Black Art: A Cultural History (2nd ed.)

Citation

Brown, B. (2003), "Black Art: A Cultural History (2nd ed.)", Library Review, Vol. 52 No. 4, pp. 181-181. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2003.52.4.181.2

Black Art: A Cultural History was originally published in 1997 and presented a ground‐breaking survey of black culture throughout the twentieth century. Now republished in an expanded second edition, the survey takes in the early twenty‐first century and provides wider coverage of the impact of film and video, as well as artists who have risen to prominence in recent years.

Black culture is defined as “things that significant numbers of black people do” and these “things” that they do can be defined as virtually any activity that is inventive, constructive or crafted within black communities. Thus the breadth of black culture ranges from making works of art, performing on stage, attending religious ceremonies to just eking out a living. The book aims to trace the changing visual representations of black culture from the 1900 Pan‐African conference, which first suggested the formation of a post‐emancipation black identity to the plans announced in 2001 to build two museums in Paris and Washington DC dedicated to black art and culture.

The book is arranged thematically and looks at how specific works of art signify the “souls of black folk”, the persona of the new negro, the black proletariat, racial pride and cultural assimilation, aesthetic variants on the concept of blackness and finally artistic commerce in black cultural identities. The author includes reference to artistic media traditionally not discussed in the context of black diasporal arts, for example, graphic art, photography, film, video, computer art and performance art. The author draws on the work of an equally wide range of artists from the works of painters, Henry Ossawa Tanner and Jean‐Michel Basquiat to filmmaker, Spike Lee and performance/installation artist, Yinka Shonibare.

This thematic survey and broad selection of art works, references and representative artists will provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of the major art‐historical issues surrounding African diasporal arts and will provide an introduction to black culture in the twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries. Biographical notes are also included on over 180 artists providing a unique reference source.

This is an excellent survey, which makes an important and significant contribution to our understanding of black art and culture.