Illuminating the Color Line Artist by Artist

Writing African-American women artists into art history is a delicate task. Art history is a discourse. It creates knowledge, institutions, objects, and people. It also produces value, through inclusions and exclusions. Historians who study excluded artists challenge that discourse, both unwittingly and deliberately. Some historians write about African-American women artists to draw attention to them, to draw them into the mainstream. Their goal is to integrate unknown artists of merit into surveys of American and Western art. But others write to expose the constructed nature of the discourse itself, to reveal the politics of race, class, and gender that underlie western aesthetics, cultural institutions, and art markets. Lisa E. Farrington's survey Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists falls squarely into the first category. Its purpose is "to inform members of academia and the art world of the relatively unknown and unrecognized achievements of African-American women artists," so that they will be integrated into art historical canons (p. 295). But because many of the artists and art forms she recovers stretch, critique, or debunk western notions of aesthetic value, Farrington's book cannot help but lean towards the second goal as well. "Chronicled in this text is the legacy of struggle and triumph of African-American women artists," she declares, who have, "since the African slave trade began, strained against a dominant and insular culture" (p. 3).

Drawing on thirty years of historical research and art criticism, Creating Their Own Image charts "the lives and careers of African-American women artists from the age of slavery to the new millennium," offering many formal analyses of their works along the way. It is a clearly written and beautifully illustrated text that presents the myriad and nuanced experiences, visions, and talents of African-American women artists. A short review cannot do justice to the breadth of art and artists Farrington has gathered together in this book, which range from the fabric and garden art of slaves and free black women in the nineteenth century to the eclectic media and "post-black subject matter" of today's artists.

To accommodate this scope, the book is divided into two sections. Part I is a history of African-American women artists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and "the impediments they faced in gaining access to the realm of the professional artist" (p. 4). Part II "centers on stylistic developments in recent decades" and contemporary critiques of artists and their work (p. 5). These different focuses divide the book conceptually into two books that Farrington ties together by highlighting what she sees as "a persistent theme" in the art of African-American women: "the configuration of their own image without racial or gender stereotypes" (p. 8).

Most of the chapters in Part I give a brief history of national events as context for the careers of individual artists, followed by a basically chronological narrative that tracks and backtracks across the decades. At times this context is a bit too brief. There is only one chapter on nineteenth-century professional painters and sculptors, and it simply states that "slavery ended" and "African-American women faced a whole new set of impediments" (p. 50). The consequence of the end of slavery was discrimination and the dearth of objects and names of artists that have survived from the period. "Art that is not valued by the mainstream culture is not saved," Farrington explains (p. 50). She chooses five artists to represent the century: Sarah Mapps Douglass, Annie E. A. Walker, Edmonia Lewis, Meta Warrick Fuller, and May Howard Johnson. Each experienced racial prejudice in the form of a rescinded award, cancelled scholarship, revoked admittance to art school, or even false criminal accusation and unwarranted arrest. Stifled by these impediments, two of these artists had truncated careers and another moved to Italy where she continued to work. The other two eventually enjoyed stellar careers, but not until the early...