rp2 – Richard J. Powell

Going There: Black Visual Satire

Beverly McIver, *Silence,* 1998. Oil on canvas. Private Collection.

That hiding behind Aunt Jemima and her inscrutable, grinning mask is an equally puzzling, flesh-in-blood black woman was a message proffered by several contemporary black women artists in the wake of Betye Saar and Maya Angelou’s early 1970s art projects. Notable among these of postmodern take-offs on stereotypic mammies were Beverly McIver’s painted self-portraits as a black-faced, fright wig wearing, and housecoat-dressed clown, shown eating watermelon, engaging in common household tasks and, occasionally, dancing and playfully wrestling with a half-naked white man. The innocuous, everyday situations in which McIver located her Jemima-like alter-ego contributed to her enigmatic character: a weird yet familiar presence whose pivotal place in these paintings, as framed by McIver in luscious oil pigments on canvas, unsettled the assumed idiosyncrasy or revulsion such black female stereotypes typically conveyed. In several of these richly textured works McIver emptied the watermelon of its iconographic, stereotypic baggage, turning it into a prop and colorful wedge that transected the painting and stood out alongside its black-faced counterpart. McIver’s occasional couplings of this stirring black caricature with a white man broached America’s deep-seated fears and fantasies about sexual liaisons between the races, but unlike the sex scenes in Robert Colescott’s Jemima’s Pancakes, McIver’s interracial horseplay alluded to a kind of easy intimacy or a filial bond between the stereotype and whites that could be interpreted as more seditious than sexual.

Going There: Black Visual Satire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020).

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The Obama Portraits, in Art History and Beyond

Zuber et Cie, detail of “Military Review at West Point,” from “Vues d’Amérique du Nord,” France, 1834. Wallpaper. The White House, Washington, DC.

When the public sees these portraits and takes into account the aesthetic sensibilities and embodied sentience of the President and First Lady, one soon realizes that Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald have, in effect, chronicled a cultural shift, a perceptual about face not considerably different than, say, the geographically and culturally diverse scenes of America that appear on the antebellum era French wallpaper in the White House’s frequently photographed Diplomatic Reception Room. Images of the President and First Lady posing alongside the Zuber et Cie wallpaper’s assorted images of elegantly dressed black Americans, circa 1834, indicate the Obamas’ cognizance of their own emblematic roles almost a century beyond these White House decorations.

“The Obama Portraits, in Art History and Beyond,” in The Obama Portraits, with Taína Caragol, Dorothy Moss, and Kim Sajet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 50-78.

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Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture

Barkley L. Hendricks, Self-Portrait, 1970. Color photograph. — Barkley L. Hendricks, *Self-Portrait,* 1970. Color photograph.

“In his most recent book, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture, Richard Powell calls for an empathetic read of the portrait, one that acknowledges the subjectivity of both the viewer and the represented. Powell positions the practice of portraiture as a performative act, one that is socially engaged and that makes evident, as Kristine Stiles puts it, “‘the all-too-forgotten interdependence of human subjects-of people-one to another'” (16). The intersubjective relations that are inherent to the practice of portraiture have been explored recently by scholars such as Amelia Jones and Catherine M. Soussloff, yet Powell’s critical analysis of how the determinants of race affect the understanding of subjectivity distinguish his study. Following the contingencies of a Barthes-inspired reading, Powell’s interests shift from the relationship established between the subject and viewer, to that of the subject and the author of the image, as well as the historical context in which the image is viewed, an approach that makes an empathetic and conscious reading of the images possible.” Amy Mooney, book review of Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture, Biography, Spring 2010.

Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2008.

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Changing, Conjuring Reality

Carl Van Vechten, Romare Bearden, 1944. Gelatin silver print. — Carl Van Vechten, *Romare Bearden,* 1944. Gelatin silver print.

