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This is a three-part perspective on a single work of art: Edward Savage's The Washington Family (1789–96). Mia L. Bagneris's essay places this painting alongside other images of George Washington with African diasporic subjects from the eighteenth century to the present to illuminate how the iconic image of the founding father—upheld as a symbol of the values of the nation itself—was and is inextricably bound up in White supremacy and anti-Blackness. Jennifer Van Horn's analysis is cartographic in focus, situating the painting in relation to geographic debates about slavery and the racialized contest over mobility in light of the relocation of the enslaved person depicted, and in relation to a second version of the image displayed at Henry Clay's Kentucky plantation. Jennifer Germann uncovers the hidden history of the painting's London creation to explore Savage's choice of the enslaved attendant portrait format, and his selection of free Black model John Riley, amidst the uncertainty surrounding the portrayal of Black figures in the 1780s and 1790s. She elucidates how disremembering has obscured John Riley as well as historical Black subjects in American art more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the inaugural exhibition of the British Institution for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom, which was held in 1806; exploring in detail the perception of race and the hierarchy of artistic genres in Great Britain at the time.

The canon of "American" art history is shaped just as much by its absences as it is by its inclusions. We must learn to see those absences; we must make present those who are absent; and we must demonstrate the racializing work performed by the absences themselves. Critical to this process is exposure to an encyclopedic collection of art at the Smithsonian campus and in the surrounding D.C. area. Additionally, opportunities like that afforded by the SAAM fellowship offers the specialist the chance to literally see their subject in the broader context of their time period as well as within the visual histories of nation-building. The SAAM fellowship also allows one to test—against the visual record—the more limited content that has been featured in coursework, exhibitions, publications, and as topics worthy of funding. In this paper, the author foregrounds compositional absences in two- and three-dimensional works of art to argue that the future of SAAM's fellowship program and the field at large must involve an examination of its greatest absence: a critical look at how race is constructed in the museum's canonical Anglo-American collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 1865, Dante Gabriel Rossetti encountered a black child in London. One year later, a portrait of this child appeared as an attendant figure in his painting The Beloved (1865–66). The context of the artist's engagements with black subjects and Victorian-era discourses of abolition, race, minstrelsy, sexuality, and labor illuminates his search for this child, as well as the treatment of his portrait. Rossetti strategically attempted a figuration of blackness independent of political implication and, by proxy, as a way to escape the charged moral discourses about slavery and race he felt surrounded him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by Hiram Powers's successful Greek Slave, John Bell debuted The Octoroon at the 1868 Royal Academy exhibition. However, the mobilization of narrative that made Powers's sculpture acceptable was not applicable for The Octoroon. Instead, racial difference made all the difference, prompting viewers to read the figure's cold, white marble as hot, sensuous flesh. Bell's sculpture reflects Victorian Britain's fascination with the enslaved, American, mixed-race beauty and suggests provocative resonances between the antebellum South and the Orient in the popular imagination. The sculpture's 1876 purchase by the cotton town of Blackburn also illuminates the octoroon's significance as a trope in nineteenth-century British culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016, racist, patriarchal rhetoric dominated the political landscape of the United States. As a response, activist artist Richard Lou of Memphis, Tennessee created a video piece as part of his series ReCovering Memphis titled ReContexting Bodies. In the artwork, Lou performs whiteness by re-creating photographs and reciting words of historic Civil War leaders Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest and President of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis. With his racialized body, Lou confronts the foundations of white supremacy in the United States American South. ReContexting Bodies examines how two historic identities of southern masculinity shape contemporary biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I develop a phenomenological account of racialized encounters with works of art and film, wherein the racialized viewer feels cast as perpetually past, coming "too late" to intervene in the meaning of her own representation. This points to the distinctive role that the colonial past plays in mediating and constructing our self‐images. I draw on my experience of three exhibitions that take Muslims and/or Arabs as their subject matter and that ostensibly try to interrupt or subvert racialization while reproducing some of its tropes. My examples are the Jean‐Joseph Benjamin‐Constant exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2015), the exposition Welten der Muslime at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (2011–2017), and a sculpture by Bob and Roberta Smith at the Leeds City Art Gallery, created in response to the imperial power painting, General Gordon's Last Stand, that is housed there. My interest is in how artworks contribute to the experience of being racialized in ways that not only amplify the circulation of images but also constitute difficult temporal relations to images. Drawing on Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, I argue that such racialized images are temporally gluey, or stuck, so that we are weighted and bogged down by them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the video artwork "Love is the Message, the Message is Death," by the artist Arthur Jafa, who also did the cinematography for the 1991 film "Daughters of the Dust," by Julie Dash. The work explores what the author describes as white fetishism and "how black deat and black joy are pinned to one another by the white gaze." The rapid pacing of the video is discussed, which offers imagery from sources including police body cameras and Kanye West music videos.

