Description
TitleCarving out a space for themselves: black artists in New York City, 1929-1989
Date Created2021
Other Date2021-10 (degree)
Extent1 online resource (x, 233 pages) : illustrations
Description“Carving Out A Space for Themselves” explores how Black visual artists’ educational activism in New York City democratized elite art practice in the years spanning the Great Depression and the culturally conservative Reagan Presidency. Specifically, I examine how African American artists countered the racist exclusion of working-class populations of color from New York City’s mainstream museums and public schools through their work as arts educators in schools, prisons, community-centered museums, and Black enclaves within the city. I argue that the sculptor Augusta Savage, a Black woman with ties to Marcus Garvey’s Black Nationalist Movement, is the foremother of the Black arts institution building and nurturing we see into the 21st century. Her students include Jacob Lawrence, Gwendolyn Knight, Norman Lewis, Ernest Crichlow, and in many ways, the legacy of her educational pedagogy reaches as far as the heralded artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat. The dissertation contributes to the broader historiography of the long Black freedom struggle by bringing attention to the fight for artistic inclusion as a significant rights claim.Using primary source material such as traditional archives, newspaper articles, journal entries, oral histories, and letters, I decenter the internal dynamics of the institutional art world, to argue that the visual arts enhanced the lives of ordinary Black New Yorkers. As such, my theoretical framework relies not only on investigating the actions and praxis of Black artist-educators, but it also analyzes the experiences of their students. “Carving Out a Space for Themselves” challenges the traditional canon of the history of art history through the serious examination of the practice of art from the “bottom-up.” At the same time, my dissertation is the only historical monograph to map two successive generations of Black visual artist-educators against the backdrop of a capacious understanding of the Black Arts Movement. Ultimately, “Carving Out a Space for Themselves” explores the vital role Black artists, their artwork, and art education played in the ongoing struggles against institutional racism, state violence, and economic inequality.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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