Black Artists in Their Own Words

by Lisa E. Farrington (Editor)

Overview

The first book to center Black artists' voices on Black aesthetics, revealing a century of evolving relationships to race, identity, and art.
 
What is Black art? No one has thought harder about that question than Black artists, yet their perspectives have been largely ignored. Instead, their stories have been told by intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke, who defined "a school" of Black art in the early twentieth century. For the first time, Black Artists in Their Own Words offers an insightful corrective.
 
Esteemed art historian Lisa Farrington gathers writing spanning a century across the United States, the Caribbean, and the African continent—including from renowned artists Henry Tanner, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Romare Bearden, Wifredo Lam, Renee Cox, and many more—that reveals both evolutions and equivocations. Many artists, especially during the civil rights era, have embraced Black aesthetics as a source of empowerment. Others prefer to be artists first and Black second, while some have rejected racial identification entirely. Here, Black artists reclaim their work from reductive critical narratives, sharing the motivations underlying their struggles to create in a white-dominated art world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520384125
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	09/02/2025
Series:	Documents of Twentieth-Century Art
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Lisa Farrington is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the City University of New York, past Associate Dean of Fine Arts at Howard University, and author of Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists and African-American Art: A Visual and Cultural History.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2025-05-27
Making their voices heard.

Art historian Farrington has edited a comprehensive collection of statements from more than 60 Black artists, from the turn of the 20th century to the present, reflecting on their aesthetic goals, their connection to European and indigenous artistic movements, and their response to the call from the community to create a Black aesthetic. Some artists gained easy recognition; others struggled with poverty and bias: “The pathology of racism has affected most, if not all, of them,” Farrington reveals. Organized chronologically and thematically, the collection begins in 1879 with Henry Tanner, the first African American to enroll at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and Alain Locke, a leading Black intellectual and Howard University professor. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s is represented by 10 artists, including sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, who studied with Rodin, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence. Two sections are devoted to the Black diaspora: The first, which emerged as a sister movement of the Harlem Renaissance, aimed to foster international Black consciousness in the arts; the later movement, in the 1960s and ’70s, sought racial solidarity in the wake of decolonization. Other sections gather artists’ responses to abstract art, activism during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, Black feminist art, and conceptual art. A final section, titled “Rethinking Race,” features artists working at the turn of the 21st century who engage with—and argue about—the term “post-Black.” Included in this section are some well-known figures: Jean Michel-Basquiat, MacArthur Fellow Kara Walker, and Obama portraitist Kehinde Wiley. The handsomely produced volume includes 14 color images and 21 black-and-white images. Each of the book’s nine sections is contextualized with a perceptive introduction.

An invaluable celebration of Black creativity.

Kirkus Reviews

"An invaluable celebration of Black creativity."

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)