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Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation
In this book, artist and art historian Michael Harris investigates the role of visual representation in the construction of black identities, both real and imagined, in the United States. He focuses particularly on how African American artists have responded to--and even used--stereotypical images in their own works.
Harris shows how, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, racial stereotypes became the dominant mode through which African Americans were represented. These characterizations of blacks formed a substantial part of the foundation of white identity and social power. They also, Harris argues, seeped into African Americans' self-images and undermined their self-esteem.
Harris traces black artists' responses to racist imagery across two centuries, from early works by Henry O. Tanner and Archibald J. Motley Jr., in which African Americans are depicted with dignity, to contemporary works by Kara Walker and Michael Ray Charles, in which derogatory images are recycled to controversial effect. The work of these and other artists--such as John Biggers, Jeff Donaldson, Betye Saar, Juan Logan, and Camille Billops--reflects a wide range of perspectives. Examined together, they offer compelling insight into the profound psychological impact of visual stereotypes on the African American community.
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In Colored Pictures , artist and art historian Michael D. Harris traces black artists' responses to racist imagery across two centuries, from early works by Henry O. Tanner and Archibald J. Motley Jr., in which African Americans are depicted with dignity, to contemporary works by Kara Walker and Michael Ray Charles, in which derogatory images are recycled to controversial effect. The work of these and other artists--such as John Biggers, Jeff Donaldson, Betye Saar, Juan Logan, and Camille Billops--reflects a wide range of perspectives. Examined together, they offer compelling insight into the profound psychological impact of visual stereotypes on the African American community.
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Harris shows how, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, racial stereotypes became the dominant mode through which African Americans were represented. These characterizations of blacks formed a substantial part of the foundation of white identity and social power. They also, Harris argues, seeped into African Americans' self-images and undermined their self-esteem.
Harris traces black artists' responses to racist imagery across two centuries, from early works by Henry O. Tanner and Archibald J. Motley Jr., in which African Americans are depicted with dignity, to contemporary works by Kara Walker and Michael Ray Charles, in which derogatory images are recycled to controversial effect. The work of these and other artists--such as John Biggers, Jeff Donaldson, Betye Saar, Juan Logan, and Camille Billops--reflects a wide range of perspectives. Examined together, they offer compelling insight into the profound psychological impact of visual stereotypes on the African American community.
<!--copy for pb
In Colored Pictures , artist and art historian Michael D. Harris traces black artists' responses to racist imagery across two centuries, from early works by Henry O. Tanner and Archibald J. Motley Jr., in which African Americans are depicted with dignity, to contemporary works by Kara Walker and Michael Ray Charles, in which derogatory images are recycled to controversial effect. The work of these and other artists--such as John Biggers, Jeff Donaldson, Betye Saar, Juan Logan, and Camille Billops--reflects a wide range of perspectives. Examined together, they offer compelling insight into the profound psychological impact of visual stereotypes on the African American community.
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304 pages, Paperback
First published March 31, 2003
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 17, 2021
This was a text that we read for my African American Art History course. The writing is very high level and academic, but also readable. I liked how this story examines the cultural, historical and sociological events that impacted the artwork created by African American artists and about African American subjects explored in the book. I learned so much about both African American artists, the movements they worked in, but also the complicated history that is continuing to play a role in modern day events. I took this class in the spring, just before this summer when police brutality against African Americans blew up in the consciousness of most Americans with the nine minute murder of George Floyd by a policemen and his collaborators, but so much of it was resonant to me as I and many other African Americans (and Americans as a whole) dealt with this horrific event and the collective trauma of black people in the face of systemic prejudice, and often state-sanctioned violence. Many African American artists process society and the events that impact them and members of their group through the artwork they produce. This book examines how there is always a political component to art because art tells us about our society. For example, Aunt Jemima imagery. I learned just how harmful Aunt Jemima is, as it is a mammy stereotype of black women as a legacy of Antebellum society. I had understood on some level that Aunt Jemima was racist, but now I realize just how racist it is. I felt and continue to feel convicted in that I do use the Aunt Jemima pancake mix. I'm really glad that the current owner have made a choice to change the name of the product and its iconic branding.
There are so many things I could discuss that I learned in this class and through reading this book. It was highly educational for me as an artist who wants to learn more about my heritage and how to express that aspect of myself through my artwork. It was also appealing to me as a history buff. The photos are good, a combination of black and white and color photos that show the work, and the visual analysis is very good. I would recommend this book, with the understanding that it is very intellectual and will take some deep reading as it probes into issues from a learned, academic perspective. I still have a bit of reading left in this book, but I read most of it, enough to feel authentic in reviewing it.
