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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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“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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“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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For Lawrence, the Haitian peasantry’s struggle for freedom in the eighteenth-century had thematic resonances for the long-term struggles for freedom of black women and men in the United States.  In a succession of serial paintings he made after the Toussaint L’Ouverture series, Lawrence brought this domestic concern for individual and collective struggle into a unique, African-American perspective.  Starting with his Frederick Douglass series of 1938-39, Lawrence embraced the range of experiences, trials, dilemmas, and triumphs of selected personalities in African-American history, providing viewers with an extra-literary sense and feeling for these important people and episodes.  For example, in several of the panels from his Harriet Tubman series of 1939-40, a strict, illustrative rendering of this nineteenth-century tale about a woman shepherding fellow bondsmen from slavery into freedom is supplanted by an expressive, sometimes dreamlike conceptualization of her true story.  At times more a symbolist than a social realist, Lawrence bypassed superficial features of the events and figures in Harriet Tubman’s story, searching instead for the inner, emotional truths of her heroism.

Jacob Lawrence (for the Rizzoli Art Series), New York: Rizzoli International Publ., Inc., 1992.

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“His story still astonishes. Nowhere in the annals of African American art is there a life’s work, a life’s journey, like that of William H. Johnson  —  that folk painter of Harlem, that European modernist, that polished academic  —  who began his artist’s life as a poor boy in the Jim Crow South drawing in the dust, and ended it in madness, a street person, a ruin. . . .  To fully understand the man, his passions, his tragedies, all that he absorbed, and all that he discarded, you have to read the deeply moving book on Johnson’s life and art by Richard J. Powell that accompanies this show. . . .”  Paul Richard, exhibition review of Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson, The Washington Post, 14 September 1991.

Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991.

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