In The Art of Remembering art historian and curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw explores African American art and representation from the height of the British colonial period to the present. She engages in the process of "rememory"—the recovery of facts and narratives of African American creativity and self-representation that have been purposefully set aside, actively ignored, and disremembered. In analyses of the work of artists ranging from Scipio Moorhead, Moses Williams, and Aaron Douglas to Barbara Chase-Riboud, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, and Deana Lawson, Shaw demonstrates that African American art and history may be remembered and understood anew through a process of intensive close looking, cultural and historical contextualization, and biographic recuperation or consideration. Shaw shows how embracing rememory expands the possibilities of history by acknowledging the existence of multiple forms of knowledge and ways of understanding an event or interpreting an object. In so doing, Shaw thinks beyond canonical interpretations of art and material and visual culture to imagine “what if,” asking what else did we once know that has been lost.
- Cover
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I. Past as Prelude
- 1. Facing Phillis Wheatley: Portraiture and Publishing in the Era of The American Revolution
- 2. Profiling Moses Williams: Silhouettes and Race in the Early Republic
- 3. The Freedom to Marry for All: Painting Interracial Families During the Era of the Civil War
- 4. Landscapes of Labor: Race, Religion, and Rhode Island in the Painting of Edward Mitchell Bannister
- Part II. Modern Blackness
- 5. “This Gifted Sculptress of the Race”: The Intersectional Art of May Howard Jackson
- 6. Singing Saints: Sargent Johnson’s Modern Blackness
- 7. Norman Lewis’s Dan Mask: The Challenge of the African “Thing” in the 1930s
- 8. “Bolshevized by Conditions”: African American Artists and Mexican Muralism
- 9. Malcolm X Rising: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Phenomenological Art
- 10. Richard Yarde’s Mojo Blues
- Part III. Beginning Again
- 11. Remembering the Remnants: Contemporary Art and Hurricane Katrina
- 12. The Wandering Gaze of Carrie Mae Weems’s the Louisiana Project
- 13. Ten Years of 30 Americans
- 14. “No Man Is an Island”: The Diasporic Performances of Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz and Sheldon Scott
- 15. What Deana Lawson Wants
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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