Seeing Black

In 1969 the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted an exhibition titled “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968.” The exhibition, composed mainly of documentary photographs, stirred controversy. Bringing what the New York Times called “sociology” into an art museum, the exhibition neglected to include any works of art by Harlem artists, and was organized and curated without any input from residents of the neighborhood just a handful of blocks north of the museum. This exhibition raised the ire of the black communities it excluded, who in turn argued that the museum seemed to mistake mere visual representation for social advocacy.¹

I open this review of recent work on African Americans and visual culture with this particular exhibition, which the art historian Bridget R. Cooks examines in Exhibiting Blackness, because it distills a number of themes central to the flourishing field of African American visual culture studies. This field links questions about the relationships between photography, art, and racial identity, the place of black artists within and without the canon and white artistic institutions, and the long history of visual representations of black individuals in the United States.

The question of representation has long been vexed for people of African descent in the Americas. Indeed, representation by others and the capacity for self-representation have been at the heart of racial politics. White supremacy founded itself on a belief in the inability of people of color to give form to experience in a manner approaching art. In 1781, for example, Thomas Jefferson declared that “never yet could I find that a black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration; never see even an elementary trait of painting or sculpture.”² Shorn, by this logic, of this basic human faculty, African Americans were everywhere represented by others in images and narratives that tended to confirm their inhumanity. Not surprisingly, in the nineteenth century, the new and purportedly objective medium of photography reinforced the racial hierarchy—as, for example, in the infamous Louis Agassiz slave daguerreotypes.

Jefferson was, of course, wrong about African capacities for representation beyond the utilitarian, as centuries of African American literature, music, and material culture attest. Scholarship over the past century has largely succeeded in bringing these achievements of people of color into full view, if not into the canon. Scholarship on African American participation in the plastic and visual arts, however, has only recently begun to have the same impact.³ The reasons for the delay in scholarly attention to black visual culture are multiple and intersecting. Traditional art historical methods, with their emphasis on artistic training, money, influence, the aesthetic as “common” (and unraced) sense, and mediating systems and institutions such as patronage and museums often exclude a priori the visual art forms most commonly produced (and consumed) by African Americans: craft, vernacular, and popular forms. The rise of what is called “visual culture studies” has been a boon to the study of African American visuality, given the flexibility of this approach.⁴ The methods of “visual culture” have enabled scholarly work like that under consideration here by attempting to do away with “high” and “low” forms of art, considering vernacular and popular media forms in addition to painting, drawing, and sculpture, and perhaps most importantly, moving the production of meaning away from the solitary artist toward an understanding of the meaning-making collaboration between producer, viewer, and object.

Yet traditional art institutions and analytic practices remain...