ABOUT
Please find below Black female artists and works available to view at the Schomburg Center and New York Public Library.
For more resources please follow the link to be directed to the Art and Artifacts Division and the Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division at the Schomburg Center.
GWENDOLYN BENNETT PAPERS
| The Gwendolyn Bennett Personal Papers consist of correspondence, 1926-1946; educational and financial papers; resumes detailing Bennett's teaching and literary career; photographs; and diaries, 1925, 1936, and 1958. Bennett's Professional and Literary Activities are documented by research material consisting of newspaper and magazine articles written by or about Bennett and the Welfare Council of New York, for whom Bennett worked as a journalist; class notes and printed material from the School for Democracy, predecessor of the Jefferson School of Social Science, a Marxist adult education center, and the George Washington Carver School, two controversial schools investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee for Communist infiltration. Also, typescripts of Bennett's poems and book reviews, 1928-1941. Frank Horne Literary Estate papers consist of typescripts of Horne's published and unpublished poems and letters, 1926-1963. Scrapbooks consist of news clippings, letters, and memorabilia and chronicles of her youth and published work, 1914-1934. |
Black Women Artists Collection
The Entitled: Black Women Artists collection includes minutes of monthly meetings which discuss the formation and projects of the organization. Some meetings featured either special guests or members giving presentations about their art related travels, exhibitions, and associated matters. Newsletters provide summaries of meetings, information regarding exhibits of members' work sponsored by Entitled: Black Women Artists, members' accomplishments and announcements. The collection includes letters written by Entitled: Black Women Artists to the "New York Times" and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum about issues pertinent to black women artists.
DIGITAL COLLECTION
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, The New York Public Library. "Black history - Women's history" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1977 - 1980.
CARRIE MAE WEEMS
The Kitchen Table Series
The kitchen Table Series
The Kitchen Table series
AUGUSTA SAVAGE
EXHIBITION CATALOGS
We Wanted a Revolution by
A landmark exhibition on display at the Brooklyn Museum from April 21 through September 17, 2017, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism. It showcases the work of black women artists such as Emma Amos, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O'Grady, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar, making it one of the first major exhibitions to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color. In so doing, it reorients conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period. The accompanying Sourcebook republishes an array of rare and little-known documents from the period by artists, writers, cultural critics, and art historians such as Gloria Anzald#65533;a, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Lucy R. Lippard, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Lowery Stokes Sims, Alice Walker, and Michelle Wallace. These documents include articles, manifestos, and letters from significant publications as well as interviews, some of which are reproduced in facsimile form. The Sourcebook also includes archival materials, rare ephemera, and an art-historical overview essay. Helping readers to move beyond standard narratives of art history and feminism, this volume will ignite further scholarship while showing the true breadth and diversity of black women's engagement with art, the art world, and politics from the 1960s to the 1980s. We Wanted a Revolution will also be on display at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles from October 13, 2017 through January 14, 2018; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York from February 17, 2018 through May 27, 2018; and at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston from June 26, 2018 through September 30, 2018. Published by the Brooklyn Museum and distributed by Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780872731837Publication Date: 2017-04-21
BOOKS CONTINUED
Creating Their Own Image by
Creating Their Own Image marks the first comprehensive history of African-American women artists, from slavery to the present day. Using an analysis of stereotypes of Africans and African-Americans in western art and culture as a springboard, Lisa E. Farrington here richly details hundreds ofimportant works--many of which deliberately challenge these same identity myths, of the carnal Jezebel, the asexual Mammy, the imperious Matriarch--in crafting a portrait of artistic creativity unprecedented in its scope and ambition. In these lavishly illustrated pages, some of which feature imagesnever before published, we learn of the efforts of Elizabeth Keckley, fashion designer to Mary Todd Lincoln; the acclaimed sculptor Edmonia Lewis, internationally renowned for her neoclassical works in marble; and the artist Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and her innovative teaching techniques. We meetLaura Wheeler Waring who portrayed women of color as members of a socially elite class in stark contrast to the prevalent images of compliant maids, impoverished malcontents, and exotics "others" that proliferated in the inter-war period. We read of the painter Barbara Jones-Hogu's collaboration onthe famed Wall of Respect, even as we view a rare photograph of Hogu in the process of painting the mural. Farrington expertly guides us through the fertile period of the Harlem Renaissance and the "New Negro Movement," which produced an entirely new crop of artists who consciously imbued their workwith a social and political agenda, and through the tumultuous, explosive years of the civil rights movement. Drawing on revealing interviews with numerous contemporary artists, such as Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, Nanette Carter, Camille Billops, Xenobia Bailey, and many others, the second half ofCreating Their Own Image probes more recent stylistic developments, such as abstraction, conceptualism, and post-modernism, never losing sight of the struggles and challenges that have consistently influenced this body of work. Weaving together an expansive collection of artists, styles, andperiods, Farrington argues that for centuries African-American women artists have created an alternative vision of how women of color can, are, and might be represented in American culture. From utilitarian objects such as quilts and baskets to a wide array of fine arts, Creating Their Own Imageserves up compelling evidence of the fundamental human need to convey one's life, one's emotions, one's experiences, on a canvas of one's own making.