There are so many things I could discuss that I learned in this class and through reading this book. It was highly educational for me as an artist who wants to learn more about my heritage and how to express that aspect of myself through my artwork. It was also appealing to me as a history buff. The photos are good, a combination of black and white and color photos that show the work, and the visual analysis is very good. I would recommend this book, with the understanding that it is very intellectual and will take some deep reading as it probes into issues from a learned, academic perspective. I still have a bit of reading left in this book, but I read most of it, enough to feel authentic in reviewing it.
August 24, 2012
Earlier this summer, I did the library equivalent of impulse buying. There at the counter, being checked in as I was checking out, was Colored Pictures. One look at the images and how could I resist? The book has made a suitable companion to Kevin Young's
The Grey Album: Music, Shadows, Lies
, particularly the chapter on Dunbar's use of high and low dialect and Young's refusal to use a hierarchy. High and low belong together as one voice.
Harris' broad concern is the manner in which the representation of race comes to shape our political/social discourse; as he notes, it is dialectic, both arising from existing understandings and then reinforcing the same. In the second part of the book he explores how some black artists have worked directly or indirectly to establish their own claim on race. The weakness in this second discussion arises from keeping the focus so tightly on specific artists that we do not see the broader cultural contexts. Even as the artist explores the African American experience, they also do so in the context of other movements and moments in in art and culture.
As Harris said, it's a dialectic. Some points would certainly be stronger for this broader discussion.
What is left under-discussed in this broader framework would be the impact of the 20th Century on the theme. Three areas suggest themselves.
First, there's the question of image, itself. Image making has moved beyond the confines of art and publishing. The combination of commercial culture and of media (movies, radio, then television) have come to play at least as important a role in the aesthetic shaping of the vision of African Americans and their place in society as the high art traditions. From DW Griffiths to the Aunt Jemima figurines Harris discusses, the very nature of such imagery seems to privilege "unblackness" (that delightful word from Ta-Nehisi Coates). We are only beginning to emerge into an era where this privileged visual narrative is being unwound.
Meanwhile back at the ranch as the white boy might say, the question of race and its representation has been opened up by artists such as Harris describes, and perhaps even more so with the turn to performing arts — the race records, jazz, for that matter Scott Joplin — all ways to subvert or push back against this dominant narrative, a theme found also in Young's book. The visual arts are then best seen as part of a larger African American effort to speak with its own voice.
A second change in the 20th Century left unexplored would be the geographic dispersion of the African diaspora. South to North and West, rural to urban. As Isabel Wilkerson chroniclesThe Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, the immigration was a rejection of caste and of caste-narratives (granting that other race narratives emerge in the North). The question for further exploration would be how the differing narratives and experiences of these locales change the narrative. For instance, Alison Saar's work such as her early
Sweet Thang, the later Afro Di(e)ty's monumentalism both appear to reflect a west coast sensibility. Kara Walker brings high art gallery approach that seems cooly eastern in flavor. Her silhouettes were part of the 30 African American Artists show last year at the North Carolina Museum of Art; their provocative sexual and even scatological narratives play with and comment earlier cultural narratives in a frame that seems to speak more to the patron set, a sort of artistic minstrelsy.
The third 20th Century change has been the growing economic diversity in the African American community itself. While in the northern urban areas it is still possible to find the the older narrative of black = poor, that no longer describes the experience of all African Americans, not even in the northern cities. Harris perhaps bumps into this most directly in Saar's Sweet Thang whose figure sports a contemporary gelted dress, a modern (at least 80s modern) hair style. In dress and hair, it as an upper-middle in visual sensibility, but as the hair, the color, the shards of glass beneath the red shoes and red toenails -- there is a tension. Saar in part, is not only discussing race (see the hair without the kinks), but the tension of being young, female, and African American, while also enjoying a socio-ecnomic status. As noted, this brings a a very West Coast vibe.
A second area where class also intrudes is in Harris' consideration of Aunt Jemima collectibles. For him, they were a misguided attempt to change the narrative, a denial of the power of the image themselves. The representation could not be overturned. Still, were one to read them through the lens of the late 90s cultural grid with its emphasis on ironies it may look different. Could there be a sort of broader cultural cross-contamination going on? After all this is the period of the hey day of Garrison Keilor mining his Minnesota heritage: the very act of picking it up testifies to how far you've come. The collectible is thus a sign of distance, and perhaps of alienation. One can only pick it up by saying I am no longer the person implicated by that caste narrative. Has the power of the image gone? The collector says yes, Harris doubts it.
