Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston by Erica Hirshler


Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Title : Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0878468153
ISBN-10 : 9780878468157
Language : English
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 256
Publication : First published January 27, 2015

The story of African Americans in the visual arts has closely paralleled their social, political and economic aspirations over the last 400 years. From enslaved craftspersons to contemporary painters, printmakers and sculptors, African American artists have created a wealth of artistic expression that addresses common experiences, such as exclusion from dominant cultural institutions, and confronts questions of identity and community. This generously illustrated volume gathers more than 100 works of art in a variety of media by leading figures from the nineteenth century to the present―among them, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Lois Mailou Jones, Gordon Parks, Wifredo Lam, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon and Kerry James Marshall―alongside many others who deserve to be better known, including artists from the African diaspora in South America and the Caribbean. Arranged thematically and featuring authoritative texts that provide historical and interpretive context, Common Wealth invites readers to share in a rich outpouring of art that meets shared challenges with individual creative responses.

Common Wealth: Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Reviews

  • Doria

    This publication contains a selected sampling of one hundred and twenty-four artworks by eighty-five different African-American artists, all drawn from the Boston MFA’s current holdings. Accompanying essays by curator and African-American art historian Edmund Barry Gaither, MFA director Malcolm Rogers, curator Elliot Bostwick Davis, gallery owner Michael Rosenfeld, Sims herself (a noted African-American curator and scholar based in New York) all contribute important pieces of the history of how and when and why the MFA came to acquire these works.

    As a careful reading of this volume makes clear, the vast majority of this extremely diverse selection was acquired directly from Boston collector John Axelrod. It is thus an extremely representative sample of the rest of the MFA’s current holdings of African-American artwork, a large percentage of which was similarly acquired from Axelrod in the early twenty-first century. In addition, as noted in the back of this book, is the fact that “Generous support for this publication was provided by John Axelrod.” The available evidence makes it overwhelmingly obvious that Axelrod has provided the financial muscle that has driven much of the MFA’s recent, albeit still-limited, expansion of its collection in the area of African-American art.