Although feminism was not a part of Bearden’s lexicon, he implicitly understood that this new/old image of his had to reside in the most appropriate personage: a figure recognizable as being the fitting vessel and vehicle for these changes to the standard racial script. And like Ralph Ellison’s largely silent, but all seeing/all knowing, apocryphal black folk critic, Bearden’s catalyst would also have to be an agency-filled representative of olde. That such an entity would ultimately be a woman meant that she was drawn from Bearden’s deep, deep memory reservoir of the women he knew or had known and considered elemental, powerful, and transforming in his life. His great grandmother Rosa, grandmother Cattie, mother Bessye, and his wife Nanette were all certainly forces of nature with which to contend, but the woman whom he repeatedly spoke of as his personal fomenter to rethinking his art was Ida, a prostitute-turn-cleaning-lady that Bearden met in 1940. After being rebuffed by Bearden following her suggestion that he paint her, Ida’s retort (which Bearden paraphrased in subsequent interviews) is telling. “‘I know what I look like,’ she said. ‘But when you can look and find what’s beautiful in me, then you’re going to be able to do something on that paper of yours.’ That always sort of stuck with me,” Bearden acknowledged. Placing this statement with Bearden’s Conjur Woman imagery drops Bearden’s (and Ida’s) words in a bubbling cauldron of ideas and possibilities: rethinking commonplace (and often racist) Western notions of beauty, the juxtaposition of desire and representation, revelations and self-discoveries as advanced from the social margins, and returning to one’s originary (female) roots as a way out of the artistic routine and into a new, cultural rebirth, among other thoughts. It is precisely the Conjur Woman’s corporeal detachment from the conventional male gaze (whose alternative was deftly articulated to Bearden by Ida) that empowers her and shifts her visual allure to the natural world and, on the cultural front, to the African diasporic principles of art-as-healing, art-as-metamorphosis, and art-as-spiritual-renewal. And Bearden’s methods for introducing this figure in his art – by distilling Cubist and Dadaist fracture through the deconstructive aesthetics of jazz composition and African American folk collage/assemblage – matched this new/old female subject perfectly.

Conjuring Bearden. With Margaret Ellen Di Giulio, Alicia Garcia, Victoria Trout, & Christine Wang. Durham, NC: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2006.

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Circle Dance: The Art of John T. Scott

E. W. Kemble, Dancing in Congo Square, 1886. Ink drawing. — E. W. Kemble, *Dancing in Congo Square,* 1886. Ink drawing.

Circle Dance traces John T. Scott’s creative output for forty years, relies on the art and aesthetics of the artist’s birthplace and a part formalist/part thematic approach for structuring this retrospective. Metaphors abound in the categorizing and designating of this work. One mental picture in particular — the previously referenced Congo Square “circle dance” — alludes to Scott’s performative engagement with three-dimensional object-making and the self-choreographed movements required by the viewer to fully experience his art (themselves gesturally comparable to the “ring dances” or “ring shouts” that were performed by peoples of African ancestry in the Caribbean and southern United States as late as the early twentieth century). But “circle dance” also refers to the city of New Orleans itself — a place whose anthropomorphic aspect routinely conjures in the mind’s eye bodies in motion.

John T. Scott’s passions — brilliant color, fluid movement, linear poetics, sharp commentary, social justice, among others — are the products of a lifetime of discerning and fashioning: pursuits that, in tandem with one’s personal genealogy, comprise an artistic performance of substantial proportions. That John T. Scott is both an artist of and from New Orleans is ideally acknowledged within the concept and meaning of a “circle dance” — artistic perambulations down real city streets and critical gamboling around theories of form and signification.

Circle Dance: The Art of John T. Scott. Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2005.

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Racial Imaginaries, from Charles White’s Preacher to Jean-Paul Goude and Grace Jones’ Nigger Arabesque

Anon., Magnificent Natural Hair Products advertisement, ca. 1968.

“‘Back to Black’ is a strident curatorial project bringing work by 47 artists, film-makers and photographers to interact over two gallery floors. It is an unusual partnership, combining those from the US, Britain and Jamaica, although artists that originated in various other Caribbean countries also take part. Collected together, its formally unorthodox display transformed the Whitechapel with a rich mixture of film and video, sculpture, print, text and image, photography and painting. An accompanying plush catalogue with gold-leaf lettering on an alluring black cover holds a compelling, imaginative essay by Powell prefacing two other curatorial commentaries, and six shorter essays by critics and historians from home and abroad. . . .” Leon Wainwright, exhibition review of Back to Black: Art, Cinema, & the Racial Imaginary, Third Text, 13 February 2006.