The author relates how she depicts the beauty of African Americans particularly women in her art. Topics discussed include the way social factors such as paintings of Renaissance artists and fashion magazines influence how people view the ideal feminine beauty and race, her intention to challenge societal interpretation of beauty, and the vulnerability and strength being symbolized by young girls in her art.

This article examines Thomas Waterman Wood's 1867 painting American Citizens , which depicts four voters, one of whom is an African American. Past interpretations have emphasized themes of equality and citizenship that must be reconsidered in light of nineteenth-century voting practices. As a means to understand American Citizens in a larger historical context, this article looks at the rhetoric of race and citizenship surrounding the extension of the franchise, the structures of nineteenth-century voting, and the means by which visual typologies were mobilized for partisan ends. Exercising the franchise was a public, often spectacular, event that placed voters in a visual context that served to affirm or deny citizenship and manliness. Treatment of voters was often based on visual cues combining references from genre painting, journalism, and popular culture. While celebrating the extension of the franchise to men of color, Wood's painting also replicates the process of visually identifying race and ethnicity, often for detrimental ends, within American political life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The marine life and aquatic worlds depicted in Ellen Gallagher's Watery Ecstatic series of artworks conceive an aquafuture through Afrofuturist aesthetics. They feature the black Atlantic in countermemories that reinscribe the historical murder of African women through a myth of their survival and transformation into aquatic beings. The artworks defy contemporary eliminations of, and assaults on, black lives to claim a spectacular present and posthuman future. This essay explores the artworks' queer politics and undoing of race and gender binaries through interdisciplinary means conceived of both in the spirit of the artworks themselves and the cultural boundlessness of Afrofuturism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some coloured and black learners in South Africa use a light orange or pink crayon to represent themselves in art. Many learners name this colour "human colour" or "skin colour". This is troublesome, because it could reflect exclusionary ways of representing race in images and language. This case study, conducted with two schools in the Western Cape, investigated Grade 3 learners' attitudes and perceptions regarding race and skin colour through art processes and discussion. The aim was to promote critical engagement with race in Foundation Phase educational contexts. Suggestions include changing the language used to describe skin colour, just recognition and representation of races in educational resources and the promotion of critical citizenship education. This research indicates the need to create practical curriculum guidelines to discuss race issues in the South African classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the works of Namibian artist John Muafangejo and its influence on the churches and church theologians in Africa and other countries. Information on Muafangejo's personal and educational background, themes used in his artworks and relationship with Anglican clergyman John Wheeler. His views on racial equality, its representation in his artworks and religious images in art is presented.

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Narcissister’s performances in masks and merkins question the fluctuating status of objecthood and subjectivity in popular renderings of the black female body. Embracing a DIY aesthetic, Narcissister scavenges material and image. Her citation of dance functions as the active disavowal of virtuosity, shifting attention from climax to aspiration, delineating an aesthetic of dramaturgical disavowal that performs an alternate imaginary for the racialized, gendered American body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the turn of the last century, Bert Williams and George Walker performed as a minstrel duo in which only Williams wore burnt cork. By mixing the surfaces of blacking and their own black skin, Williams and Walker offered an aesthetic critique of the subject/object status of the black body—animating the inanimate substance of burnt cork while objectifying animate black skin. Examples from portrait photography and the visual art of Whitfield Lovell and Kara Walker support arguments about the agency of surface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at "Quiet North," a series of paintings by artist Dominique Hui, and "Shooting Geronimo," a short film by artist Kent Monkman. Particular focus is given o the production of racialized masculinities in these artworks and to the ways in which Hui and Monkman use their art to challenge popular notions of home and nation in North America. Details on queer minority expression and on the relationship between diasporic and Indigenous minorities are presented. Multiculturalism is also discussed.

