1971: a year in the life of color / Darby English.

Author
English, Darby, 1974- [Browse]
Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
  • Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, [2016]
  • ©2016
Description
285 pages, 2 unnumbered folded pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

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Marquand Library - Remote Storage: Marquand Use OnlyN6538.N5 E538 2016 Browse related items Request

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    Subject(s)
    Summary note
    In this book, art historian Darby English explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of United States cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in America, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, a racially integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto. 1971: A Year in the Life of Color looks at many black artists' desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their efforts and those of their advocates to further that aim through public exhibition. Amid calls to define a black aesthetic, these experiments with modernist art prioritized cultural interaction and instability. 'Contemporary Black Artists in America' highlighted abstraction as a stance against normative approaches, while 'The DeLuxe Show' positioned abstraction in a center of urban blight. The importance of these experiments, English argues, came partly from color's special status as a cultural symbol and partly from investigations of color already under way in late modern art and criticism. With their supporters, black modernists among them Peter Bradley, Frederick Eversley, Alvin Loving, Raymond Saunders, and Alma Thomas rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for interracial collaboration and, above all, responding with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding cultures preoccupation with color--Publisher's description.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    Contents
    • Introduction: Social experiments with modernism
    • How it looks to be a problem
    • Making a show of discomposure: Contemporary Black Artists in America
    • Local color and its discontents: the DeLuxe show
    • Appendix: Raymond Saunders, Black is a color (1967).
    ISBN
    • 9780226131054 ((cloth ; : alk. paper))
    • 022613105X ((cloth ; : alk. paper))
    LCCN
    2016012924
    OCLC
    944087514
    Statement on language in description
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