Browsing by Subject "Black Arts Movement"
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Item For my people--Margaret Walker--lithographs by Elizabeth Catlett : a consideration(2015-06-29) Hopkins, Letitia; Chambers, Eddie; Smith, CheriseThis thesis examines the 1992 Limited Edition Collection prints artist Elizabeth Catlett (American, 1915 – 2012) created to illustrate Margaret Walker's poem, For My People. The author analyzes Catlett’s images in terms of the ways in which they both document as well as reflect on the Black experience, and the ways in which her practice both anticipated and chimed with, the Black Arts Movement. Alongside a consideration of Catlett and her work, the author discusses the related significance of Margaret Walker (American, 1915 – 1998) and her poem, For My People, and the ways in which it was in so many ways the perfect poem for Catlett to illustrate.Item Pass the Crown: How black artists advocate for protected freedom of self-expression and identity building by re-imagining the beauty of blackness in textured hair(2023-05) Kilpatrick, ParkerBlack hair culture has been a significant element in shaping race relations in the United States. The spread of authentic black hair stories will help protect the collective black identity from false, racist ideals, which has been done by black artists for decades. Although black people have the backdrop of personal experience as a black woman with my own textured hair stories, many others lack that stimulant to want to interact with black hair. Non-black people often aren’t the ones seeking black stories or, if they do seek black stories, they may have limited access to them. The most authentic ones are those that come directly from black people. Throughout the past century, oppressors manipulated this limited visibility of the black community to rewrite narratives that black hair was unclean and therefore indicative of poverty. Such falsified stories about the black experience kept black people in lower social orders and, in some cases, even turned them against themselves. No matter what they did, they didn’t quite fit into their own stories because they weren’t the ones telling them. Today, in a desperate attempt to maintain sociopolitical stratification by race, oppressors still try to rewrite black people's stories when they feel threatened. Luckily, black representation in the arts has bolstered true black stories above those created by non-black groups. I explore hair and identity and is where I continue to find my own space to use my art as activism.Item "What do they call me?" : quilting aesthetics in the music of the Black Arts Movement(2022-10-06) Buffington-Anderson, Heather Nicole; Carson, Charles D. (Charles Daniel); Moore, Robin; Seeman, Sonia; Smith, CheriseIt is clear from the foundational theoretical texts and subsequent scholarship that music is at the center of the Black Arts Movement discourse. Discussions have primarily focused on the insistence from Black Arts theorists to look to Black music as the standard for Black expression to develop a Black Aesthetic. Theorists often located free jazz as the standard for Black Arts cultural production. As a result, the experimental sounds of the jazz avant-garde became the representative music of radical Black politics of the 1960s and 1970s. Recent scholarship underlines the dominant narratives of Blackness and radical Black politics of the Black Power era privilege heterosexual Black masculinity. This has rendered the participation of Black women artist-activists invisible within the movement. Influenced by this scholarship, I reorient discussions of Black Arts music by exploring the participation of jazz vocalists. By focusing on musicians at the margins of jazz, this project aims to expand and complicate notions of Black radicalism, Black aesthetics, as well as the chronology of the Black Arts Movement. This dissertation explores the music and activism of Oscar Brown Jr., Betty Carter, Abbey Lincoln, and Nina Simone by focusing on Black aesthetic strategies, collaborations, reception, and identity. I develop a theory of a quilting aesthetic to discuss how artists-activists move between genres and forms as an act of subversion and resistance. The lens of a quilting aesthetic supplements discussions of a Black Aesthetic that privileges primarily Black male jazz musicians associated with the experimentalism of avant-garde jazz. I argue that quilting, as an aesthetic and activist strategy, can bring into relief the ways these artist-activists obscure conventional binaries to challenge divisions between jazz and popular, masculinity and femininity, and blackness and whiteness. Ultimately, within this dissertation, I aim to highlight how dominant notions of the Black Aesthetic are gendered masculine. Resituating Brown Jr., Carter, Lincoln, and Simone within the Black Arts discourse does not simply increase the roster of musicians within the movement. Rather, I aim to reconfigure and complicate notions of Black radicalism and the jazz avant-garde by underlining multiple Black aesthetics within the Black Arts Movement.