Project proposal for Fall 2023 Introduction to Public History Seminar.
Questions:
- How can the examination of African American involvement in the arts lead to a greater understanding of the evolving relationship between black visual representation and black social and cultural politics?
- How do artists, as public figures, comment on society’s values or movements?
- How does artistic propaganda stimulate the spread of ideas to strategically bring communities together or to exclude the marginalized?
- How can the Arts be employed for learning public history?
Abstract:
The arts exist in all cultures and are the intuitive representation of society’s beliefs, and traditions, their essential values, and proclamations of power and status. Art can inspire and connect people with their emotions and identities and circulate a message.[1] Fannie Barrier Williams (1855-1944), the prominent feminist and political activist, believed the refining influence of art could “drive out all impurities” in the black culture,[2] reflecting the prevailing middle-class attitudes toward art and culture and the emerging “politics of respectability.” Williams recognized the political element of sophisticated behavior and refinement to demand the respect and citizenship that people of color, especially women, deserved.[3] Therefore, the aesthetic experience must be accessible to those from society’s lower ranks, and not only to those who benefited by wealth, status, or art expertise.
W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), an African-American writer, sociologist, and activist, viewed the arts as a powerful political weapon, transforming “the aesthetic into a militant part of a political, economic, and cultural movement.”[4] While Williams promoted art as decoration, Du Bois promoted art as a political tool for social justice, to counter racist representations, and to promote African Americans as equals, and capable of high achievement. [5] This study investigates how people of color during Fannie Barrier Williams’s lifetime employed the arts to strengthen their self-identities. Whether the goal was respectability or antagonism, the arts linked black visual representation with black cultural politics. The arts promoted common social and political issues to influence public opinion toward acceptance, and empathy and reaffirmed the dignity of African Americans.[6]
Project Proposal:
Fannie Barrier Williams (1855-1944) was a prominent feminist and political activist who promoted art appreciation within her community and believed art was a powerful link in the fight for social justice. Williams called for the promotion of art appreciation for people located in places isolated from galleries and organized the lending of art reproductions, citing the minimal cost, educational value, and influence of what she hoped would become a permanent educational influence. In the spirit of Williams’s vision for art and community engagement, practitioners can incorporate art into public history initiatives, through a virtual gallery. Globally, internet usage is achieving remarkable growth rates, with 5.3 billion active internet users as of October 2023.[7] The new digital age has developed with new methods to communicate and collaborate with others worldwide. The Internet has opened several new practices in various fields of human interests including the application in the field of fine arts, where it provides exciting new possibilities to present the artwork to a broad audience.[8] Through the internet, art collections can be presented in immersive virtual environments, transforming how art may be presented and viewed.
Tuuli Lähdesmäki cites art as an essential tool for future generations to be skilled in empathy, imagination, and creativity. “Cultural, ethnic, national, social, religious, or linguistic identities intersect within the arts,”[9] and urges the public to acknowledge and empathize with diverse cultures. For educators, art proposes abstract, non-material ways of thinking, immensely useful for students across all disciplines and in real-world situations from technology to culture and society at large. Virtual art spaces can advance analytical dialogue, enhance social support, and offer learners flexibility, choice, and awareness of inclusion.[10] Chia and Kay assert that the arts in all their various cultural forms sustained the public during the COVID-19 lockdown.[11] Further, the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new era of virtual applied learning. Digitalization, particularly in the employment of virtual reality, is an emerging trend that will fuel the future of education and the workplace.[12]
Rebecca Bush and Paul K. Tawny[13] describe how providing visual art and music in interdisciplinary projects across a variety of platforms attracts audiences in new and creative ways for the public to see and share history, linking data with visual images to organize types of storytelling for the public to see and share history. Unlike digital collections, brick-and-mortar galleries are confronted with the physical limitations of usable exhibition space that is further problematic by entryways and exits, and the traffic flow often leads to confusion. Pathways are key in allowing the public to stop and examine objects and stories that interest them. Physical art spaces also pose curatorial challenges in determining what objects are available for the exhibition.
