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This paper critically discusses the work of three women artists of colour who, in different ways, engaged with environmental catastrophe and called for climate justice during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Leslie Hakim-Dowek, Gurminder Sikand, and Nina Edge each engaged in particular types of thoughtful, practice-led decolonial feminism that addressed the consequences of rampant corporate neo-colonialism and the ways that the global North has treated the global South as a site for material extraction and exploitation. Echoing the non-violent systems of protest of the women-led Chipko environmental movement in northern India, Sikand's delicate and gentle paintings may nonetheless be understood as searing eco-feminist statements; Edge's work from 1991 combines image and poetry to address the on-going consequences of the devastating industrial disaster at Bhopal, India, in 1984; while Hakim-Dowek's 1991 series of paintings titled Endangered Species (1991) presents a memorial to what has already been lost. This paper will argue that despite the curatorial and critical neglect experienced by these artists, their work nonetheless offers entryways into current, globally important, conversations about the ongoing struggle of women in the global South against white neo-colonial capitalism, and the fight for climate justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pós: Revista do Programa de POS-Graduacao Em Artes - EBA/UFMG is the property of Pos - Programa de Pos-graduacao em Artes (PPG-Artes) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Pós: Revista do Programa de POS-Graduacao Em Artes - EBA/UFMG is the property of Pos - Programa de Pos-graduacao em Artes (PPG-Artes) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Cuadernos de Música, Artes Visuales y Artes Escénicas is the property of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Evangelical Lutheran Church’s Art and Craft Centre at Rorke’s Drift provided an enlightened environment for black artists during the apartheid years when they had few other opportunities. There is a growing literature on these achievements, but potter Judith Mkhabela, who benefited from this influence, has not yet been recognised in print, probably because she worked mainly at home. This paper documents, as far as we have been able, the range of items, including the distinctive ceramic elephants, made by her and her associates, as well as some details about her life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on a painting by Los Angeles-based Black artist Mark Bradford, On a Clear Day, I Can Usually See All the Way to Watts (2001), which was exhibited at SFMOMA in an installation that juxtaposed it to a series of drawings by abstract artist Agnes Martin, Untitled (Study for 'On a Clear Day'), <> (2019–2020). In an extended reading of abstraction and its social implications and of Bradford's engagement with abstract traditions, the article explores the material traces of impurity in his contemporary non-representative visual art. In particular, it focuses on hair as complex sign of impurity, concealment, animality, decay, aesthetic beauty, etc, and of the ways in which its incorporation, materially and metonymically, in the painting disturbs the clarity of the white aesthetic gaze. The article thus considers how the material practices of certain, broadly speaking, postcolonial artists, but in particular the Black Abstraction exemplified by Bradford's work, challenge the Kantian aesthetic tradition that has dominated the visual arts even in a post-Kantian artistic realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a proposal for workshop-meetings, which were held with black Early Childhood Education teachers, with the aim of mapping their paths of aesthetic training. Structured around the sharing of poetics by black artists, the workshop-meetings were constituted as space-time for autobiographical narratives, in order to support the premise that it is necessary to open space for listening to narratives that affirm singular-plural (re)existences. Issues about ethnic-racial diversity and aesthetic principles in the proposals for Early Childhood Education are articulated and make up the context over which the discussion is woven. The focus is on teacher training, as it is understood that the proposition of pedagogies of diversity, decolonial and reexistence, necessarily passes through teaching and its repertoires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modernist propositions long have been understood as atemporal—somehow outside of time—or insistently hailing the future. This temporal framework suppresses the contributions of those excluded from modernist canons, particularly Black women. In this article, visual and material analysis of sculptural works produced in the 1970s and 1980s by U.S. Black women artists Beverly Buchanan, Senga Nengudi, and Betye Saar reveal how Black feminists have engaged with modernist protocols in order to redress cultural erasures of Black women. These practices exemplify Black feminist modernisms, or creative practices that unsettle the racist and sexist logics of dominant cultural institutions. Each of these artists utilizes haptic surfaces as a method for defying institutional modernism's obfuscation of the past. The analysis focuses on Buchanan's defiance of memorial erasures, Nengudi's reenactment of labor, including in its historical forms, and Saar's adaptation of generational memory-making processes. Ultimately, these artists' rejection of a "timeless" modernism demands that viewers understand the present moment in relationship to a still-evolving past. In this way, Buchanan, Nengudi, and Saar position the present as an accumulation, rather than transcendence, of historical occurrences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I conceptualize the term "black op art" to consider how black artists are centralizing speculative sensory effects as both object and subject within their work and therefore as dynamic interventions within the political, hyper-racialized, and dispossessing field of visuality. I consider themes of dispossession through a studied meditation of two works that similarly play and push on the edges of optical effects: James Baldwin (2018) by Nekisha Durrett and Requiem for Charleston (2016) by Lava Thomas. Black op art is neither about what is knowable nor enigmatic through the visual field, but rather about what lengths black artists must go to in order to work within it, as well as the ciphered language of mattering and meanings embedded within their works of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The few known African American photographers in the 19th and early 20th centuries faced significant challenges, including racial prejudice and competition from white photographers for both white and the relatively few Black customers. The New Jersey photographers examined here were no exception and this may help explain why images by an artist with a long career, William M. Dutton, are so hard to find today and why other artists, like Isaiah Burton and Levi Bankson, worked only briefly in the medium before moving on to other, more remunerative occupations. Beginning his photographic career at the end of the 1800s, Albert Thomas Moore achieved considerable success in the first part of the 20th century in New Brunswick and South River but less so in Atlantic City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1960s, tapestries from Swedish art and craft centres in southern Africa were acclaimed in the Nordic country as an outcome of its own expertise and largesse. Yet when these works by marginalised women artists in Africa were exhibited at the National Museum in Stockholm in 1970, they were dismissed as the