Fatima, circa 1886

Positioned against a shallow, undifferentiated background, her broad shoulders lying parallel to the picture plane, Fatima is rendered with an alert but impassive facial expression. Her lack of direct engagement with the audience was not unusual for the period and can be read as a sign of feminine modesty. In the historical and cultural context of late nineteenth-century Jamaica, this lack of direct contact with viewers encourages a reading of the work as ethnographic. Fatima wears a collarless blue-striped tunic slightly open at her throat, revealing crisp, white undergarments beneath. The stripes of the shirt are not continuous, suggesting tha

Charles White’s J’Accuse

African American artist Charles White grounded his aesthetic practice in radical left politics and the belief that the representation of black people communicated a universal mandate of freedom. This essay explores how White’s faith in a cosmopolitan politicized aesthetic was formed, deployed, and ultimately challenged leading up to his 1966 exhibition at the Heritage Gallery in Los Angeles

Decolonizing Time Nineteenth-Century Haitian Portraiture and the Critique of Anachronism in Caribbean Art

Critiques of anachronism have been used to dismiss art made in the Caribbean since the arrival of Christopher Columbus. This article argues that in order to render Caribbean art in the critical imagination, one must first decolonize notions of time foundational to the discipline of art history. Through a series of portraits of black subjects produced in Haiti during the nineteenth century, it sets aside temporally bound notions of innovation and avant-garde aesthetics that center art history and considers the manner in which these portraits defused the authority of Western frames of looking. The portraits demonstrate how postrevolutionary Haitians appropriated the seemingly hegemonic aesthetic codes of Western art in ways ambivalent to, if not wholly detached from, their temporal-bound values of origins, the singular or original work of art, and the linear concept of formal innovation. Instead, these portraits are works generated and thus rendered within a different value system, where the copy and the ability of a work of art to be reproduced across time was prized far more than a singular, original, individually authored object, and where the literal of art superseded its materiality and form and in every sense transcended linear time

Opening Remarks: 31st Annual James A. Porter Colloquium

Opening Remarks and Presentation by Erica Moiah James, Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Art History, University of Miami “Undress to Redress: African Diasporic Art History and Archives of Black Representational Bodies” 31st Annual James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art and Art of The African Diaspora is co-presented by Howard University’s Department of Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at University of Maryland, College Park. This year’s virtual program will explore the theme “Defining Diaspora: 21st Century Developments in Art of the African Diaspora.” Sessions will investigate the ways in which visual artists and scholars are defining, and redefining, the aesthetic contours and possibilities of the African Diaspora in American art spaces. Started in 1990 by art historian Dr. Floyd Coleman, the Porter Colloquium is the foremost academic setting for innovative dialogue and perspectives from leading and emerging scholars, artists, curators, and cultural critics.https://dh.howard.edu/portercolloquium_31/1001/thumbnail.jp

Speaking in Tongues: Metapictures and the Discourse of Violence in Caribbean Art

Violence, trauma, and memory are fundamental factors of Caribbean modernity but have thus far been underexamined within art history and criticism. This essay explores the invisible yet palpable presence of violence in the genre of family portraiture and the contemporary redeployment of this genre in Edouard Duval-Carrié's (1992) and Ebony G. Patterson's (2010). As (following W. J. T. Mitchell), Duval-Carrié and Patterson's art detonate the expectation of stillness attached to genre. Instead, these works challenge, illuminate, and reform interdiscursive Caribbean epistemologies of violence, trauma, and memory that continue to reverberate across space and time

Introduction: Art as Caribbean Feminist Practice

This special section focuses on the work of women whose artistic practices are grounded in a feminist ethos and engage multiple and nuanced meanings of the Caribbean and its diaspora across linguistic, geographic, material, and formal boundaries. Through diverse written and visual contributions, the section presents the Caribbean as a critical space that recognizes an existing foundation yet facilitates and expands conversations between artists and writers who have shaped and are shaping local and global art discourses using intertextual formal art practices. It aims to mark the archive of Caribbean art history through its focus on the remarkable contributions of women from the Dutch-, English-, Spanish-, French-, and Creole-speaking Caribbean to the making of this history as well as the ongoing cultivation of arts practice and discourses.</jats:p

Graham Fagen complainte de l'esclave = The slave's lament

This catalog is being published in the wake of the exhibition 'Graham Fagen. The Slave's Lament' showed at Galerie de l'UQAM. It brings together works from the multidisciplinary artist Graham Fagen, who represented Scotland at the 2015 Venice Biennale, on the theme of slavery and Scottish involvement in the fate of African people deported to the Caribbean in the 18th century.The drawings, with the look of masks or portraits, the seascape photographs and the imposing video and music installation shown here explore the tensions and emotions brought about by colonialism and the African slave trade. Today considerable feeling has been mobilized with the aim of reconciliation and redemption for the economic servitude and cultural oppression of peoples -- whether aboriginal, the product of immigration or subject to current insidious forms of servitude. Fagen's questioning of nationality and identity, however, is based on a particularly pertinent critique of the cultural and social heritage. At the invitation of curator Louise Déry, specialist of the arts of the Caribbean Erica Moiah James signs an essay that contextualizes and questions the work of Fagen. Includes bibliographical references