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The first book highlighting the historical roots and contemporary
implications of the silhouette as an American art form Before the
advent of photography in 1839, Americans were consumed by the
fashion for silhouette portraits. Economical in every sense, the
small, stark profiles cost far less than oil paintings and could be
made in minutes. Black Out, the first major publication to focus on
the development of silhouettes, gathers leading experts to shed
light on the surprisingly complex historical, political, and social
underpinnings of this ostensibly simple art form. In its
examination of portraits by acclaimed silhouettists, such as
Auguste Edouart and William Bache, this richly illustrated volume
explores likenesses of everyone from presidents and celebrities to
everyday citizens and enslaved people. Ultimately, the book reveals
how silhouettes registered the paradoxes of the unstable young
nation, roiling with tensions over slavery and political
independence. Primarily tracing the rise of the silhouette in the
decades leading up to the Civil War, Black Out also considers the
ubiquity of the genre today, particularly in contemporary art.
Using silhouettes to address such themes as race, identity, and the
notion of the digital self, the four featured living artists--Kara
Walker, Kristi Malakoff, Kumi Yamashita, and Camille Utterback-all
take the silhouette to unique and fascinating new heights.
Presenting the distinctly American story behind silhouettes, Black
Out vividly delves into the historical roots and contemporary
interpretations of this evocative, ever popular form of
portraiture. Published in association with the Smithsonian's
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC
This book spotlights a complex art collection established at the
intersection of modern art and social justice. In 1963, as civil
rights protests swirled across the fiercely segregated state, this
historically Black college became an unlikely hub in Mississippi
envisioned as “an interracial oasis in which the fine arts are
the focus and magnet.” Since its founding in 1869 by the
abolitionist-led American Missionary Association, Tougaloo College
has made the fight for equality central to its mission. In 1963,
Tougaloo became the nexus for modern art in Mississippi, when
leaders of the New York art world began a rich program of art
acquisitions. This publication features two essays and
approximately thirty-five selections from this distinctive
collection by diverse artists such as Francis Picabia, Jacob
Lawrence, and Alma Thomas.
Out of Earshot offers a reconfiguration of three of the nineteenth
century's most prolific painters: Winslow Homer (1836-1910), Thomas
Eakins (1844-1916), and Thomas Dewing (1851-1939). Asma Naeem
considers how these painters turned, in ways significant for their
individual artistic ventures, to themes of sound and listening
throughout their careers. She shows how the aural dimension of
these artists' pictures was an ideological product of period class,
gender, cultural, racial, and technological discourses. Equally
important, by looking at such materials as the artists' papers,
scientific illustrations, and technological brochures, Naeem argues
that the work of these painters has complex and previously
unconsidered connections to developments in sound and listening
during a period when unprecedented innovation in the United States
led to such inventions as the telegraph and phonograph and forged a
technological narrative that continues to have force in the
twenty-first century. Naeem's unusual approach to the work of these
three well-known American artists offers a transformative account
of artistic response during their own era and beyond.
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