O. Iaonnou claims that in creating a virtual gallery, art needs to connect with relevant and informative text information and unfold progressively, allowing each work to build upon preceding works. [14] In an online platform, audiences can take their time, navigating through the gallery, moving about between the artworks, and comparing them. Within the virtual space, the viewers can also share their impressions through feedback or survey platforms. However, Hrk asserts that virtual galleries are a relatively new area in the broad scope of software development and may feel unfamiliar to those who are not engaged in software design.[15] Further, virtual galleries are two-dimensional, unlike the subjective feeling of visiting a real gallery. Acquiring some sort of digital representation of the artwork that is to be exhibited can be challenging. Other key considerations are the “walls,” which shape the gallery and provide surfaces for “hanging pictures” and the loading of text files containing descriptions of exhibited artwork. A finished gallery design and its data can be saved in an internal format, although the internet poses new questions of accessibility and privilege to those who cannot afford their services.
In determining the target audiences for a virtual gallery, several were identified, including those interested in history, art enthusiasts, and “stakeholder” audiences comprising people of African descent. A virtual space appeals to those who cannot physically attend a show or an event at a gallery, perhaps because it is abroad or too far, or for those with disabilities. The challenge is to appeal to the interests of all audiences.
Virtual Art Gallery example:
In 2022, in partnership with researchers from the Rand Corporation, I curated a virtual gallery, featuring work by LGBTQ+ incarcerated artists, giving a platform to marginalized community members inside the prison system and helping inform the public about the plight of LGBTQ+ prisoners. “Digital Expressions of Mass Incarceration” serves as a template for the gallery proposal.
Literature Review:
Fannie Barrier Williams’s emphasis on artistic expression is not widely investigated. Little is known of her initial encounters with racism in her art education or her promotion of art appreciation within her community. Williams was the daughter of wealthy, mixed-race parents in the upstate New York town of Brockport, a community with few black residents and no enslaved people, where class distinctions rather than color bound her social world. Her parents provided her with a college education that enabled her to pursue her passion for art, ultimately leading her to pursue a lifetime of activism. Mary Ann Stankiewicz claims that by the mid-19th century, an arts education played a crucial role in constructing a middle-class person. “Genteel people were expected to have leisure time to appreciate the arts, as well as the sensitivity and good taste to appreciate artistic accomplishments.”[16] When studying portrait painting at the School of Fine Arts in Washington DC, for the first time, she was confronted with an intensity of racism she had never suffered in Brockport, surrounded by screens that separated her from the other students. Later, studying piano at the New England Conservatory School of Fine Arts in Boston, the director of the Conservatory, a former abolitionist, agreed to the demands of white southern students. Williams was expelled at a time when most of the public exhibition venues at this time were segregated from blacks, free or otherwise.[17]
The Refining Influence of Art
In 1906, Williams’s “The Refining Influence of Art,” was published in The Voice of the Negro, the turn of the century’s most significant African American literary periodical, whose goal was to support the education and social elevation of African Americans within American society. However, Desnee French claims the journal maintained and promoted class divisions, as leading black intellectuals’ discussions of racial identity reveal the importance they placed on their middle-class values to increase African Americans’ social status.[18] In “The Refining Influence of Art,” Williams called for the promotion of art appreciation for people located in places isolated from galleries, citing the success of the Chicago Woman’s Club and the Central Art Association that were loaning out reproductions of Italian and French masterpieces, and contemporary American art to homes and country schools. Following the structure of the traveling library, a method of distributing “good literature”[19] among people in the community, Williams cited the minimal cost, educational value, and influence of what began as an experiment that she hoped would become a permanent educational influence among those who could not afford to purchase art for their consumption. Williams hoped the world of art, with all its “joyousness and beauty,”[20] would grace the “pictureless homes and schools”[21] of people of color.
There is an exultation of soul in the study of art that makes one loathe the crooked, awkward, and ugly things in life. We can see more clearly the largeness, the glory, and the brightness of the world, the beauty of women, and the nobility of men when the love and knowledge of art enter more fully into our everyday lives.[22]
Williams suggested that homes displaying images of heroes such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, like the Sistine Madonna, might teach future generations kindness and humanity; the artist can instruct and preach true righteousness.
Art and the Politics of Respectability
Roxane Victoria Pickens claims in the late nineteenth century, black Americans’ political status was explicitly linked with the degree of domestic respectability and refinement. The homes of people of color became disputed areas for white supremacists who felt that African Americans’, as well as immigrants’ homes, were the source of uncleanliness, disease, ill morals, and general laziness.[23] Black women who were engaged in uplift efforts centered on the home in an attempt to combat these and other vicious accusations. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in 1926’s “On the Making of Homes,” urged readers to pay more interest to the organization and creation of a refined family life. According to Wilcox, “The home, not the adornment of the person, marks the progress of any race from the crude to the civilized state.” Historians Shane and Graham White stress the significance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century clothing for enslaved people in the United States, as demonstrations of their self-worth, and as a resistance to the authority and oppression of their white masters.[24] Newly-emancipated slaves participated in American society through their interaction with consumerism. As free American citizens, they could acquire the same luxury goods as their white counterparts.