The traditional appraisal that artists in Brazil were unable or unwilling to depict black subjects during the Imperial and early Republican periods is at odds with much of what was actually produced. Following the success of abolitionist imagery in the mid-nineteenth century, a number of visual artists in Brazil actively established a critical discourse that linked race and inequality as early as the 1890s, two decades before such critiques became widespread in literature and the social sciences. Specific works by Eliseu Visconti, Antonio Ferrigno and Modesto Brocos are singled out and examined, in this respect. The final section of the essay examines the issue of self-representation, focusing on the work of Arthur Timótheo da Costa in the 1900s and 1910s. A marked contrast exists between the relatively neglected efforts of these artists and the much lauded drive of Brazilian modernism to embrace the theme of race, after 1922.

The article looks at artist Peju Alatise, with a particular focus on her use of textiles in her sculpture. Emphasis is given to the elements of seaming, abstraction, and realism in her work. Details on Alatise's life and on the political climate in Nigeria are presented. Other topics include race, gender, and Yoruba culture.

The article discusses the April 15, 2012 performance art piece "Painful Cake" by artist Makode Linde for a reception at the Moderna Museet (Museum of Modern Art) in Stockholm, Sweden with Swedish culture minister Lena Adelsohn-Liljeroth. Topics include the history of anti-black racism in relation to imperialism, the life of freak show slave Sara Baartman (known as the Hottentot Venus), and the notions of shame and guilt in relation to whiteness. The thought of theorist Gayatri Spivak is noted.

The article discusses sculptor Malvina Hoffman's work on the exhibit "Races of Mankind," which opened at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History in Illinois in 1933. Particular focus is given to the relationship between science and art in the exhibit and to Hoffman's identity as a woman sculptor and traveler. Details on Hoffman's travels while working on the exhibit and on her book "Heads and Tales" are presented.

Since 2000 the Korean art world has witnessed the emergence of a new generation of artists. Arriving after the social and political upheavals of modern Korean society, this generation enjoys ready access to the larger world via the internet, ample opportunities to study/travel/work abroad, and broad recognition in international art fairs and exhibitions. Not surprisingly, unlike Korean artists of previous eras, their highly individual and varied works address ever more diverse issues in art, society and history. Their works do not conform to any overarching patterns, characteristics or attitudes that would point to ‘Korea’ as their common origin. What then makes them Korean artists? Do we suppose that their works deliver special insights about a unique culture and society, some definitive Korean-ness? Does it even matter whether we label their art ‘Korean’? By both exposing and questioning current discourse based in the transcendent ‘cult of origin’ of our seemingly globalized art world, this article will probe the possibilities of a ‘post-global’ paradigm in hopes of identifying a new path for arts discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The quintessential Berlin artist Heinrich Zille, while remaining almost unrecognized outside Germany and certainly neglected in art historical circles on both sides of the Atlantic, nonetheless offers an important way to understand the modern city in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Zille, I argue, represents a proletarian modernism, a way of viewing and embracing a vibrant working-class domesticity—a milieu—that the Großstadt itself had created. In so doing, he offered intimate representations of Berlin for Berliners; he was decidedly grounded in the local and telescoped Berlin from its districts to its neighborhoods to its streets. What reemerged at this insider level, however, were glimpses of the wider world into which Berliners had been cast. Zille thus blurred distinctions between public and private spaces that marked the social boundaries of the city and drew from both the local and the global in ways that have gone unrecognized in his work. His perspective on the new capital, in other words, was accomplished by embracing the liminal, and he ultimately offered a kind of palatable social protest—a vision of reform without socialism—that was itself quite remarkable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven, a silhouette installation created by contemporary artist Kara Walker, was inspired by and named after Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel. Walker's installation references characters and relationships drawn from the novel, yet positions them as illustrations with ambivalent, or even perverse relationships to the original text. Most scholars who focus on this work make brief reference to Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in order to identify one or two of Walker's silhouetted characters, then leave the novel behind – choosing to interpret Walker's work as commentary on something larger than one novel. This critical tendency has, so far, prevented a thorough-going analysis of Walker's sustained engagement with Stowe's text, as well as with the creative industry it inspired. The main goal of this essay is to take Walker's references much more seriously – more literally, and literarily. The essay that follows proposes a close reading of The End of Uncle Tom alongside Uncle Tom's Cabin, with the goal of pointing out not only the depth of Walker's engagement with the novel, but also what her resistance to, and reiteration of, the narrative reveals about a one hundred fifty year tradition of retelling this epic work. At stake is a more complex understanding of both Walker's practice, and the ongoing influence of Stowe's novel on the ways in which racialized identity is imagined, constructed, consumed, and reproduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the works of Ghanaian painter Papa Essel. It discusses his use of adkinkra symbols to incorporate his cultural background into his paintings, compares his use of colors to that of traditional African art which uses kente cloth, and explores his use of words in his paintings to discuss social issues such as gold mining, wealth, and racial identity.

