American Art Criticism and the African American Artist

FAIN: FB-51678-05

Mary Ann Calo
Colgate University (Hamilton, NY 13346-1338)

This project is concerned with the critical reception of African American artists who emerged in the wake of the Harlem Renaissance. In the interwar decades a set of critical ideals rooted in the discourse of racial difference functioned to isolate black artistic production from mainstream cultural practice. This was a lost opportunity for American art critics who failed to recognize the extent to which African American artists, through their work and their rhetoric, sought to participate in a collective project of national self-definition. The legacy of this era has been the persistent inability to dislodge the preeminence of race as a constant in the critical assessment of African American artists.

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