...Margo Natalie Crawford This essay considers the very use of the word “black” in diasporic freedom struggles as a type of strategic abstraction. Crawford’s focus on blackness as a strategic abstraction deepens our understanding of the practice of diaspora as the practice of black abstraction...

... or disenfranchise the realpolitik? Is this an art-historical question, or a matter of and for ethics and aesthetics? AESTHETICS OF THE ABSTRACT Julie L. McGee AND EXPL elebrating twenty years of democracy in 2014, South Africa has been dubbed “the C...

... of the virtue of self-­reliance, a notion that Abstraction! on Bay Area painters in March 2012. was reinforced by the boundaries of racial segrega- tion. Though society has come a long way since the Notes days of Jim Crow, the story of the Davis brothers 1. In 1932 the US Public Health Service...

... artists employed abstraction—histories that often begin in the mid-1960s or 1970s. In examining the mid-1950s Plaiton works, I hope to both bring Cousins and his work back to visibility and suggest that this history actually began substantially earlier. kroiz@berkeley.edu © 2022 by Nka...

... himself arriving in 1946). The article discusses one of Williams’s most celebrated works, Human World (1950), and examines how the artist’s practice engaged with anticolonial resistance and modernist discourse surrounding abstraction. The author also explores and comments on the exhibitions in which...

... in Europe suggest a foundation in which naming identity (in terms of race, gender, or other classifications) was not yet of interest. Rather, the aesthetic experimentalism associated with abstract expressionism enabled Amos to master abstraction in a manner that would guide her entire oeuvre. 116 Nka...

... of IS. By Abstraction is comprised of a its nature, it is not an insular language. The resilience But within Modernism, it becomes inscribed in a prede• of its signage runs like a thread through many different termined lineage of ideas that represent an equivocal milieus, collapsing insurmountable distances...

... of the postwar artists to form Spiral, an artistic alliance that rep- avant-­garde, the history of abstract expressionism resented African American artists in the March has largely expunged their contribution, instead on Washington and that sought to formulate an canonizing the work of such artists...

..., and the movement of crowds. His work compels viewers to look carefully at other people and themselves. How do we interact with others and what happens durinG those exchanGes? His interest in human interaction on the micro and macro scales has not yet received in-depth analysis. When for many abstract...

... Lewis as a painter who was con• homage to a working class labor ethic which became part of the cerned with the thin line between narration and spectacle; a abstract expressionist myth. painting, Passing Storm, 1952, seems at first only about...

...• sition from principle to abstract motif, from the signified to the Fringe Foyer of the London Royal the sign, in much Yoruba art there is a narrative intercedent Festival Hall in 1991. between the idea and the form...

... his deep relation to the world around him via a mode of abstraction that is layered with meanings. This investigation follows by centering upon a single painting from Bowling’s white series, Icarus (2005), produced after the death of his eldest son. Icarus explores themes of time, death, and spiritual...

...• vate studio. While in Germany, he met many famous abstract painters and was inspired by this art form. After graduating from the Cologne Art Academy he held...

...Fo Wilson This essay examines the tensions between dichotomies concerning the color black through the work of the abstract expressionist Norman Lewis and through some of Lewis’s philosophical ambitions that have found a place in the work of the contemporary artist Ellen Gallagher. Seizing...

... of social realism, in particular Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, whose work encouraged unity of classes and the glorification of folk roots and peasant culture. Through his extensive travels and experimentation, Johnson later became focused on abstract expressionism and explored it through the rest of his...

... photogra• phy in 1958. Cowans served as a military photo• pher Adger Cowans move the medium from its grapher in the U.S. Navy before moving to New comfortable post dictating descriptive accuracy York, where he worked with Life magazine photo• and visual journalism, to an abstract expression...

...Chanda Laine Carey This essay closely surveys Jack Whitten’s 2014 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. An emphasis on the aesthetics of gestural abstraction informs Whitten’s work of the last five decades, resulting in a body of work that pushes through historical events...

... that the artist’s work leverages the expressionist possibilities of identity, figuration, and history on the abstract legacies of linguistic conceptualism. A continuous examination of representation grounded in the implacably figural substrate of race, gender, sexuality, and history, Ligon’s art highlights...

..., the latter an extensive art library of his own. But what he saw famous for his Zen-­inspired personal abstract lan- and experienced during the three months abroad guage. In Portway, Maqhubela found not only...

... on contemporary art — is book, such as his interest in abstraction, his prefer- Sanyal Nka • 111 ence for nonfixed forms, and, most important, the wall-­hanging projects, and berates others for down- creative aspirations of his...