Adrienne L. Childs

Exploring the role the decorative arts played in the representation of Black people in European visual and material culture This revelatory look at European decorative arts addresses the long-ignored implications of the depiction of Black bodies on luxury objects from the Baroque period through the nineteenth century. Adrienne L. Childs traces the complex history of the vogue for representing the Black body as an ornamental motif throughout spaces of wealth and refinement. Objects such as furniture, porcelain, clocks, silver, light fixtures, and more conveyed the taste for exoticism and portrayed the laboring Black body in the guise of décor. These objects also express larger ideas about the concept of race, romantic notions of distant lands, the harsh realities of slave labor in the colonies, the presence of Black servants in wealthy European households, and the culture of luxury consumption. Ornamental Blackness demonstrates how seemingly benign decorative objects can embody the complexities of race, slavery, and representation. Childs examines the tensions inherent in the system of codes in which the Black body can be enslaved, reviled, feared, subjugated, and assaulted on one hand and a symbol of opulence on the other. In this important volume she establishes a framework for understanding the racialized aesthetics of luxury.

Out of Many: Reframing an American Art Collection offers a re-examination of select works from The Phillips Collection, the Howard University 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. This volume, and its accompanying exhibition, features 75 works of art in various media: paintings, prints, photographs, sculpture, and mixed-media by a diverse array of artists, including William H Johnson, Doris Lee, Elisabeth Poe, David Driskell, Ralston Crawford, William Christenberry, Jacob Lawrence, and Romare Bearden to name a few. Arranged into five thematic sections—People, Places, Spaces, Things, and Chronicles—the authors consider why artists have been omitted from our current narratives; and how do we properly contextualize the work of marginalized artists.

Since he started collecting in the 1990s, Eric Key's intent has always been to help preserve America's Black experience in the arts, and to benefit the many communities of which he has been a part-opening gateways for artists, African Americans, and conversations about race, identity, and America. Featured in the volume are selected works by some of the most recognizable contemporary African American artists, including Sam Gilliam, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, William Artis, Samella Lewis, and Renee Stout. Together, these artists work to dispel the many stereotypes and misunderstandings about African American art and people, but also remain a form of personal narrative. As Eric Key states, the works in his collection are an extension of himself, a Black man in a still mostly white art world; they are an extension of the country in which he lives and an extension of the artists who created them.

Riffs and Relations: African-American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition presents works by African-American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries together with works by the early-twentieth-century European artists with whom they engaged. Black artists have investigated, interrogated, invaded, entangled, annihilated, or immersed themselves in the aesthetics, symbolism, and ethos of European art for more than a century. The powerful push and pull of this relationship constitutes a distinct tradition for many African-American artists who source the master narratives of art history to critique, embrace, or claim their own space. This groundbreaking catalog--accompanying a major exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D. C.--connects the work of artists such as Romare Bearden with Pablo Picasso; Renee Cox and Robert Colescott with Edouard Manet; Norman Lewis with Paul Klee; and Leonardo Drew with Piet Mondrian. The volume explores how blackness has often been conceived from the standpoint of these international connections and presents the divergent and complex works born of these important dialogues.