This qualitative mixed methods study examines how six participants- three Black college-level art students and three accomplished Black artists-educators, respond to curated installations designed to probe their understandings of and reactions to depictions of Black Americans in examples of visual culture from the United States of America (US), namely early film and television. The participants viewed and responded to two presentations designed from two contextual analyses. Exhibition Part 1 featured popular early US American films, animated movies, and a television sitcom from 1915 to 1979. Exhibition Part 2 displayed artistic, historical, and scholarly materials from 1903 to the present, which related to the content in Exhibition Part 1 to examine the enduring presence and implications of the famous media. Specifically, this study addressed the following questions: Given that stereotypical depictions of Black people in popular American visual culture have historically influenced societal perceptions of Black people and how these stereotypes can manifest into racial propaganda for capitalist means, what might we learn about the enduring nature of racial stereotypes from the responses of six Black participants to a curated visual arts exhibition based on the theme racial stereotyping? Given a specifically created visual arts exhibition embedding several racist tropes, how do three Black college art educators and three Black college art students recognize the stereotypes embedded in the exhibition and know anything about their origins and histories? What have participants' experiences been with the stereotypes they recognize, and in what different forms and settings? If some of the racial stereotypes embedded in the visual installation are unrecognized, how do participants account for this? The data analysis, especially cross-examinations, revealed participants' assessments of the exhibitions, which centered on their observances of media created by White US American artists that spotlighted fictional Black characters in creative storylines and how these endeavors sought to control and define Black Americans. When discussing Exhibition Part 1, participants had unfavorable reactions to the content and witnessed unfavorable depictions that reminded them of unfavorable lived experiences. When answering questions about Exhibition Part 2, their remarks primarily cited control, gains, and trauma as examples of racial propaganda for capitalist means. The concluding discussion of the significant takeaways from this study centered on six salient implications for art and art education: 1. Artistic Racism and Art as Racial Capitalism in popular American visual culture 2. Action-oriented, racially conscious educational practices 3. The fundamental need for Black Intellectual Thought 4. Subsequent scholarly work for the researcher 5. Black Research Throughout this study, I evoked the Black gaze, meaning I approached and tackled this scholarly work from my perspective as a Black queen, a proud descendant of and advocate for African people and the Black Race. I lead with a culturally informed Black stance and dare to do so in academia. It is for readers who are the same. Despite identifying differently, it is also for those who can decenter themselves to acknowledge and consider information about African Americans, the Black Race, and viewpoints of Black individuals to appreciate this study and its suggestions. KEYWORDS:artistic racism, the Black gaze, the Black Race, Blackness, depictions, education, film, media, lived experiences, perceptions, Race, racial bias, racial capitalism, racial gaslighting, racial propaganda, racial stereotypes, racism, representations in early US media, research, social and racial implications, social assumptions, teaching, visual art, visual culture, US American history

Historically Black colleges and universities served as primary sites of modernist artmaking. In 1920, however, no HBCU offered an art major or employed full-time fine arts faculty. This dissertation examines that swift transformation, demonstrating it not as a simple evolution, but rather as a contested site of Black thought and protest. I show this not through an institutional history or "timeline" of Black college art departments, but rather in a sustained attention towards Black colleges as nodes within a larger network of publics constituting Black modernism as sites for subjectivity. In doing so, this dissertation examines the conjuncture between two coincident forms: that of modernist art and of the same era's radical modes of racial exclusion. I ask what is at stake in art as lived experience, at a moment in which modernist aesthetics made claims as a means of producing novel ways of inhabiting being human while simultaneous modes of racial formation devalued Blackness within that conceptual category as life. Through this, I track aesthetic production as a relation and set of experiences occurring through specific sites and publics as an asymmetric arena for contestation, with an emphasis on historically Black colleges and universities. My first chapter, "Organize, Strike, Paint: Making Modern Art at Historically Black Colleges," charts that shift in a set of breaks in art-making at HBCUs, arguing for a student-driven movement away from industrial education towards a modernist visual arts, one embedded within a larger constellation of sites. My second chapter, "Aaron Douglas and a Liberatory History of the Senses," looks closely at Fisk University through the work of painter Aaron Douglas in a set of site-specific murals he made which visualize a long narrative of Black history, art, and labor. I argue that Douglas interrogated in those paintings central questions of visual modernism, placing the radical exclusion of Black subjects in slavery and its afterlives in the Jim Crow era as central to an understanding of modern vision and subjectivity. Through such works, HBCUs stand as necessary sites for theorizing a history of vision and its relation to the "human," as a rejoinder to histories of visual modernism that do not meaningfully account for racialization. In my final chapter, "Black Study in the White Cube: Racialized Subjectivities and the Museum of Modern Art, ca. 1935," I demonstrate the circulation and exclusions that structured Black audiences and art viewing. I do so through an examination of the Museum of Modern Art’s African Negro Art exhibition, which Black artists engaged with as visitors at MoMA, through mediated forms in print and photography, as well as in circulating satellite shows presented at HBCUs. In doing so, I attend to both the modes of viewership at the museum proper as well as the ways it interacted within a broader network of Black publics. Similarly, I examine the specific content of that MoMA exhibit in its primitivist imagination of an African past, one which might be used as a ground for "modern" white subjects. I track how Black artists confronted that continued legacy of anti-Blackness and addressed the immense dislocations inherent in it. Throughout, I provided sustained attention to artists including Hale Woodruff, Loïs Mailou Jones, Aaron Douglas, John Biggers, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Amaza Lee Meredith, William H. Johnson, Augusta Savage, and Elizabeth Catlett.