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.