Cultural History Seminar

 Date: 19th February (week 7) Speaker: Dr Celeste-Marie Bernier (Nottingham)  Title: “Struggle is a Beautiful thing:” Narrative Experimentation and Visual Abstraction in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration of the Negro (1941) and Elizabeth Catlett’s The Negro Woman (1946-47). 

Abstract:  The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast works by both artists to address widespread critical neglected of aesthetic issues within the field of African American art history.  In the same way that early scholars of slavery prized the poems of Phyllis Wheatley and George Moses Horton alongside the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs for their fidelity to fact, numerous critics of African American art celebrate Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden and many others as authentic creators of a black art which is not only highly identifiable as such but which exalts the sociological over and above the aesthetically experimental in an oversimplified and potentially reductive and hand fisted commitment to realism.  In the light of current scholarship, it is clear that those early critics of slave narratives who were so keen to celebrate what they saw as an authentic narrative style which neither embellished nor detracted from the simplicity of their political message failed to note their complex literary devices.  It is no stretch to suggest that with the exception of astute critics such as Michelle Wallace, bell hooks, James Smalls, Richard Powell and Sharon Patton, many scholars are still asking, “African Americans could paint then, could they?”  In this way, many adopt narrow and reductive analytical approaches to artists and their works which close down rather than open up interpretative possibilities.  Critic James Smalls despairs of current African American art criticism by protesting against “the dearth of a viable and critical art historical and historiographical practice within the discipline.”  He is not alone.  Only two years ago, Floyd Coleman wrote that  “African American art” is “still a new frontier in American art history.”  By adopting close formal analysis in connection with an in-depth investigation of the aesthetic developments within African American art history, the aim of this paper is to get to grips with issues related to an experimental visual poetics within the US black tradition.