"This book explores the career and legacy of Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890-1960), whose figural sculptures embody her uncompromising sovereignty over her work and life. Through original essays, catalogue entries on Prophet's major works, and an illustrated chronology of her remarkable life, this book demonstrates how Prophet continues to inspire a new generation of artists and viewers today. Contributors trace her transatlantic career, from Parisian ateliers to Spelman College, and consider topics such as the art institutions Prophet navigated, the stylistic connections between her figurative sculpture and the work of her modernist contemporaries, and how she resisted predetermined conceptions of her cultural identity."--

African American artists Hale Woodruff and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet both worked in Paris before they become colleagues in Atlanta. When Woodruff began teaching drawing and painting at Atlanta University in 1931 he opened a new era of art instruction. After Prophet arrived to teach sculpture in 1934, the art offerings expanded exponentially. By the mid-1930s, the Coordinated Art Program at Atlanta University Center was the place in the southeast for African Americans to study art. This generously illustrated book considers the artists' lives and their impact as teachers and mentors. Hale Woodruff (1900-1980) was born in Cairo, Illinois. After briefly attending the Herron Art School and the Art Institute of Chicago, he took a job at the Senate Avenue YMCA in Indianapolis, where he met some of the leading figures of the time, including W. E. B. DuBois, Charles S. Johnson, Walter White, and Countee Cullen. After winning several prizes for his drawings, he left for Paris in 1927. When he joined the newly formed Atlanta University Center, he viewed teaching as his chance to impart a sense of cultural and social responsibility to his students and encouraged them to portray black experience in America honestly. The annual exhibition he initiated became the most important national exhibition for African American artists. Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890-1960) was born and raised in Warwick, Rhode Island, and in 1918 became the first African American to graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1922 she went to Paris, where she studied under the acclaimed sculptor Victor Joseph Jean Ambrose Segoffin and received the prestigious Otto Kahn and Greenough prizes. She was associated with the New Negro Movement, which called on African American artists to learn from African practitioners and to develop their own cultural style. Her arrival in Atlanta added the three-dimensional component necessary for the Atlanta University Center to initiate a degree-granting program in art. Amalia K. Amakiis the curator of the Paul R. Jones Collection and assistant professor of art and Black American studies at the University of Delaware.Andrea D. Barnwellis the director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta.

Creating Their Own Image marks the first comprehensive history of African-American women artists, from slavery to the present day. Using an analysis of stereotypes of Africans and African-Americans in western art and culture as a springboard, Lisa E. Farrington here richly details hundreds ofimportant works--many of which deliberately challenge these same identity myths, of the carnal Jezebel, the asexual Mammy, the imperious Matriarch--in crafting a portrait of artistic creativity unprecedented in its scope and ambition. In these lavishly illustrated pages, some of which feature imagesnever before published, we learn of the efforts of Elizabeth Keckley, fashion designer to Mary Todd Lincoln; the acclaimed sculptor Edmonia Lewis, internationally renowned for her neoclassical works in marble; and the artist Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and her innovative teaching techniques. We meetLaura Wheeler Waring who portrayed women of color as members of a socially elite class in stark contrast to the prevalent images of compliant maids, impoverished malcontents, and exotics "others" that proliferated in the inter-war period. We read of the painter Barbara Jones-Hogu's collaboration onthe famed Wall of Respect, even as we view a rare photograph of Hogu in the process of painting the mural. Farrington expertly guides us through the fertile period of the Harlem Renaissance and the "New Negro Movement," which produced an entirely new crop of artists who consciously imbued their workwith a social and political agenda, and through the tumultuous, explosive years of the civil rights movement. Drawing on revealing interviews with numerous contemporary artists, such as Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, Nanette Carter, Camille Billops, Xenobia Bailey, and many others, the second half ofCreating Their Own Image probes more recent stylistic developments, such as abstraction, conceptualism, and post-modernism, never losing sight of the struggles and challenges that have consistently influenced this body of work. Weaving together an expansive collection of artists, styles, andperiods, Farrington argues that for centuries African-American women artists have created an alternative vision of how women of color can, are, and might be represented in American culture. From utilitarian objects such as quilts and baskets to a wide array of fine arts, Creating Their Own Imageserves up compelling evidence of the fundamental human need to convey one's life, one's emotions, one's experiences, on a canvas of one's own making.

An interdisciplinary look at the Harlem Renaissance, it includes essays on the principal participants, those who defined the political, intellectual and cultural milieu in which the Renaissance existed; on important events and places.

"Andy Warhol’s Raid the Icebox exhibition [held at the RISD Museum of Art, April 23-June 30, 1970], and the many similar museum projects it has spawned throughout the world over the past fifty years allow us to reconsider what storage is and might be. How do we recuperate the lost narratives residing in storage? How do we write new histories? How do objects that have become disassociated from their original contexts acquire fresh lives? How does storage evolve from a problem to be solved to an opportunity for discovery?"--Prelude.

What Nerve! reveals a hidden history of American figurative painting, sculpture and popular imagery. It documents and/or restages four installations, spaces or happenings, in Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit and Providence, which were crucial to the development of figurative art in the United States. Several of the better-known artists in What Nerve! have been the subject of significant exhibitions or publications, but this is the first major volume to focus on the broader impact of figurative art to connect artists and collectives from different generations and regions of the country. These are: from Chicago, the Hairy Who (James Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, Karl Wirsum); from California, Funk artists (Jeremy Anderson, Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Robert Hudson, Ken Price, Peter Saul, Peter Voulkos, William T. Wiley); from Detroit, Destroy All Monsters (Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara, Jim Shaw); and from Providence, Forcefield (Mat Brinkman, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg, Ara Peterson). Created in collaboration with artists from these groups, the historical moments at the core of What Nerve! are linked by work from six artists who profoundly influenced or were influenced by the groups: William Copley, Jack Kirby, Elizabeth Murray, Gary Panter, Christina Ramberg and H.C. Westermann. Featuring paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs and videos, as well as ephemera, wallpaper and other materials used in the reconstructed installations, the book and exhibition will broaden public exposure to the scope of this influential history. The exuberance, humor and politics of these artworks remain powerfully resonant. Much of the work in this book, including installation photos, exhibition ephemera and correspondence, is published for the first time. What Nerve! represents the first historical examination of the circumstances, relationships and works of an increasingly important lineage of American artists.

A city of modest size, Providence, Rhode Island, had the third-largest Native American population in the United States by the first decade of the nineteenth century. Native Providence tells their stories at this historical moment and in the decades before and after, a time when European Americans claimed that Northeast Natives had mostly vanished. Denied their rightful place in modernity, men, women, and children from Narragansett, Nipmuc, Pequot, Wampanoag, and other ancestral communities traveled diverse and complicated routes to make their homes in this city. They found each other, carved out livelihoods, and created neighborhoods that became their urban homelands—new places of meaningful attachments. Accounts of individual lives and family histories emerge from historical and anthropological research in archives, government offices, historical societies, libraries, and museums and from community memories, geography, and landscape. Patricia E. Rubertone chronicles the survivance of the Native people who stayed, left and returned, who faced involuntary displacement by urban renewal, who lived in Provi­dence briefly, or who made their presence known both there and in the wider indigenous and settler-colonial worlds. These individuals reenvision the city’s past through everyday experiences and illuminate documentary and spatial tactics of inequality that erased Native people from most nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history.