Mixed Media investigates Black and white artists' efforts toward racial integration, from the infamous 1931 Scottsboro Boys trial until Brown v. Board's 1954 desegregation of public schools. Each chapter attends to a distinctive visual ecology fostered by institutions and individuals committed to desegregation to varying degrees, including the nationwide public art initiatives of the New Deal, the imagery and cultural programs of the multiracial Popular Front, graphics produced for CIO-member labor unions, Jacob Lawrence's war paintings and other visual propaganda of the armed forces, and the struggle of New York abstract painters of African descent to navigate the criticism, museums, and markets of the mainstream art world. Together, they explore the divergent approaches to conceptualizing and implementing racial integration along the liberal-radical axis.
John Ott is author of Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California and coauthor of Muybridge and Mobility.
"Few historians of American art have the archival skills or curiosity to uncover the trove of primary sources—from murals to magazines, pamphlets to posters—upon which John Ott builds his arguments. The product of this extraordinary research, Mixed Media sheds new light not only on the interrelations of popular visual culture and the fine arts, but also on the deep connections that emerged between art by African Americans and social discourses on (de)segregation in the 1930s and 1940s."—Tanya Sheehan, author of Study in Black and White: Photography, Race, Humor
"Ott provides a new cosmology for understanding the possibilities for and limitations on visual art's ability to make social change in twentieth-century America. Through examples from federally funded programs, Popular Front organizations, and labor unions, Mixed Media offers a well-researched analysis of the efforts to advance and contain visions of racial integration. Looking inside and outside of the fine art world, Ott shows how artists argued that national unity against a common enemy abroad could be achieved only through interracial unity at home."—Bridget R. Cooks, author of Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum
328 pp.7 x 10Illus: 108 color images
9780520417595$45.00|£38.00Paper
Feb 2026