Browsing by Author "Powell, Richard J"

While great strides have been made in the study of Trinidad Carnival, there has yet to be a robust inquiry into how women have contributed to its evolution. One major reason for this shortcoming is that the dominant cultural discourse relies on a reductive

dichotomy that recognizes the costumes created prior to the 1970s as creative and those made after the 1970s as uncreative. This arbitrary division of the costume aesthetic reflects a distinct anti-feminist bias that sees women's spirited emergence in Carnival

territory in the 1970s as apolitical.

My dissertation exposes this dilemma, and seeks to undermine this

interpretation, by its focus on how women's bodies, their presentation, and their acknowledgment of the body's potential for non-verbal articulation impacted the evolution of performance practices and the costume aesthetic in Trinidad Carnival. I

explore how the predominance of women in Carnival since the 1970s and the bikinibased costume aesthetic that complements this change is suggestive of women's urgent need to manipulate the body as an aesthetic medium and site of subversion. Critical to

this argument is a close examination of certain female figures who have had a sustainable presence in Trinidad Carnival's history. My project acknowledges the jamette, a working class woman who defied Victorian tenets of decorum in preindependence

Trinidad. This figure has been overlooked in the predominant scholarship of Trinidad Carnival history. Another section of my dissertation explores the influence of the Jaycees Carnival Queen competition. Women of mostly European descent participated in this Carnival-themed beauty pageant that remained popular until the

1970s. I also examine the legend of soucouyant (an old woman who turns into a ball of fire at night and sucks the life blood from unsuspecting victims) and how this figure can be deployed to reinterpret Jouvay (the ritual that marks the beginning of Trinidad Carnival).

This dissertation examines photographic representations of Ethiopian identity. It focuses on Emperor Haile Selassie I as a recuperative figure in Pan-African contexts, images by court photographer and later London studio portraitist Shemelis Desta, and contemporary works created by Ethiopian artists in the diaspora one generation after the Derg’s collapse. Exploring visual processes that concern, inform, and confront the practices of photographers working at the intersection of ethnic identity and nationalism, this dissertation scrutinizes Ethiopian artists’ views of the importance of their work to their country and to the African diaspora in conjunction with opposing historical narratives adopted by Black nationalists, and alternatively, white imperialists in the early twentieth century.

Although interest in the work of untrained artists has surged recently, appearing everywhere from the Venice Biennale to The New Yorker, the art world’s fascination with American autodidacts began nearly a century ago. My dissertation examines how and why American artists without formal training first crashed the gates of major museums and galleries between 1927 and 1940 through case studies on the most celebrated figures of the period: John Kane (1860–1934), Horace Pippin (1888–1946), and Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma" Moses (1860–1961). All three painters were exhibited as “modern primitives,” a category that emerged in the wake of the French naïve Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) but which took on a distinct character in the United States where it became a space for negotiating renewed debates about authenticity in American art as well as pervasive social anxieties over how immigration, race, and industrialization were changing the country. In addition to establishing how the “modern primitive" fit into the pluralistic landscape of American modernism, my dissertation reaches into the present, exploring how the interwar breakthroughs of Kane, Pippin, and Moses prefigured the ubiquity of self-taught artists—often referred to as “outsider” artists—in American museums today.

HOGARTH'S PROGRESS: `MODERN MORAL SUBJECTS' IN THE ART OF DAVID HOCKNEY, LUBAINA HIMID AND PAULA REGO

An Abstract by

Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd

Hogarth's Progress: "Modern Moral Subjects" in the Work of David Hockney, Lubaina Himid and Paula Rego, examines three late twentieth-century, British appropriations of William Hogarth's narrative series. Hogarth is best known for the paintings and engravings that he termed "modern moral subjects," exemplified by satirical series such as The Harlot's Progress (1732) and The Rake's Progress (1733-5). These cautionary yet humorous tales evince a period of great social, political, economic and cultural transformation in England, a time of profound change wrought by colonial enterprise, an increasingly powerful middle class, and a heightened public interest in moral questioning. Recent scholarship on Hogarth has increasingly focused on the artist's diverse representations of eighteenth-century London life, his numerous images of servants of African descent, French dancing masters and Italian castrati. Unsurprisingly, for many contemporary artists, Hogarth's narratives provide a complex visual template for a host of present-day issues regarding race, gender, sexuality and national identity.