Consumerism could also be related to irresponsibility and vice. W. E. B. DuBois stressed the excessive amount that African Americans spent on home furnishings, personal decorations, and household amusements and interpreted it as, ultimately, wasteful. He claimed, “Probably few poor nations waste more money by thoughtless and unreasonable expenditure than the American Negro. Much money is wasted in extravagantly furnished parlors, dining-rooms, guest chambers and other visible parts of the homes.”[25] Yet, Roxane Victoria Pickens contends that middle- and working-class African Americans gained a sense of dignity and pride as Americans and as individuals through their domestic material culture, including ornamenting their homes with objects of art “that reflected their personal tastes, their personal histories, and their private understandings of themselves as proud beings.”[26]
Fannie Barrier Williams urged women to develop decorators’ skills to make their homes “bright, beautiful, and refined,”[27] and to appreciate the sacred “trust and privileges as a homemaker.”[28] Williams followed the dominant ideology, that a woman’s sphere was a private world of the home and family, with her public, middle-class status defined through involvement with philanthropic organizations, women’s clubs, music societies, and lecture halls. She believed the arts could align women with emerging cultural values, affirming traditional social hierarchies, and contribute to the construction of the American middle class, relying on the ‘dynamics of emulation,” [29] a method through which the developing middle class sought to copy or surpass upper-class ideals through refinement while urging the lower classes to mimic their middle-class behavior. Fannie Barrier Williams maintained that an atmosphere of culture would lift African-American youth above “the coarse and vulgar things of life.”[30] Recognizing that art gallery privileges were often out of reach to the African-American public, she advocated for art and music education in schools.
Race and Representation
Williams reflected on the ways African Americans had been represented in art and other visual mediums and the principles these representations served to perpetuate racist stereotypes. Slavery played a large part in the ways African-American representations were produced and perceived, with most images that were stereotypical and patronizing and corresponding to the dominant ideology of white supremacy and, conversely, abolitionists’ positive visual representations of blackness that were created and funded to promote African-American social and cultural equity. David W. Blight maintains that after the Civil War, white Americans, both North and South, moved quickly from an ideological vision of the conflict, with slavery as a leading cause, instead stressing union, liberty, forgiveness, and respect for both sides. [31] After slavery ended, white citizens were challenged to acknowledge black people’s freedom and debated the proper role of black people in American society. Race became a divisive and threatening topic as plantation myths recirculated, and visual representations of slavery and emancipation were no longer suitable for the developing narrative of a romanticized South.
Derogatory racial depictions of black people emerged as less civilized, overly sexual, socially inferior, and uncontrollable, including illiterate Uncle Tom, and sexually licentious Jezebels. The sexless and subservient Mammies, seen in advertisement posters, postcards, and cereal boxes, held black people in perpetual servitude. James Smethurst claims that even the American “high art” tradition reflected deep-seated white attitudes toward Black subordination. People of color were portrayed as nostalgic for the past despite the painful memories of enslavement, apparently satisfied within their dilapidated surroundings and tattered clothing. [32]
Photography as a Social Leveler
The introduction of the daguerreotype in 1838 and the ensuing development of photographic technologies were immediately embraced for both racist propaganda and racial uplift. In 1850, Swiss-American biologist Louis Agassiz, with photographer Joseph T. Zealy, produced daguerreotypes of enslaved South Carolinians in 1850, arguing that blacks represented an inferior race. Conversely, Frederick Douglass, one of the first critical theorists of photography, advocated for photography’s potential to counteract distorted representations of African Americans and reverse the “social death” caused by slavery. Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. Du Bois all “practiced” photography, in their varied quests for social and political justice, capitalizing on the political power of the photograph that could communicate vital messages about African American achievement. Douglass, the most photographed individual of the 19th century, circulated his image extensively on both sides of the Atlantic. Photographs also provided documented evidence of deadly white supremacy in the United States. Journalist and educator Ida B. Wells utilized commercially produced “souvenir” images of American lynch mobs and their Black victims to draw international attention to these detestable acts.
