Recommended Reading: Art and Race

Black Hair Flag (2010) by Sonya Clark. A flag that looks like braids that mimics the American flag and the Confederate flag.

#BlackLivesMatter #BlackTransLivesMatter

The Art History program at the School of Art, 5X�� is committed to the study of critical discourses of politicized identities and their relationship to art and visual culture. From the European Renaissance and African art to museum/curatorial studies, art of the Americas, contemporary art, Asian art, Russian art, craft, and avant-garde art, we encourage you to enroll in our courses and grow your knowledge of race and ethnicity. In addition to special topics in art history, upper-level art history classes center voices that address overlooked histories, lay out the hegemony of funding/exhibiting systems, and foreground how artists dream up potential futures. The following readings are selected by the art history faculty and represent a wide breadth of voices, methodologies, and subjects.

Image: Sonya Clark, Black Hair Flag, 2010, Paint, canvas, thread, 51.25 x 26.1 x 1.1 in. (130.2 x 66.3 x 2.8 cm), Collection of Pamela K. and William A. Royall, Jr.

Featured in the exhibition, (Oct 2020-Aug 2021) at the 5X�� Museum.

Recommendations:

The Abolition Collective, Together We Lift The Sky: New to Abolition Study Guide (Summer 2020).

Glenn Adamson, Design in Dialogue, Friedman Benda Gallery (New York).

Amadou Hâmpaté Bâ, “African Art: Where the Hand Has Ears,” Craft Reader Anthology.

Maurice Berger, “Are Art Museums Racist?,” Art in America, Vol. 78, No. 9 (September 1990), pp. 68-77.

David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art: Four Volumes in Eight Parts (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009–12).

Jennifer González, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (MIT Press, 2008).

Clare Harris, The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

bell hooks, Art on My Mind (New York: New Press, 1995).

Linda Nochlin, "The Imaginary Orient,” The Politics of Vision: Essays on 19th Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989)

Kymberly Pinder, “Black Representation and Western Survey Textbooks,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 81, No. 3. (September 1999), pp. 533-538.

James Smalls, “A Ghost of a Chance: Invisibility and Elision in African American Art Historical Practice,” Art Documentation, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Spring 1994), pp. 3-8.

Jonathan Spicer, ed., Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe (Baltimore, MD: Walters Art Museum, 2012.

Sue Williamson, “Should I Stay or Should I Go: The Ceaseless Dilemma of the Artists of Island

Africa,” pp. 10-11.

5X��