The Color of Stone: Sculpting the Black Female Subject in Nineteenth-Century America

by Charmaine A. Nelson

Overview

Nineteenth-century neoclassical sculpture was a highly politicized international movement. Based in Rome, many expatriate American sculptors created works that represented black female subjects in compelling and problematic ways. Rejecting pigment as dangerous and sensual, adherence to white marble abandoned the racialization of the black body by skin color.

In The Color of Stone, Charmaine A. Nelson brilliantly analyzes a key, but often neglected, aspect of neoclassical sculpture—color. Considering three major works—Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave, William Wetmore Story’s Cleopatra, and Edmonia Lewis’s Death of Cleopatra—she explores the intersection of race, sex, and class to reveal the meanings each work holds in terms of colonial histories of visual representation as well as issues of artistic production, identity, and subjectivity. She also juxtaposes these sculptures with other types of art to scrutinize prevalent racial discourses and to examine how the black female subject was made visible in high art.

By establishing the centrality of race within the discussion of neoclassical sculpture, Nelson provides a model for a black feminist art history that at once questions and destabilizes canonical texts.

Charmaine A. Nelson is assistant professor of art history at McGill University.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780816646517
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	07/11/2007
Edition description:	First edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.60(d)

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations     ix
Introduction: Toward a Black Feminist Art History     xi
Artists, Environs, Aesthetics
Dismembering the Flock: Difference and the "Lady-Artists"     3
"Taste" and the Practices of Cultural Tourism: Vision, Proximity, and Commemoration     45
"So Pure and Celestial a Light": Sculpture, Marble, and Whiteness as a Privileged Racial Signifier     57
From Slavery to Freedom
White Slaves and Black Masters: Appropriation and Disavowal in Hiram Powers's Greek Slave     75
The Color of Slavery: Degrees of Blackness and the Bodies of Female Slaves     113
Two Cleopatras
Racing the Body: Reading Blackness in William Wetmore Story's Cleopatra     143
The Black Queen in the White Body: Edmonia Lewis and the Dead Queen     159
Conclusion: Neoclassicism and the Politics of Race     179
Acknowledgments     185
Notes     187
Index     227