The dissertation will investigate how Hogarthian re-workings by artists David Hockney in the early 1960s; Lubaina Himid in the mid-1980s; and Paula Rego in 1999-2000, modify and/or expound upon narratives of gender and sexuality that are already present in the eighteenth century artist's narrative series. The three contemporary works examined here engage with two works by Hogarth: Marriage-a-la-Mode (1745), which chronicles the doomed union of an Earl's son and the daughter of a wealthy merchant, who sells her in marriage to obtain a higher social standing, and The Rake's Progress. Rake recounts the tale of Tom Rakewell, a merchant's son whose exuberant spending and moral decay, aided by a procession of effeminate French dancing masters, prostitutes and criminals, leads to his final residence, the madhouse "Bedlam."

I will first examine David Hockney's early 1960s "Rake's Progress", a series of 16 etchings loosely based on the artist's first visit to the United States, an insertion of his own personal narrative into Hogarth's tale of moral decline. I will then investigate the work of Lubaina Himid, who initiated a Black women artists movement in 1980s London. In 1986, Himid produced a large-scale installation entitled A Fashionable Marriage. The work employs Scene 4 of Hogarth's Marriage-a-la-Mode series to critique the racist and sexist policies of the London art world during this period. Finally, I will discuss the work of Paula Rego, best known for her large-scale paintings of emotionally-charged domestic scenes. Rego has also re-worked Hogarth's Marriage, employing the earlier series to critique arranged marriages in her native Portugal. Rego's triptych entitled After Hogarth: Betrothal; Lessons; Wreck (1999-2001), like much of her work, reveals the psychological anxieties and ambiguities of gender relations and, in a broader sense, human interaction. For Hockney, Himid and Rego, Hogarth's contradictory evocations of eighteenth century London society provide a complex visual template for a host of contemporary issues such as race, gender, sexuality and national identity.

Also critical to this study is the relationship between the three contemporary artists. Hogarth is present as the key driving factor in all three works, yet also to be considered is the role that Hockney, as a critical figure in late twentieth-century art, played in the construction of both Himid and Rego's later works.

Although Hogarth's work has been appropriated by a wealth of artists from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries for a wide variety of uses, this dissertation will examine how three relatively recent quotations employ Hogarth as an "ally in subversion," while simultaneously making use of Hogarth's stature within the English art historical canon. I am proposing that these later uses of Hogarth, many of which explored various configurations of race, gender and sexuality, evolved from a key element inherent within the artist's work, a form of `ambiguous narrativity' that yet somehow appeared to crystallize issues of moral questioning as central ideological theme.

This dissertation, Loïs Mailou Jones, Diasporic Art Practice, and Africa in the 20th Century, investigates the evolving dialogue between twentieth-century African-American artists and Africa--its objects, peoples, diasporas, and topography. The four chapters follow the career of artist Loïs Mailou Jones (1905-1998) and focus on periods when ideas about blackness in an African-American context and its connection to Africa were at the forefront of artistic and cultural discourses. Chapter 1 traces African-American artists contact with African art during the first decades of the twentieth century. Chapter 2 examines Jones's use of Africa in her art produced at the start of her career (1920s -1940s) and repositions her in relation to the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude movements. Chapter 3 considers Jones's engagements with the African Diaspora via travels to France, the Caribbean, and Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, voyages that I argue result in the creation of a Black Diasporic art practice predicated upon the act of viewing. Chapter 4 critiques the signifying grasp of Africa in African American art. By looking at Jones's turn to pastiche as an aesthetic choice and cultural commentary, the chapter argues that that the possibility of a seamless reconciliation of Africa in African American art is impossible. Where the limited scholarly discourse on the subject has emphasized a heritage-based relationship between Black artists and Africa, this project's cross-cultural approach is one of the first to consider the relationship between Africa and Black artists that goes beyond looking for African retentions in African American culture. In doing so the project also suggests an alternative to the internationalization of American artists in African, rather than European terms. Moreover, though Jones is broadly cited within African American art history beyond monographic considerations her work has yet to be critically examined particularly in regards to larger debates concerning blackness and the African Diaspora.

