Politics of Ephemerality in African American Art Practices, 1965-2015

FAIN: FT-264870-19

Rebecca Elizabeth Keegan VanDiver
Vanderbilt University (Nashville, TN 37203-2416)

Preparation of a book on 20th-century African American art that addresses the notion of impermanence.

My book confronts the relationship between Blackness and ephemerality (material, temporal, and political) as manifest in African American contemporary art. I query how African American artists reconcile the permanent (their Blackness) with the ephemeral (the changing socio-cultural moment). The central claim of the project is that some African American artists engage the politics of ephemerality and its associated connections to permanence and impermanence as part of their efforts to respond to states of emergency—government-declared and government-perpetrated. Topics include: the production and archiving of 1960s era civil rights march posters, 1970s Black feminist print-making, collaborative site-specific artworks like the Organization of Black American Culture’s 1967 Wall of Respect mural, Mark Bradford’s use of ephemera in his collages, Kara Walker’s 2006 After the Deluge show, and recent artistic responses to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Associated Products

From the Black Feminist Matrix: Artistic and Biological Reproduction in Elizabeth Catlett's late career Prints (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: From the Black Feminist Matrix: Artistic and Biological Reproduction in Elizabeth Catlett's late career Prints
Author: Rebecca VanDiver
Abstract: Motherhood is a pervasive theme in Elizabeth Catlett’s sculptural and printmaking practice. In her 1940 MFA thesis she wrote that the mother-child motif was “one in which blackness and femaleness intersect.” In the late 1960s, after race riots engulfed major US cities and the release of the Moynihan Report damning the state of the Negro family, Catlett’s prints started to explore the trauma of Black motherhood and the impossibility of biological reproduction in such times of crisis. This paper analyzes a selection of Catlett's prints from 1969-1980 and argues that Catlett deploys repetition and seriality as artistic strategies to counter the negative mainstream discourses concerning Black women. While Catlett’s early career has received scholarly attention, her late-career printmaking practice (post-1970) remains heretofore understudied as such this paper addresses this lacuna while also offering new insights into contemporary African American printmaking practices.
Date: 10/04/19
Primary URL: http://library.udel.edu/special/catlett-symposium/
Conference Name: "My Art Speaks for Both My Peoples" A Symposium on Elizabeth Catlett

---