In The Art of Remembering art historian and curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw explores African American art and representation from the height of the British colonial period to the present. She engages in the process of "rememory"—the recovery of facts and narratives of African American creativity and self-representation that have been purposefully set aside, actively ignored, and disremembered. In analyses of the work of artists ranging from Scipio Moorhead, Moses Williams, and Aaron Douglas to Barbara Chase-Riboud, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, and Deana Lawson, Shaw demonstrates that African American art and history may be remembered and understood anew through a process of intensive close looking, cultural and historical contextualization, and biographic recuperation or consideration. Shaw shows how embracing rememory expands the possibilities of history by acknowledging the existence of multiple forms of knowledge and ways of understanding an event or interpreting an object. In so doing, Shaw thinks beyond canonical interpretations of art and material and visual culture to imagine “what if,” asking what else did we once know that has been lost.

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Associate Professor of History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, author of Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker, also published by Duke University Press, and Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century.

List of Illustrations  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction  1
Part I. Past As Prelude  15
1. Facing Phillis Wheatley: Portraiture and Publishing in the Era of the American Revolution  19
2. Profiling Moses Williams: Silhouettes and Race in the Early Republic  42
3. The Freedom to Marry for All: Painting Interracial Families During the Era of the Civil War  62
4. Landscapes of Labor: Race, Religion, and Rhode Island in the Painting of Edward Mitchell Bannister  73
Part II. Modern Blackness  85
5. “This Gifted Sculptress of the Race”: The Intersectional Art of May Howard Jackson  91
6. Singing Saints: Sargent Johnson’s Modern Blackness  111
7. Norman Lewis’s Dan Mask: The Challenge of the African “Thing” in the 1930s  127
8. “Bolshevized by Conditions”: African American Artists and Mexican Muralism  135
9. Malcolm X Rising: Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Phenomenological Art  144
10. Richard Yarde’s Mojo Blues  161
Part III. Beginning Again  187
11. Remembering the Remnants: Contemporary Art and Hurricane Katrina  191
12. The Wandering Gaze of Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louisiana Project  203
13. Ten Years of 30 Americans  213
14. “No Man Is an Island”: The Diasporic Performances of Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz and Sheldon Scott  229
15. What Deana Lawson Wants  237
Notes  247
Bibliography  277
Index  289