Frederick Douglass saw photography’s value as a social leveler, as it became increasingly affordable to ordinary people by the end of the 19th century. He noted that photo studios could be found in even the smallest towns. Photographers of color specialized in making “complementary” portraits that emphasized the sitters’ skin tones to look beautiful and glamorous in wedding and family photographs. [33] Painterly, soft-focused studio portraits contrasted the crisp identification pictures or mugshots gathered in assorted educational institutions nationwide. For the African-Americans, photography was particularly important, because when they were in control of the camera, they had a chance to shape their image of themselves, their neighborhoods, and their cultures.
By the 1930s and 1940s, photographers employed the camera to document the dignity of working men and women while stressing their life struggles. Gordon Parks is considered one of the most distinguished photographers of the twentieth century, who consistently explored the impact of poverty, racism, and other forms of discrimination. In 1942, Parks worked for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and, later, the Office of War Information (OWI), confronting the challenges as a Black man in Washington DC. American Gothic, a reference to the famous Grant Wood painting, is a portrait of a government cleaning woman Ella Watson, who poses with a mop and broom in front of the U.S. flag, linking the intimacy of a person’s everyday life with the national state of affairs. Woods provides a rare focus on a black female subject who is a mother and a worker, not a famous actress, singer, or prominent activist.
“All Art is Propaganda”
W. E. B. Du Bois, founder and editor of The Crisis, the leading publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), advanced his conviction that literature and art could enhance the image of African Americans. Du Bois claimed that an elite group of black leaders, his purported “Talented Tenth,” were pioneers who would guide future generations.[34] In 1900, Du Bois organized The Exhibit of American Negroes, a sociological display at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris. His goal was to demonstrate progress and commemorate the lives of African Americans at the turn of the century. Du Bois exhibited photographs of the “typical Negro faces,” including studio portraits, informal snapshots, people working, family outings, images of houses and businesses, and the interiors of homes. The photographs of affluent young African-American men and women challenged the scientific “evidence” and popular racist caricatures of the day that ridiculed and sought to diminish African-American social and economic success.
In the Criteria of Negro Art, Du Bois addressed the political standing of African-American art in explicitly political terms, stating: “All art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.”[35] For Du Bois, the artistic representation of black subjects was a significant aspect of his political program for racial equality when African Americans were seldom showcased in mainstream media and often in racist terms. Therefore, pushing for art by the black community not only built a strong cultural identity but confirmed that African Americans, as artistic subjects, were also a powerful political weapon, challenging the power relations and the concepts of blackness and whiteness regarding access to citizenship. Through The Crisis, artistic expression was theorized and employed to dignify the image of African Americans as humans, and their contribution to society and history.
“The New Negro”
Bonnie Harrison claims that during Fannie Barrier Williams’s lifetime, as African Americans began to overcome social and economic barriers, several black visual artists deliberately countered the deprivation of black culture and identity.[36] Lee Ann Timreck describes Mary Edmonia Lewis, (1844 to 1909), and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller (1877 to 1968) as the only artists of color who sculpted the emancipation experience from a black perspective. Lewis’s 1867 sculpture, Forever Free honored the Emancipation Proclamation, while Fuller’s 1913 sculptural interpretation, Emancipation, marked the 50th anniversary of black freedom. Through the artistic representations of newly emancipated black bodies, the artists offered a historical counter-narrative to the “Lost Cause.” Timreck claims that Forever Free and Emancipation were restricted from public viewing, while over 500 Confederate statues, monuments, and historical markers were celebrated across the nation during the period.[37]
In a 1925 essay entitled The New Negro, Howard University Professor Alain LeRoy Locke called for an increased demand for dignity and a rejection of the Jim Crow racial segregation customs and laws. The term, “New Negro” was popularized during the Harlem Renaissance, as artists explored their African American identity and black social and political movements had an increasing influence on the mainstream arts. Like the poetry produced under the African or Caribbean literary movement known as Negritude, visual artists expressed a deeper connection to African heritage, creating a heightened consciousness of a culture, a declaration of a distinct identity, and resistance to white, colonial assimilation.[38] Loïs Mailou Jones, a Paris-based African-American painter, created surrealist African masks, and sculptures, transforming problematic French colonial objects into expressions of modern black identity. The African American painter Aaron Douglas recast the “New Negro” in Art Deco silhouettes, harsh angles, concentric circles, and waves, celebrating urban landscape and modernism beside rural shacks. [39]
James Smethurst describes the era as the beginning of “the age of mechanical reproduction,”[40] with the formation of the recording industry, the developing film industry, and modern music publishing, the invention of circulation of the player piano and the box camera. Smethurst notes that black popular culture stimulated the growth of numerous emerging mass culture industries. Landmark movies of each stage of the early film industry from the silent version of DW Griffiths, 1915 Birth of a Nation to 1927’s The Jazz Singer, and the early All-black cast of 1929’s Hallelujah all revolved around white versions of black identity. Concurrently, James F Dorman notes the rise of the “coon song” and the related phenomenon of ragtime in the late 19th century, a different, more threatening version of African Americans was promoted.[41] Before Fannie Barrier Williams died in 1944, the Harlem Renaissance, the flourishing of literary, visual, and musical arts within African-American communities, emerged. Also known as the New Negro Movement, spanning the 1920s and 1930s, The Harlem Renaissance was the intellectual and cultural revival of African-American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics, and scholarship. However, Dorman claims that the “black subject, the black body, and the black voice”[42] have always persisted in the high popular culture of the United States and initiated a great deal of the truly American popular culture today. Many African Americans, poets, and artists situated themselves outside the politics of respectability and the so-called “genteel and romantic traditions,”[43] invading the high culture that one sees in U.S. modernism. The “refining influence of art,” therefore, was redefined as an appreciation for visual representations of beliefs, opinions, and cultural pride for African Americans, as artists concerned with race, class, gender, and heritage provided fresh insights into the links between black visual representation and black cultural politics.
