(re) Introductions
What was the main issue with the Harlem on my Mind exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and whose photographs were discovered as a result of the exhibition?
- the exhibition only featured photojournalism, film projections, and sound recordings meant to represent life in Harlem, but shockingly included no paintings or sculptures by Black artists working in Harlem.
- James Van Der Zee's photos were discovered as a result of the exhibition
What is one defining feature of Aaron Douglas's painting style?
- flat, silhouetted figures
- concentric circles
- layered imagery that requires us to look "through" the painting
What was La Revue Nègre?
- a half-hour, multi-act spectacle that featured a company of 20 Black dancers (including Josephine Baker)
- the show had a number of scenes, including a Mississippi steam boat race, a skyscraper scene, and a Harlem cabaret scene, but the most famous part was the finale: la danse sauvage
What kinds of props did Seydou Keïta have in his studio?
chairs, handbags, radios, a telephone, an alarm clock, a scooter, a bicycle, plastic flowers, glasses, European style suits, jewelry, watches, and fountain pens
What socio-political event do Malick Sidibé's party photographs document?
In 1960, Mali gained independence and his photographs document the new attitudes and social activities of the younger generation
Two Centuries of Black American Art was a record-breaking exhibition at LACMA that toured across the country. On the level of subject matter, why was this exhibition groundbreaking?
- this show is considered the first comprehensive survey of Black American art, featuring 200 works by 63 artists mostly covering the two centuries between 1750 and 1950
- the exhibition very importantly acknowledges the fact that there are (and indeed have been) Black artists in America since the country was founded
What did Jacob Lawrence consider to be the first step in his artistic process?
research!
What was the inspiration behind Katherine Dunham's dance L'Ag Ya?
- L’Ag Ya was inspired by a fighting dance from Martinique
What does "griot" mean?
In a number of West African cultures (and specifically in Mali) a griot is a highly admired and respected oral historian, musician, or poet who creates and preserves individual and collective identities through their stories
What was Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation?
- an assortment of fiction, poetry, art, and essays
- considered the first national book of African American experience.
- the anthology announced that Black artists were important players on the American cultural scene and was meant to inspire young Black artists
What does Kobena Mercer mean when he says that the exhibition The Other Story: Asian, African, and Caribbean Artists in Postwar Britain “had to carry an impossible burden of representation”?
“The exhibition had to carry an impossible burden of representation in the sense that a single exhibition had to ‘stand for’ the totality of everything that could fall within the category of black art.”
- basically, the curator had one chance to tell this story of Black diasporic art in postwar Britain so there was an impossible pressure to tell everything all at once.
What is the peculiar way in which Jacob Lawrence's Migration series was collected by museums?
The 60-work series was split in half: the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC acquired the odd-numbered panels and MoMA in New York received the even-numbered ones.
What did critics mean when they said: "Mr. Féral Benga is a black man, not 100%, but 200% black."
- Benga, who was from Senegal, was considered more "authentically" Black because he was from Africa
How did Gordon Parks’ photographs for The Restraints: Open and Hidden elicit empathy from the Life magazine readers?
Gordon Parks doesn't offer us a "typical" civil rights photograph in that he isn't showing us a protest, the aftermath of violence, or brutality. Rather, by focusing his photo essay on this one particular family going about their daily lives, he emphasizes intimacy and shared human experience.
How does the story of Emmett Till intersect with the history of photojournalism?
How was the Studio Museum in Harlem conceived that set it apart from most other art museums and what was (and continues to be) the museum's mantra?
- not a collecting museum
- founded as more of a workshop with a prominent artists-in-residence program to support contemporary artists
- mantra: Black art was whatever Black artists decided it would be
Name and define two concepts W.E.B. Du Bois promoted
- the talented tenth: the so-called talented tenth represented the "best examples" of Black Americans: they were educated, at the top of their field, earning money, successful leaders who could instigate social change. Du Bois felt that the talented tenth were the people whom the Black community should be emulating.
-Double consciousness: the idea that Black Americans are always conscious of, on the one hand, looking inward at oneself, attempting to develop one’s own authentic mode of self-expression; yet, on the other hand, are always conscious of being defined by the external gaze of the majority white population.
What does it mean that Katherine Dunham had an "embodied research practice" during her fieldwork trips in the Caribbean?
- she did not maintain the expected distance we might expect from an anthropologist, but rather participated in the rituals/events she was studying
- for example, she wanted to learn about the physical components of voodoo, so she actually participated in one portion of initiation ceremonies into voodoo.
What audience were Malick Sidibé's Vues de Dos images intended for and how, visually, did he decide to compose his images based on that audience?
- made for the international art world audience
- Unlike a traditional portrait, these sitters refuse the meet the gaze of their (mostly white) art audience
What are two ways we might interpret the idea of James Van Der Zee's photography studio being a "studio of transformation?"
- it was a place where the client could go and imagine how you wanted to be represented on film
- Van Der Zee used numerous techniques (hand-tinting, double printing, and even adding jewelry) to embellish his photographs
For the 1939 exhibition Contemporary Negro Art at the Baltimore Art Museum, the curators argued that they needed to highlight Black art "in order to have American art fully document American life and experience and thus more adequately reflect America.” What does that mean?
Put in the simplest terms, it means that Black art is contemporary art.
- Black art isn’t something separate – it is part of the larger contemporary art narrative.
- the exhibition showed a vibrant group of artists who could be analyzed through some of the same frameworks with which we study another type of contemporary American art.
How did Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller’s sculpture Mary Turner: A Silent Protest Against Mob Violence contrast with mainstream media’s approach to communicating acts of racial violence?
- At this time, images of lynchings were circulated in a variety of ways. In addition to white supremacists circulating images of lynchings as "souvenirs," Black organizations like the NAACP published photographs of lynchings in the hopes that it would shock people enough to support their causes.
- Fuller, by making her work in this particular way, gives Turner dignity; she is not the perpetual victim.
According to the scholar Mae Henderson, what was the “ultimate paradox” of Josephine Baker’s performances?
“The ultimate paradox of Baker’s performance is in its interrogation and renegotiation of racial difference, since her role-playing of the primitive not only affirmed her modernism, but demonstrated her art in mimicking what had been construed as nature in the ethnographic spectacle.”
- Deconstructing primitivism while she is simultaneously staging its reenactment
how does the term “visual griot” apply to photographers like Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé?
The term “visual griot” can be applied to photographers who, like a griot, embellish and create idealized identities for their patrons and act as preservers of personal and collective social identity.
In class we watched a scene of Josephine Baker in the film Princesse Tam Tam. Describe what happened in that scene and explain how that might be read as a metaphor for Baker's own life (as she is seen by European audiences)
- Josephine Baker is at a fancy party with a performance taking place on stage. She becomes overwhelmed by the music and, with the encouraging of a white woman at her table, she leaps from her seat onto the stage. She throws her high heeled shoes off of her feet and strips from her shiny lamé gown to reveal a dark dress underneath and begins to perform a highly-energized dance.
- Josephine Baker is an immensely popular performer and movie star. She orbits within the most fashionable of French society. Yet, through the roles she is given, she can never solely be a glamorous movie star; there are always these "primitive" performances that she can't seem to get away from