The Unfinished Business of Unsettled Things

Art from an African American South

Bernard L. Herman

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781469668529
• eBook ISBN: 9781469668536
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunst Allgemein

This book invites readers into a growing, dynamic conversation among scholars and critics around a vibrant community of artists from an African American South. This constellation of creative makers includes familiar figures, such as Thornton Dial Sr., Lonnie Holley, and quiltmakers Nettie Young and Mary Lee Bendolph, whose work is collected in major museum and private collections. The artists represented extend to lesser-known but equally compelling creators working across a wide range of artistic forms, themes, and geographies. The essays gathered here, accompanied by a generous selection of full-color plates, survey subjects such as the artists' engagement with enslavement and liberation, the spiritual and religious dimensions of their work, the technical aspects of their work (such as the common use of "assemblage" as an artistic medium), the links between art and biography, and the evolving status of their reception in narratives of contemporary, modern, southern, and American art.

Contributors are Celeste-Marie Bernier, Laura Bickford, Michael J. Bramwell, Elijah Heyward III, Sharon P. Holland, and Pamela J. Sachant.

INDEX

Page numbers appearing in italics refer to illustrations.

Abe Kane (Doyle), 103

Ackland Art Museum, 8–9, 10

affect, 37, 38

African diasporic history and art, 55–90; background and overview of, 55–57; Bolden and, 66–71, 68; conclusions on, 89–90; Dial and, 71–77, 73, 76; Doyle and, 63–66; Harvey and, 78–83, 80; Minter and, 83–89, 86, 88; Smith and, 57–63, 58, 60–62

“African Hut, The” (Minter), 114

African Methodist Episcopal Church, 171

African Village in America, The (Minter): about, 28, 56, 84–85, 107, 108–9, 114–21, 123–25, 129; Four Hundred Years of Chains and Shackles in, 85–87, 86; huts in, 114, 115; Mass Grave of Two Cultures in, 115, 116; A Monument: The Birmingham Jail in, 115–18, 119; The Price to Vote, The Price to Be a Human in, 118, 120; The Royal Family in Chains in, plate 7, 28, 101, 124; Slave Ship USA in, 115, 117

Afrofuturism, 161, 167, 168–69, 171

agency: African American art as a canon and, 157, 171; background and overview of, 2, 3, 7; Dial and, 28, 74, 122, 169; Minter and, 108, 114; spirituality and, 162; Young and, 25, 26

Alexander, Elizabeth, 61

ancestor veneration, 108–9

Andrews, Benny, 75–77

Angelou, Maya, 89, 98

animal studies, 39

anxieties of authenticity, 3–5, 7

Archer, Barbara, 42

Arnett, Matt, 10

Arnett, Paul, 10

Arnett, William S.: on the art world, 31; background and overview of, 6, 9–10; Bolden and, 67; collection of, 8, 9, 157; Dial and, 96–97; Doyle and, 35, 63–64; Light and, 139; Smith and, 59, 61; Willis and, 142, 149; Young and, 25, 51

Arning, Eddie, 151–54, 153

art and a “public,” 52

art canon, African American art as an, 155...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Unfinished Business of Unsettled Things: Art from an African American South
• Put Honey in the Sky Where It Could Drip and Make the World Sweet: Looking for Purvis Young and Thomas Samuel Doyle, but Seeing Something Else: Meditations on the Matter of Black Freedom
• Had to Learn Surviving: Imaging Slavery and Imagining Freedom in “Black Lexicons of Liberation”
• Heard a Voice, Saw a Light: Spiritual Implications of Creative Belief in Black Vernacular Art
• When Everything Stands Still, That’s When the Griot Spirit Come On: History-Making and Assemblage in the African American South
• Biography—Writing Lives; Art—Viewing Lives
• The South Has Always Had Something to Say
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Contributors
• Index