Works Cited
Alexander-Minter, Rae. “An African American Artist Finds His Voice in Paris During the 19th Century.” Présence Africaine 1 (2005): 119-132.
Barrier, Williams Fannie, and Mary Jo Deegan. The new woman of color: The collected writings of Fannie Barrier Williams, 1893-1918. Northern Illinois University Press, (2002).
Blight, David W. Race, and reunion: The civil war in American memory. Harvard University Press, 2001.
Boime, Albert. “Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Subversion of Genre.” The Art Bulletin 75, no. 3 (1993): 415–442.
Bush, Rebecca, and K. Tawny Paul, eds. “Art and public history: approaches, opportunities, and challenges.” (2017).
Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. “Négritude.” (2010).
Dorman, James H. “The strange career of Jim Crow Rice (with apologies to Professor Woodward).” Journal of Social History 3, no. 2 (1969): 109-122.
Du Bois, William. “The souls of black folk: essays and sketches.” (1911).
Harrison, Bonnie. Racialization, representation, and resistance: Black visual artists and the production of alterity. The University of Texas at Austin, 2003.
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks (1994-03-14T23:58:59.000). Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.
Hrk, Stanislav. “Virtual art gallery.” In Proceedings of the 5th Central European Seminar on Computer Graphics, pp. 185-194. 2001.
Iaonnou, O. (2018). Opening up design studio education using blended and networked formats. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 15 (47), p 1-16.
Kirschke, Amy Helene Kirschke. Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1995.
Lähdesmäki, Tuuli, and Aino-Kaisa Koistinen. “Explorations of linkages between intercultural dialogue, art, and empathy.” Dialogue for intercultural understanding: Placing cultural literacy at the heart of learning (2021): 45-58.
Parsons, Alexandra. “Virtual art galleries as learning spaces and agents of praxis.” AI, Computer Science and Robotics Technology 2023.
Petrosyan, A. “Number of internet and social media users worldwide as of January 2023.” (2023).
Pickens, Roxane Victoria Pickens. “Notions of refinement and displays of dignity in African-American home spaces, 1885-1935.” (2000).
Sheehan, Tanya. “In a New Light: Early African American Photography.” American Studies 52, no. 3 (2013): 7–25.
Smethurst, James. The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance. UNC Press Books, 2011.
Sholette, Gregory; Bass, Chloë; Social Practice Queens. Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art (p. 23). Allworth. Kindle Edition.
Smethurst, James. The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance. UNC Press Books, 2011.
Stankiewicz, Mary Ann. “Middle-class desire: Ornament, industry, and emulation in 19th-century art education.” Studies in Art Education 43, no. 4 (2002): 324-338.
Timreck, Lee Ann. Pieces of Freedom: The Emancipation Sculptures of Edmonia Lewis and Meta Warrick Fuller. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2023.
Worteck, Susan Willand. “Forever Free”: Art by African-American Women, 1862-1980 an Exhibition.” Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (1982): 97-108.
Digital Assets:
[1] Gregory Sholette; Bass, Chloë; Social Practice Queens. Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art. (Allworth. Kindle Edition). p. 23.
[2] Williams, The new woman of color. p. 100.
