African American visual aesthetics1995
a postmodernist view
by David C. Driskell
In this collection of ground-breaking essays, five prominent curators and scholars - Ann Gibson, Keith Morrison, Sharon F. Patton, Richard J. Powell, and Lowery Strokes Simsexplore postmodernism's influence on African American art during the last thirty years.
Covering the works of such contemporary artists as Renee Stout, Joe Overstreet, David Hammons, Beverly Buchanan, and Martha Jackson-Jarvis, the book revisits the questions, posed in the 1930s by critics Alain Locke and James Herring, about how to define and to interpret African American art.
The contributors address such interrelated issues as an African American aesthetic identity, personal experiences of culture, the relationship between art and politics, and the blurring of the distinction between "art" and "craft." They...