This is an intriguing, sometimes eye-opening book. The color plates present a wealth of African American art that opens our eyes to what is said, shown, and yes, how we've changed.
Harris' broad concern is the manner in which the representation of race comes to shape our political/social discourse; as he notes, it is dialectic, both arising from existing understandings and then reinforcing the same. In the second part of the book he explores how some black artists have worked directly or indirectly to establish their own claim on race. The weakness in this second discussion arises from keeping the focus so tightly on specific artists that we do not see the broader cultural contexts. Even as the artist explores the African American experience, they also do so in the context of other movements and moments in in art and culture.
As Harris said, it's a dialectic. Some points would certainly be stronger for this broader discussion.
What is left under-discussed in this broader framework would be the impact of the 20th Century on the theme. Three areas suggest themselves.
First, there's the question of image, itself. Image making has moved beyond the confines of art and publishing. The combination of commercial culture and of media (movies, radio, then television) have come to play at least as important a role in the aesthetic shaping of the vision of African Americans and their place in society as the high art traditions. From DW Griffiths to the Aunt Jemima figurines Harris discusses, the very nature of such imagery seems to privilege "unblackness" (that delightful word from Ta-Nehisi Coates). We are only beginning to emerge into an era where this privileged visual narrative is being unwound.
Meanwhile back at the ranch as the white boy might say, the question of race and its representation has been opened up by artists such as Harris describes, and perhaps even more so with the turn to performing arts — the race records, jazz, for that matter Scott Joplin — all ways to subvert or push back against this dominant narrative, a theme found also in Young's book. The visual arts are then best seen as part of a larger African American effort to speak with its own voice.
A second change in the 20th Century left unexplored would be the geographic dispersion of the African diaspora. South to North and West, rural to urban. As Isabel Wilkerson chroniclesThe Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, the immigration was a rejection of caste and of caste-narratives (granting that other race narratives emerge in the North). The question for further exploration would be how the differing narratives and experiences of these locales change the narrative. For instance, Alison Saar's work such as her early
Sweet Thang, the later Afro Di(e)ty's monumentalism both appear to reflect a west coast sensibility. Kara Walker brings high art gallery approach that seems cooly eastern in flavor. Her silhouettes were part of the 30 African American Artists show last year at the North Carolina Museum of Art; their provocative sexual and even scatological narratives play with and comment earlier cultural narratives in a frame that seems to speak more to the patron set, a sort of artistic minstrelsy.
The third 20th Century change has been the growing economic diversity in the African American community itself. While in the northern urban areas it is still possible to find the the older narrative of black = poor, that no longer describes the experience of all African Americans, not even in the northern cities. Harris perhaps bumps into this most directly in Saar's Sweet Thang whose figure sports a contemporary gelted dress, a modern (at least 80s modern) hair style. In dress and hair, it as an upper-middle in visual sensibility, but as the hair, the color, the shards of glass beneath the red shoes and red toenails -- there is a tension. Saar in part, is not only discussing race (see the hair without the kinks), but the tension of being young, female, and African American, while also enjoying a socio-ecnomic status. As noted, this brings a a very West Coast vibe.
A second area where class also intrudes is in Harris' consideration of Aunt Jemima collectibles. For him, they were a misguided attempt to change the narrative, a denial of the power of the image themselves. The representation could not be overturned. Still, were one to read them through the lens of the late 90s cultural grid with its emphasis on ironies it may look different. Could there be a sort of broader cultural cross-contamination going on? After all this is the period of the hey day of Garrison Keilor mining his Minnesota heritage: the very act of picking it up testifies to how far you've come. The collectible is thus a sign of distance, and perhaps of alienation. One can only pick it up by saying I am no longer the person implicated by that caste narrative. Has the power of the image gone? The collector says yes, Harris doubts it.
This is an intriguing, sometimes eye-opening book. The color plates present a wealth of African American art that opens our eyes to what is said, shown, and yes, how we've changed.
March 3, 2019
Really interesting examination of race and visuals, and the way racism is reinforced or challenged through visual images. I skimmed some parts pretty fast, but the pics are amazing (and some are amazingly horrifying). I'd like to reread this when I have more time.
June 23, 2014
Interesting "view" of blacks on canvas and water color paper.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews