Full Description
Mixed Media investigates Black and white artists' efforts toward racial integration, from the infamous 1931 Scottsboro Boys trial until Brown v. Board's 1954 desegregation of public schools. Each chapter attends to a distinctive visual ecology fostered by institutions and individuals committed to desegregation to varying degrees, including the nationwide public art initiatives of the New Deal, the imagery and cultural programs of the multiracial Popular Front, graphics produced for CIO-member labor unions, Jacob Lawrence's war paintings and other visual propaganda of the armed forces, and the struggle of New York abstract painters of African descent to navigate the criticism, museums, and markets of the mainstream art world. Together, they explore the divergent approaches to conceptualizing and implementing racial integration along the liberal-radical axis.
Contents
Contents
Introduction
1. "The Whites Do Rule": The New Deal Imagines Racial Mixing
2. "The Strongest Social Weapons": The Visual Cultures of Racial Unity on the Left
3. "Graphic Consciousness": The CIO's Visual Cultures of Interracial Solidarity
4. Battle Station MoMA: Jacob Lawrence Desegregates the Armed Forces and the Art World
5. Formal Unity: Black Abstractionists and Integration at Mid-Century
Conclusion: "Sidetracked"
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