Back to Black: Art, Cinema and the Racial Imaginary. With David A. Bailey and Petrine Archer-Straw. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 2005.

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Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow

Anon., Beauford Delaney, New York, 1929. Gelatin silver print. Private collection. — Anon., *Beauford Delaney,* New York, 1929. Gelatin silver print. Private collection.

“‘Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow’ . . . glows with this power. In these 26 paintings and drawings from 1943 to 1972, the artist explores the often shaky promise presented by this luminous color. Works ranging from portraits and cityscapes to abstractions are united by golden tones. And yet all is not carefree here. At times, Delaney’s yellow can appear joyous or jaundiced, gentle or glaring, transcendent or tortured.” Joanne Silver, exhibition review of Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow, The Boston Herald, 28 February 2003.

Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2002.

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To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Herbert Pinney Tresslar, William J. Edwards and the Teachers at Snow Hill Institute, n.d. Gelatin silver print. Tuskegee University, AL. — Herbert Pinney Tresslar, *William J. Edwards and the Teachers at Snow Hill Institute,* n.d. Gelatin silver print. Tuskegee University, AL.

“Powell, an expert on, among other things, African American art since 1880, provides a fascinating historical account and analysis of art collecting at historically black colleges and universities. Both a survey and a critique, Professor Powell anchors the catalogue by raising the essential questions about the meaning and meanings of this show and of art historical inquiry. . . . This is an important addition to the scholarship on American art and the vital writings and research on African American art.” Michael Prokopow, book review of To Conserve a Legacy: American Art From Historically Black Colleges and Universities, The Boston Book Review, July/August 1999.

To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities. With Jock Reynolds, et al. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

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Rhapsodies in Black: The Art of the Harlem Renaissance

Oscar Micheaux, Body & Soul (still), 1925. Film (black and white, silent), 79 minutes — Oscar Micheaux, *Body & Soul* (still), 1925. Film (black and white, silent), 79 minutes

“Discursively, this location of Harlem to the forces of cultural encounters, assimilations, and oppositions is perhaps the most interesting part of ‘Rhapsodies in Black’ . . . . [The] exhibition calls on us to meditate on the idea of black modernity as part of the consequence of the transition of the world economy into industrialization. It offers a vision of Harlem as a real space, and its culture as important within a historical moment. The curators generously offered the view, rarely reciprocated by most surveys of modern art . . . that 20th century modernity has always been transcultural, transnational, often through the efforts of émigrés.” Okwui Enwezor, exhibition review of Rhapsodies in Art: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Spring/Summer 1998.

Rhapsodies in Black: The Art of the Harlem Renaissance. With David A. Bailey, et al. London & Berkeley: University of California, 1997.

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Black Art: A Cultural History

Stanley Greaves, The Presentation No. 2 (from There's a Meeting Here Tonight series), 1992. Acrylic on canvas, 47 ¼ x 41 1/8 in. (120 x 104.5 cm). Collection of the artist. — Stanley Greaves, *The Presentation No. 2* (from *There’s a Meeting Here Tonight* series), 1992. Acrylic on canvas, 47 ¼ x 41 1/8 in. (120 x 104.5 cm). Collection of the artist.

“This is indeed an ambitious undertaking that attempts concisely to complicate and reposition the study of the arts of the Afro-Atlantic Diaspora. It shares with its predecessors . . . the desire to underscore the ways in which visual culture contributed to the construction of African American identities and subjectivities. However, unlike those earlier works, Powell attempts to show these processes through the cultural forces that have shaped twentieth-century diasporal concerns. Absent is the biographical celebration of the artist who has weathered despair and racism to achieve “greatness” . . . , yielding a more detached narrative that reveals how ‘black’ imagery engages with larger issues to achieve its symbolic force.” Steven Nelson, book review of Black Art & Culture in the 20th Century, Art Journal, Fall 1998.

Black Art: A Cultural History. London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 2021 (Expanded edition of Black Art: A Cultural History, 2002 and Black Art & Culture in the 20^th Century, 1997). Spanish translation: Arte y Cultura Negros en el Siglo XX. Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, S.A., 1998.

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