghana (1964)
 
Abdias do Nascimento
Open Letter to the First World Festival of Black Arts (1966)
Candomblé: The Source of Art (1978)
 
Papa Ibra Tall
The Role of the Painter (1970)
Interview with Elizabeth Harney (1994)
 
Erhabor Emokpae
My School Is Life Itself (1977)
 
Ben Enwonwu
On the Impact of FESTAC (1977)
 
Arthur Monroe
The Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (1977)
 
Momodou Ceesay
Socialism in African Culture (1977)
 
7. "AFROFEMCENTRISM": BLACK FEMINIST ART
 
Faith Ringgold
Does Art Have a Gender? (1972)
A Message to the Could Be Political Artists of the World (1973)
 
Emma Amos
Some Do's and Don'ts for Black Women Artists (1982)
Letter to the Editors of the Feminist Journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G (1989)
Contemporary Feminism: Art Practice, Theory, and Activism (1999)
 
Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis
Afrofemcentrism in the Art of Catlett and Ringgold (1987)
 
Betye Saar
Unfinished Business: The Return of Aunt Jemima (1998)
 
Kay Brown
The Emergence of Black Women Artists: The 1970s, New York (1998)
 
8. WORD! CONCEPTUAL ART
 
Howardena Pindell
Free, White and 21 (1980)
Art (World) and Racism (1987)
 
Lorraine O'Grady
Mlle Bourgeoise Noire 1955 (1981)
 
Lorna Simpson
You're Fine (1988)
 
Pope.L. (formerly William Pope.L.)
Tompkins Square Crawl (1991)
Some Notes on the Ocean . . . (2012)
 
Glenn Ligon
Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background) small version 1 (1991)
 
Renée Stout
Tippy (1998)
Can't Breathe (2015)
 
Fred Wilson
Interview with Mark A. Graham (2007)
Museums Move Glacially (2006)
 
Willie Cole
Interview with Nancy Princenthal (2019)
 
Simone Leigh
Response to Whitney Biennial Critics (2019)
 
9. RETHINKING RACE: FROM BLACK TO POST-BLACK AND B(L)ACK AGAIN
 
Jean-Michel Basquiat
In His Own Words: Art and Photography Quoted (1978–1988)
 
Keith Morrison
The Global Village of African American Art (1996)
 
The Kara Walker Debate
Juliette Bowles, Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroes (1997)
Juliette Bowles, Stereotypes Subverted: Editor's Response (1998)
 
Michael Ray Charles
Interview with Don Bacigalupi and Marilyn Kern-Foxworth (1997)
 
Robert Colescott
Interview with Paul Karlstrom (1999)
 
Renee Cox
Interview with Cristinerose Parravicini (1998)
 
Kerry James Marshall
Portraiture & Representation (2008)
 
Kehinde Wiley
Interview with Brandon Fortune (2008)
Kehinde Wiley Explains the Botanical Imagery in His Painting of President Obama (2018)
 
Coco Fusco
Coco Fusco Talks about Her Latest Performance (2013)
 
Martine Syms
The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto (2013)
 
List of Illustrations
Index