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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/xpe1-d289 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Sledge, David |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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