The article examines European paintings, photographs, prints, popular culture, maps, and anthropological drawings of Gypsies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I focus on three paintings: French realist Gustave Courbet's Charity of a Beggar at Ornans (1868), British Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Beloved (1865-6), and Expressionist Otto Müller's Gypsy Encampment (1925). I seek to problematize the concept of Gypsy identity in these images as a stable, homogeneous "Other" category that is clearly separate from the white population, by pointing out a variety of interpretations for the artist and his audience. Contrary to traditional Orientalist scholarship that views images of "Others" as strengthening and defining white identity while denying agency to the depicted subject, this essay argues the more nuanced view that these images endow the Gypsy with a certain level of agency and demonstrate a less stable conception of white power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses race, class, and gender in "Beggars and Choosers," a photography exhibition by curator Rickie Solinger. The author analyzes the exhibition's photopolitics, commenting on economically disadvantaged women and women of color, welfare policy in the United States, and sexual respectability. Photographs analyzed include "Migrant Mother" by Dorothea Lange, "Maria y Solstiz" by Rudy B. Ornelas, and "Chen in Detention" by Steven Rubin. The author also discusses curator Edward Steichen's 1955 photography exhibition "Family of Man."

Humanity ceaselessly seeks sites of refuge and reference points for values in territories offering possibilities for identifications and putting down roots. It is within this context that I would like to consider the relationship among three bodies of my work, namely, "Seeking Refuge" (2008), "Mute" (2008) and "Home and Away" (2003). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article profiles the painters Aubrey Beardsley and H.D. It recounts that these two modernist artists engage in the issues of gender, sex, and race. Aubrey Beardsley's examination at gender and sexuality is evident in his paintings that portray Mrs. Pugh's habits including the "Masked Woman," and "Caprice." It mentions that H.D. has embraced her bisexuality and had sexual attachments to both man and woman throughout her life. It also notes that H.D.'s painting "Astrid" depicts her androgynous quality. However, male modernists in H.D.'s period have strived to provide a place free of sexual judgments on her "Bordeline," and her poetry. It provides comparison and linking on Beardsley's decadent aesthecism and H.D.'s modernity.

An essay is presented on the artist Marsden Hartley and his work. It examines the role of race in Hartley's art and writing and discusses criticism of his paintings. The book "Marsden Hartley: Race, Region, and Nation" by Donna Cassidy is mentioned. The philosophy of eugenics is explored for its role in perceptions about race and influence in Hartley's art. Hartley's piece "Finnish-Yankee Sauna" is also analyzed and other art works involving saunas are discussed.

The article focuses on the painting "Moses’s Ethiopian Wife," done by Flemish painter Jacob Jordaens circa 1650. The author explores both Jewish and Catholic religious accounts of Moses marrying a black woman, specifically in the "Jewish Antiquities," written by Jewish historian Josephus, and German reformist Martin Luther's "Bible" translation. She also explores contradictory literature regarding the race of Moses's wife written by Protestant leader John Calvin. A discussion of race represented in contemporary period art is also presented.

The article discusses how American artists are addressing issues of biraciality and nationhood in their artworks. The artworks are evaluated within the context of an increasing acceptance of biraciality, as represented by the acceptance golfer Tiger Woods. Works by artists Lorraine O'Grady, Archibald Motley, and Byron Kim, and others are evaluated.

A call for papers is presented, which asks for submissions on the topic of "Seeing the Survey Anew: White Racial Formation in the History of Art."