[3] Roxane Victoria Pickens. “Notions of refinement and displays of dignity in African-American home spaces, 1885-1935.” (2000).
[4] Ross Posnock, “The Distinction of Du Bois: Aesthetics, Pragmatism, Politics,” (American Literary History, 7. 1995): 5220.
[5] Sholette, Art as Social Action. p. 9
[6] Dewhurst, Marit (2014-10-31T23:58:59.000). Social Justice Art: A Framework for Activist Art Pedagogy. Harvard Education Press. Kindle Edition.
[7] A. Petrosyan. “Number of internet and social media users worldwide as of January 2023.” (2023).
[8] Stanislav Hrk. “Virtual art gallery.” In Proceedings of the 5th Central European Seminar on Computer Graphics, pp. 185-194. 2001.
[9] Tuul Lähdesmäki and Aino-Kaisa Koistinen. “Explorations of linkages between intercultural dialogue, art, and empathy.” Dialogue for intercultural understanding: Placing cultural literacy at the heart of learning (2021): 45-58.
[10] Hrk. “Virtual art gallery
[11] Chia and Kay, “Virtual Art Gallery.” 98.
[12] Chia, Ivy, and June Tay. “Virtual Art Gallery: A Multi-disciplinary Approach.” International Journal of Multidisciplinary Perspectives in Higher Education 7, no. 1 (2022): 98.
[13] Rebecca Bush, Rebecca, and Paul K. Tawny, eds. “Art and public history: approaches, opportunities, and challenges.” (2017).
[14] Iaonnou, O. (2018). Opening up design studio education using blended and networked formats. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 15 (47), p 1-16. Retrieved from https://educationaltechnologyjournal.springeropen.com/track/pdf/ 10.1186/s41239-018-0129-7.
[15] Hrk. “Virtual art gallery” p. 187.
[16] Mary Ann Stankiewicz. “Middle-class desire: Ornament, industry, and emulation in 19th-century art education.” Studies in Art Education 43, no. 4 (2002): 324-338.
[17] Bonnie Harrison. Racialization, representation, and resistance: Black visual artists and the production of alterity. (The University of Texas at Austin, 2003).
[18] Desnee French. “Preaching from above: the Voice Of The Negro 1904-1907 and African American classes.” Flinders Journal of History and Politics 20, no. 1998 (1998): 101–115.
[19] Williams, The new woman of color. p 101.
[20] Ibid., 103.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid., 102.
[23] Pickens, Roxane Victoria. “Notions of refinement and displays of dignity in African-American home spaces, 1885-1935.” (2000).
[24] MCCRISKEN, TREVOR. “Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998,£ 23.95). Pp. 301. ISBN 0 8014 3179 4.” Journal of American Studies 34, no. 2 (2000): 311-356.
[25] W. E. B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1996) 178
[26] Pickens. “Notions of refinement.” p.12.
[27] Williams, The new woman of color. p 101.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Stankiewicz, Middle-class desire.
[30] Williams, The new woman of color. p 102.
[31] David W Blight. Race and reunion: The civil war in American memory. Harvard University Press, 2001.
[32] James Smethurst. The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance. UNC Press Books, 2011.
[33] Moresi, Michele Gates, Laura Coyle, and Lonnie G. Bunch. Pictures with Purpose. Early Photographs from the National Museum of African American History and Culture. D Giles Limited, 2019.
[34] Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). “The Talented Tenth”. In Washington, Booker T. (ed.). The Negro Problem: a series of articles by representative American Negroes of today. New York: James Pott and Company. pp. 31–75.
[35] W.E.B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” The Crisis, 32 (1926): 295.
[36] Bonnie Harrison. Racialization, representation, and resistance: Black visual artists and the production of alterity. (The University of Texas at Austin, 2003).
[37] Lee Ann Timereck. Pieces of Freedom: The Emancipation Sculptures of Edmonia Lewis and Meta Warrick Fuller. (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2023).
[38] Souleymane Bachir Diagne. “Négritude.” (2010).
[39]Amy Helene Kirschke. Aaron Douglas: Art, Race, and the Harlem Renaissance. (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1995).
[40] James Smethurst. The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance. (UNC Press Books, 2011). p.6.
[41] James H. Dorman. “The strange career of Jim Crow Rice (with apologies to Professor Woodward).” Journal of Social History 3, no. 2 (1969). p. 109.
[42] Dorman. “The strange career of Jim Crow Rice. p. 109.
[43] Smethurst. The African American Roots of Modernism. p.19.