fruits of Swedish cultural imperialism and naive artistic minds. Despite the ensuing public debate, the exhibition and its discourses, like the works themselves, are little known in southern Africa and now largely forgotten in Sweden. In considering the visual vocabularies of some of these tapestries, many of which were woven at the renowned centre at Rorke's Drift in KwaZulu-Natal, this article addresses the implications of these Swedish 'culture-rescue' projects, showing how women's artistic 'voices' on the subcontinent were silenced, not merely by apartheid suppression but also in Swedish representations. By interrogating the attitudes that the audiences of the exhibitions held towards black women artists, the article reveals how the tapestries' woven iconographies were a complex response to circumstance, covertly interrogating white hegemony while invested with self-definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identity of Jewish-Israeli men of Ethiopian descent has undergone deep-seated changes in the last decade, as evident in visual representations created by contemporary black artists living in Israel. In recent years, a new generation of Ethiopian-Israeli artists has revitalized local art and engendered deep changes in discourse and public life. Ethiopian-Israelis, who comprise less than two percent of the total Jewish population in the country, suffers multiple forms of oppression, especially due to their religious status and given that their visibility—as black Jews—stands out in a society that is predominantly white. This article draws links between events of the past decade and the images of men produced by these artists. It argues that the political awareness of Jewish-Ethiopians artists, generated by long-term social activism as well as police violence against their community, has greatly impacted their artistic production, broadened its diversity, and contributed a wealth of artworks to Israeli culture as a whole. Using intersectional analysis and drawing on theories from gender, migration and cultural studies, the article aims to produce a nuanced understanding of black Jewish masculinity in the ethno-national context of the state of Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1971, Harold Cousins published an essay explaining the sculptures that he had begun creating in the mid-1950s, following his relocation in October 1949 from New York to Paris. Cousins described his series named Plaiton, his own neologism combining the English word plate with the French word laiton (brass). This linguistic combination paralleled Cousins's description of himself as a "sculptor-welder," a practice that grew from experiments in oxyacetylene welding while studying in Paris with funding from the GI Bill. Providing the first scholarly analysis of sculptor Cousins's rich career, this article recovers the artist's early biography through family archives, including correspondence and period criticism. It then examines Cousins's early artwork and his own description of his artistic practice culminating in Plaiton. Finally, it considers Cousins's 1950s sculptures, particularly Plaiton Suspendu, and speculates on its relation to his later work. In considering Cousins's sculpture in relation to racial constructions of the immediate postwar period, I draw on prior scholarship focused on postwar African American artists in Paris. I also look to studies of the ways Black artists employed abstraction—histories that often begin in the mid-1960s or 1970s. In examining the mid-1950s Plaiton works, I hope to both bring Cousins and his work back to visibility and suggest that this history actually began substantially earlier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contextualizes the professional life and traumatizing lynching death of African American blackface minstrel Louis Wright in New Madrid, Missouri, in 1902. It unearths the physical dangers of "entertaining while Black" in early twentieth-century America. Wright's life serves as a window into the racialized, gendered world of the American minstrel stage, which is gleaned from advertising information, entertainer biographies, and the early twentieth-century theatrical press. The essay highlights the mid-nineteenth-century origins of African American blackface minstrelsy, chronicles obstacles unique to Black traveling performers, and investigates contradictory reporting in African American and White newspaper media accounts of white supremacist violence. Ultimately, the Wright case and the persistence of racial violence were among the motivating factors in the pursuit of autonomous Black traveling theater in American entertainment during the nadir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the landmark 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists to re-examine the gendering of the Black public sphere. Organized by Présence africaine , the journal/publishing house that served as the hub for the negritude movement, the congress is one of the iconic moments in African and Black intellectual history. Women were notoriously absent among its delegates, yet this article reconstructs the contributions of Christiane Yandé Diop, Dorothy Brooks and other collectives whose myriad contributions were critical to its success. It argues that the congress was representative of what feminist theorists and organizers have called the fused nature of 'work' (production) and 'domestic work' (social reproduction), that is, labour necessary to sustain life. As they have shown, where labour takes place impacts its gendering. Because most of the planning for the congress took place in social reproductive settings like homes and cafés, this often compressed re/productive labours, gendering negritude's intellectual life in consequential ways. Yet though negritude's women exemplify the frequently blurred lines between re/productive labour, between so-called 'intellectuals' and those who operated without such a designation, their own self-understandings sometimes reinstated these gendered divisions. Yandé Diop, Brooks and many others were critical to shaping negritude, and yet the alternative choices they made in that shaping need to be reckoned with on their own terms. I thus argue that we need to take such choices seriously at the same time as we do justice to the integral nature of their contributions. Doing so can help us negotiate with greater nuance the different choices that women made in their contributions to intellectual life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalizing histories of art and design and contesting historical narratives that overlook and marginalize the art and material culture of the African diaspora have become increasingly popular in recent years. The artworks selected predominately date from circa 2019 but the book also includes artworks from as early as 1970, reflecting the rich cultural heritage and artistic traditions brought together in the collection. What began as a small collection of recent art by regional artists has expanded to include traditional African art and artworks by internationally acclaimed artists (xiv). [Extracted from the article]

As few beyond the most dedicated enthusiasts are likely to seek out Baker's films, this point deserved more attention; in an age when Hollywood dominates and is #SoWhite, it is crucial to trace the potentialities - and limitations - of the cinematic prism as an ongoing strategy for Black women. While other scholars have made similar claims about Baker's image construction, none have focused exclusively on the peculiarity, doubling, and comedic texture of Baker's films. Francis proposes Baker's inclusion in the canonical history of early twentieth-century Black American performers, directors, and films, as the first global Black woman star. [Extracted from the article]