Las Meninas
2019
Simone Leigh
(American, b. 1967)
America
See Also
Videos
Gallery Hangouts: Las Meninas
Contemporary Art in 60 Seconds: The Figure
Visually Similar by AI
CMA Store
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
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.
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.
Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists
Antwaun SargentWhat's new, now and next from contemporary Black artistsThis book surveys the work of a new generation of Black artists, and also features the voices of a diverse group of curators who are on the cutting edge of contemporary art. As mission-driven collectors, Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi have championed emerging artists of African descent through museum loans and institutional support. But there has never been an opportunity to consider their acclaimed collection as a whole until now.Edited by writer Antwaun Sargent (author of The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion), Young, Gifted and Black draws from this collection to shed new light on works by contemporary artists of African descent. At a moment when debates about the politics of visibility within the art world have taken on renewed urgency, and establishment voices such as the New York Times are declaring that "it has become undeniable that African American artists are making much of the best American art today," Young, Gifted and Black takes stock of how these new voices are impacting the way we think about identity, politics and art history itself.Young, Gifted and Black contextualizes artworks with contributions from artists, curators and other experts. It features a wide-ranging interview with Bernard Lumpkin and Thelma Golden, director, and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem; and an in-depth essay by Antwaun Sargent situating Lumpkin in a long lineage of Black art patrons. A landmark publication, this book illustrates what it means (in the words of Nina Simone) to be young, gifted, and Black in contemporary art.192 pagesFirst published September 29, 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, a detail image, or any image with a color bar, request a digital file from Image Services.