Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710-1940

xlix, 140 pp. "This comprehensive study of the portrayal of African-Americans by American artists of all races documents and interprets the changing, surprisingly cyclical nature of visual representation of black Americans from the colonial period to the middle of the twentieth century. Lavishly illustrated in color and black and white, the book is informed by essays and images that provide one of the first full-range surveys of the variety of ways in which visual conceptions of the African-American — from slave to freedman, comic genre figure to worker, hero, or symbol of urban American life — have mirrored this country's social and political history. The essays, illustrated by early stereotypical black images gathered from periodicals of the day, offer insights into changing white assumptions about black identity. They trace the often painful attempts by black artists to counter racial stereotypes, climaxing in the beginnings of a black artistic identity in the twentieth century. Scholarly entries describe the origins of and motivations for 116 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by 80 artists. Facing History is the culmination of more than four years of research by Guy C. McElroy for The Corcoran Gallery of Art. Reflecting the emerging talents of a generation of black scholars, the book consolidates sociopolitical approaches to images of African-Americans in art pioneered by Alain Locke in the 1930s and revived in the 1960s and 1970s by scholars such as Sidney Kaplan and Ellwood C. Parry III."--jacket flap