FARRINGTON, Lisa (ed.)
Black Artists in Their Own Words

What is Black art? No one has thought harder about that question than Black artists, yet their perspectives have been largely ignored. Instead, their stories have been told by intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, who defined "a school" of Black art in the early twentieth century. For the first time, Black Artists in Their Own Words offers an insightful corrective.
 
Esteemed art historian Lisa Farrington gathers writing spanning a century across the United States, the Caribbean, and the African continent—including from renowned artists Henry Tanner (“The Story of an Artist’s Life,” 1909), Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (“Diary: Paris, France,” 1922-34), Romare Bearden (“The Negro Artist and Modern Art,” 1934), Elizabeth Catlett (“Address to Conference on the Functional Aspects of Black Art,” 1970), Coco Fusco (“Coco Fusco Talks about Her Latest Performance,” 2013), Martine Syms (“The Mundane Futurist Manifesto,” 2013), and many more—as well as interviews—with Jacob Lawrence (1968), Wilfredo Lam (1976 and 1980), Sam Gilliam (1973), Renee Cox (1998), among others—that reveals both evolutions and equivocations—from the Harlem Artists’ Guild’s 1936 “Statement” to declarations from the 1971 Whitney Museum Protest, to the “Kara Walker Debate” of 1997-98.

Many artists, especially during the civil rights era, have embraced Black aesthetics as a source of empowerment. Others prefer to be artists first and Black second, while some have rejected racial identification entirely. Here, Black artists reclaim their work from reductive critical narratives, sharing the motivations underlying their struggles to create in a white-dominated art world. [publishers’ note]

T o C:

1. THE MAKING OF A BLACK AESTHETIC

2. THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

3. THE BLACK DIASPORA I: NÉGRITUDE AND INDIGENISM

4. ABSTRACTION

5. THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT

6. THE BLACK DIASPORA II: POSTCOLONIAL ART AND FESTAC

7. “AFROFEMCENTRISM”: BLACK FEMINIST ART

8. WORD! CONCEPTUAL ART

Published by University of California Press, 2025
Anthologies / Black Studies / Artists' Writings / Conversations / Art History / Art Theory