Product Description: Yale professor Robert Farris Thompson is a living legend. He started writing about the African heritage in the art and music of the Americas when no one recognized the continuities, when African-American studies did not exist and the Civil Rights Movement still met with violent opposition...read more

Product Description: "My aim is to express in a natural way what I feel, what is in me, both rhythmically and spiritually, all that which in time has been saved up in my family of primitiveness and tradition, and which is now concentrated in me." -William H...read more

Product Description: In the winter of 2007, Milwaukee's Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, organized and hosted the first American retrospective exhibition of Cuba's favorite Surrealist, Wifredo Lam (1902-1992). Lam's paintings craft Surrealist conjunctions from Cuban religious iconography--especially from tribal masks--and retrieve a suppressed Afro-Cuban culture that ultimately sets them apart from any movement...read more

Product Description: Geometry can be found all around us. The Persistence of Geometry is an exploration of the visualization of geometry and geometrical forms through history with a special emphasis on modern and contemporary art. It is a highly personal visual journey that records not only the commonalities of human perception throughout the ages and in different cultures, but also the continuing dialogue of vanguard art from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries with traditional and historical art...read more

Product Description: Betye Saar, born in Los Angeles in 1926, emerged in the 1960s as a powerful figure in the redefinition of African American art. Over the past forty years, she has injected African American visual histories into mainstream visual culture by blending spiritual, political, and cultural iconography to create complex works with universal impact...read more

A lively portrait of the great Cuban artist explores Lam's influences--including his notable primitivist stage--as well as his important contributions to twentieth century art. (Fine Arts)

A native of Nashville and the son of former slaves, William Edmondson (1872 - 1951) was the first African American artist to be featured in a solo show at New York's Museum of Modern Art (1937). For this exhibition MoMA director Alfred Barr remarked, "Usually the naïve artist works in the easier medium of painting. Edmondson, however, has chosen to work in limestone, which he attacks with extraordinary courage and directness, to carve out simple, emphatic forms." Robert Bishop, the late director of the Museum of American Folk Art, declared Edmondson to be "one of the outstanding folk carvers--if not the outstanding one--of the twentieth century." Edmondson's first works were memorial gravestones. Later he created animal, human, and celestial figures. His carvings were inspired by his faith, community, and culture. He told the story of how God spoke to him. "I was out in the driveway with some old pieces of stone when I heard a voice telling me to pick up my tools and start to work on a tombstone. I looked up in the sky and right there in the noon daylight He hung a tombstone out for me to make." Showcasing Edmondson's sculpture and placing it in the mainstream of American art for the first time, this lavishly illustrated volume accompanies a traveling exhibition organized by the Cheekwood Museum of Art in Nashville. In new interpretations that challenge long-held views about Edmondson's artistic naieveté, the essays emphasize his profound and intimate connection to his community and its traditions. Adding immeasurably to the understanding of Edmondson's art are photographs by Edward Weston, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and Consuelo Kanaga that show the artist in his community and his workplace. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This catalogue presents more than 30 works by first-generation American Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Pousette-Dart.

Amazon.com Review: In earlier centuries, still-life painting was not as highly regarded as portraiture or history painting, with its often heroic themes of war. In this century, however, the still life has progressed far beyond the traditional arrangements of fruits and flowers...read more

Briefly describes the life of the African American artist, presents a selection of his works, and comments on their composition

Product Description: A volume on Stuart Davis, an American artist of the 20th century. He forged a personal and varied iconography inspired by the upheaval of the city, the tranquility of the seaside, industry and the automobile, cafe society, sports, jazz music and his year-long stay in Paris.