The following post and the addendum of recent publications are simply a few new titles that have been released since the last Booklist, consisting of a compilation of reviews from various publishers' notes and other source materials:
Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist
The catalogue, Archibald Motley:
Jazz Age Modernist, accompanies
the first full-scale survey of the work of Archibald Motley and features
more than 140 color illustrations. It was on view at the Nasher Museum of Art
at Duke University from January 30 through May 11, 2014. The catalogue includes
an essay by Richard J. Powell, organizer and curator of Archibald Motley:
Jazz Age Modernist, as well as contributions from other scholars examining
the life, work, and legacy of one of twentieth-century America's most
significant artists. After its debut at the Nasher Museum of Art, the
exhibition travels to other museums across the country: the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art;
the Chicago Cultural Center; and the Newark Museum.
Archibald John Motley, Jr., was an
American painter, master colorist, and radical interpreter of urban culture.
Among twentieth-century American artists, Motley is surely one of the most
important and, paradoxically, also one of the most enigmatic. Born in New
Orleans in 1891, Motley spent the first half of the twentieth century living
and working in a predominately white neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, just
blocks away from the city's burgeoning black community. During his formative
years, Chicago's African American population increased dramatically, and he was
both a witness to and a visual chronicler of that expansion. In 1929 he won a
Guggenheim Fellowship, which funded a critical year of study in France, where
he painted Blues and other memorable pictures of Paris. In the 1950s,
Motley made several lengthy visits to Mexico, where his nephew, the well-known
novelist Willard F. Motley, lived. While there, Motley created vivid depictions
of Mexican life and landscapes. He died in Chicago in 1981.
Motley's brilliant yet idiosyncratic
paintings—simultaneously expressionist and social realist—have captured
worldwide attention with their rainbow-hued, syncopated compositions. The
exhibition includes the artist's depictions of African American life in
early-twentieth-century Chicago, as well as his portraits and archetypes,
portrayals of African American life in Jazz Age Paris, and renderings of 1950s
Mexico.
This is a publication of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke
University.
This catalogue was published by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press in 2013. It focuses on Chase-Riboud's monumental series of sculptures dedicated to the assassinated civil rights leader Malcolm X. Begun in 1969, Chase-Riboud's series is explored in terms of developing artistic practice; her travels to China and North Africa; and her experiences in Europe, particularly during the cultural, political, and social upheavals of the 1960s. The volume also includes a fascinating analysis of the Malcolm X sculptures in light of critical debates on abstract art’s role in memorializing the past.
Beautifully designed and produced, this book presents an illustrated checklist of the 13 sculptures in the series, related drawings and sculptures, and a chronology of Chase-Riboud’s life and career.
Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America
At the close of the twentieth century, black artists began to
figure prominently in the mainstream American art world for the first
time. Thanks to the social advances of the civil rights movement and the
rise of multiculturalism, African American artists in the late 1980s and early 90s enjoyed unprecedented access to established institutions
of publicity and display. Yet in this moment of ostensible freedom,
black cultural practitioners found themselves turning to the history of
slavery.
Bound to Appear focuses on four of these artists—Renée Green, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, and Fred Wilson—who have dominated and shaped the field of American art over the past two decades through large-scale installations that radically departed from prior conventions for representing the enslaved. Huey Copeland shows that their projects draw on strategies associated with minimalism, conceptualism, and institutional critique to position the slave as a vexed figure—both subject and object, property and person. They also engage the visual logic of race in modernity and the challenges negotiated by black subjects in the present. As such, Copeland argues, their work reframes strategies of representation and rethinks how blackness might be imagined and felt long after the end of the “peculiar institution.” The first book to examine in depth these artists’ engagements with slavery, Bound to Appear will leave an indelible mark on modern and contemporary art.
Ellen Gallagher: Don't Axe ME
Spanning the past twenty years, Don’t Axe Me will provide one of the first opportunities to thoroughly examine the complex formal and
San Francisco Lithographer: African American Artist Grafton Tyler Brown
In this biography, Robert J. Chandler focuses on Grafton Tyler Brown’s
lithography and his life in nineteenth-century San Francisco, offering a study equally fascinating as a business and cultural history and as an
introduction to Brown the artist.
Chandler’s contextualization of Brown’s career goes beyond the issue of
Brown was not respected as a fine artist until after his death. Collectors of western art and Americana now recognize the importance of California and of Brown’s work, some of which depicts Portland and the Pacific Northwest, and they will find Chandler’s checklist, descriptions, and reproductions of Brown’s ephemera—including billheads and maps—as uniquely valuable as Chandler’s contribution to the cultural and commercial history of California. In an afterword, historian Shirley Ann Wilson Moore discusses the circumstances and significance of passing in nineteenth-century America.