Call Number: Sc F 05-31ISBN: 019516721XPublication Date: 2004-12-30
Kara Walker by
Winner in the book category of the AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers of 2003 competition presented by the American Institute of Graphic Arts Kara Walker (b. 1969) has emerged as one of her generation's most important artists. Best known for her provocative black paper cutout silhouettes, she confronts stereotypes, sex, violence, and power relationships through Civil War-era parodies, narratives, and a mastery of craft and installation. This book, which accompanies an exhibition organized by the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and the Williams College Museum of Art, presents a comprehensive overview of Walker's work, beginning with her first cut-paper wall installation, Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart(1994). Other highlights include the 1996 series of twenty-four watercolor drawings, Brown Follies, which is reproduced in full as an artist's book within the book, and installation views of many of Walker's exhibitions. Recent drawings and projections are also featured. Throughout the book are a selection of the Walker's writings reproduced as they were created typed on index cards. These writings reveal a rarely seen side of the artist, whose words are as provocative as her installations and drawings. The essays discuss Walker's place in art history, formal and narrative readings of her work, her relation to culture at large, and issues of race, sexuality, and representation addressed in her work. Copublished with the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College and Williams College Museum of Art.
Call Number: Sc +E 03-822ISBN: 026202540XPublication Date: 2003-04-01
BOOKS
Betye Saar by Call Number: Sc E 17-1370ISBN: 9780979893667Publication Date: 2017-08-22Betye Saar (born 1926) is a legend. For 60 years, she has created powerful artworks that question traditional roles and representations of African Americans and women in the US, as well as deeply personal works about her family history and spirituality. Betye Saar: Still Tickin' considers the breadth of the artist's career and its key themes. To contextualize Saar's works, this volume includes writings by the artist from the 1970s to the present day as well as a recent interview with Saar in which she discusses her artistic practice and her views on history, including the current debate about police violence in the US. "My art becomes an explorer, a tracer of forgotten tribes, a seeker of sanctified visions," explains Saar. "These works are what I leave behind."
American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold's Paintings of The 1960s by
Faith Ringgold (born 1930) is famed today as the progenitor of the African-American story-quilt revival of the late 1970s, but her story begins much earlier, with her American People Series of 1963. These once influential paintings, and the many political posters and murals she created throughout the 1960s, have largely disappeared from view, being routinely omitted from art historical discourse over the past 40 years. American People, Black Light is the first examination of Ringgold's earliest radical and pioneering explorations of race, gender and class. Undertaken to address the social upheavals of the 1960s, these are the works through which Ringgold found her political voice. American People, Black Light offers not only clear insight into a critical moment in American history, but also a clear account of what it meant to be an African American woman making her way as an artist at that time.
Call Number: Sc F 10-634ISBN: 9780979562938Publication Date: 2011-03-31
Lorna Simpson by Call Number: Sc F 06-423ISBN: 0810955482Publication Date: 2006-05-01One of the leading African-American artists of her generation, Lorna Simpson first became well known in the mid-1980s with large-scale photographs examining racial and gender identity. The shadowy, foreboding atmosphere of these works suggests still images from film noir subjects, and they depict urban locales.
Mickalene Thomas - Origin of the Universe by
Mickalene Thomas (born 1971) has won acclaim for her elaborate, colorful paintings of African-American women, often posed provocatively against rich, 1970s-themed backgrounds adorned with rhinestones, enamel and acrylics. Thomas draws from earlier traditions of portraiture to arrive at her contemporary sensibility. She engages with the tension between a personal investigation of eroticism, black femininity and beauty and a pop-cultural critique of the overt sexual imagery prevalent in the media--from Blaxploitation film heroines like Cleopatra Jones to the construction of middle-class, African-American taste in Ebony magazine. Her portraits of trans-generational female empowerment have been receiving attention far beyond the standard art-world venues and have been reproduced everywhere from The New Yorker to Bomb magazine. Thomas also reenvisions landscapes and interiors through playful and passionate recontextualizations of such artists as Romare Bearden, Edouard Manet, Henri Matisse and Balthus. Mickalene Thomas: The Origin of the Universe is the first monograph on the artist, and accompanies her first solo museum exhibition in the United States at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. It features a wide array of full-color reproductions of her work across media--much of it new and never before published--including photo collages and provocative landscapes, along with an interview with the artist and critical texts that elucidate her paintings' investigations of femininity, sexuality and power, and provide extensive context for her oeuvre as a whole.
Call Number: Sc +F 13-35ISBN: 9780983967200Publication Date: 2012-06-30