This dissertation examines color photographs made in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee between 1968 and 2005 and their relation to evolving racial discourse. My discussion revolves around three photographers: William Eggleston, Birney Imes, and William K. Greiner, who make striking color photographs in the U.S. South. I discuss the critical reception of their work and place it within the context of political and cultural attitudes toward the region and issues of race expressed in the media in the 1970s-early 00's. The important role played by Museum of Modern Art [MoMA] curator John Szarkowski was central in shaping discussions about contemporary photography during this period, placing Eggleston as the herald of the color photography explosion. I explore changing attitudes toward artistic and documentary color photography among photographers, critics, and the general public leading into the 1970s, arguing that these attitudes influenced the reception of the often high-intensity color images of Eggleston, Imes, and Greiner, in the decades that followed.

I discuss the critical reception of William Eggleston's 1976 photography exhibition at MoMA. I examine how Imes's color photographs of juke joints and roadhouses in Mississippi utilize the expressive potentials of color film to depict these liminal, public/private spaces as sites of boundary crossing in a racially divided culture. I explore the ways in which William K. Greiner uses color to depict the pre-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans metropolitan area.

My contribution is to show how Eggleston, Imes, and Greiner employed the expressive, visceral potentials of color photography to interpret and navigate the uncertain moral terrain of the U.S South in the era following the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

This dissertation examines South African artist Irma Stern’s contributions to modernism in South Africa and to modernism as a global movement. It analyzes how Stern’s interactions with South Africans, combined with her early artistic training in Germany and her cultural connections to the South African Jewish community, helped her to bring critical issues of race, gender, and nation into focus through her work. This study goes beyond the work of previous scholars who have suggested that Stern was uninterested in social or political causes, arguing that Stern was acutely aware of how social and political themes contributed to modernism’s development in Europe. Moreover, this study concludes that Stern employed similar strategies to develop a South African modernism. Although she often spoke pejoratively about nonwhite South Africans, she was cognizant of the fact that the act of painting nonwhites made significant artistic and political statements.

Because Stern is virtually unknown in the United States, this study will do the following: 1) Introduce Stern to an American audience by discussing her work from the beginning of her artistic training in Germany in 1913 to her death in 1966; 2) Reconnect Stern to the larger global debates about modernism in the twentieth century; 3) Analyze Stern’s works that have received little or no attention in previous scholarship; and 4) Discuss the long-term influence that Stern’s work had in shaping the direction of South African art before, during, and after apartheid.

Formal analysis and close readings of Stern's oil paintings, drawings, travel narratives, and watercolors are crucial in understanding how she used her artistic talents to record visual interpretations of South African culture history. As one of only a few internationally respected South African artists of the apartheid era, an examination of Stern's work and career allows for a more complex understanding of how race, gender, and nation contributed to the development of modernism in South African art history.

In 1967 a massive graphic print based on Cuban photographer Alberto Korda’s world famous image of Che Guevara was draped over the five-story Ministry of Interior Building in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución. The print became the iconic image of the Cuban Revolution, reaching beyond its architectural surface into an international market of consumer-based goods. My dissertation is concerned with the ways in which Cuba’s architectural past was put to very different use by the Cuban Revolution, and how Cuban modernity was re-imagined in new architectural projects, in the governmentally supported visual arts, and in curatorial work which brought the fine and popular arts into Cuba’s new and re-inhabited spaces. Drawing from critical theory, formal analysis, and methodologies of art and architectural history along with visual studies, I explicate the ways in which art, design and architecture play a significant role in mediating a revolutionary mythology. I argue that national identity, or cubanidad, becomes reliant on such a mythology of revolution, defined by a Third World solidarity and Cuba’s position within a broader socialist world as much as it is by local elements.

My dissertation explores the history of the Cuban Revolution’s visual culture in six thematic chapters, looking at themes such as modernities, revolution, appropriation, utopia, propaganda, and postmodernity. Each chapter explores developments in the relationship between art and architecture, and situates 1960s Havana within Cuba’s broader history as a republic and a colony. Concerned with the role the visual and spatial played within a socialist setting, Cuba became a productive platform to engage in international debates regarding modernity at the height of the Cold War era. My dissertation examines how Cuba deliberately projected its modernity to the world via architecture and the arts, and how these visual and spatial manifestations speak to the utopic character of modernity within Latin America and the Caribbean.