Rage Against Machine
2008
Robert A. Pruitt
(American, b. 1975)
America
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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
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.
Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch
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