What is black art?

In his section entitled "Art, Culture, and 'the Souls of Black Folk,'" Powell examines media as diverse Henry Ossawa Tanner's 1893 The Banjo Lesson, turn-of-the century sheet music, and D. W. Griffith's 1915 Birth of a Nation, showing the relation between high art and popular culture. This strategy ties this author to earlier African American scholars such as Henry Morris Murray, Alain Locke, and James A. Porter - all of whom saw representation as an interpretive battleground and understood the innate connection between representation and perception.(2) Powell critically examines their works in combination with the object as a means to reveal the complexities (and sometimes the failure) of representation put into the service of remaking the perception of black people for both blacks themselves as well as for whites. Furthermore, this critical engagement allows him to examine the different (and, at times, problematic) ways in which black artists have understood both European modernism and tropes about "Africa."

In addressing the complexity inherent in race and representation as well as the limitations inherent in standard interpretations of black art in the United States, Powell's section "Enter and Exit the 'New Negro'" is by far the most successful part of his book. Here, he considers the object in light of the twenties debates about the connections of representation and ideology, which took place among writers, artists, and scholars. As exemplified in The Crisis, the magazine for the NAACP, questions were asked about the ways in which the black image could be recast. Through the analysis of art, literature, exhibitions, and the dispersed locations of artists - unlike the critical mass of black literati in Harlem - at the time, he expands the definitions of the Harlem Renaissance, implicating it "within the more inclusive concept of a metaphoric racial landscape" (54). By highlighting the differences between art and literature, Powell demonstrates that this period cannot be defined in the same way for the visual arts as it has been for literature.

In other parts of his book, Powell is less successful in departing from standard interpretations of black art. For example, in his chapter "The Cult of the People," a consideration of the relationship of African American artists to the work of Regionalists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Social Realists such as Ben Shahn would have shed light on African American perceptions of their representations in art by nonblack artists.(3) In addressing abstraction, his chapter "Pride, Assimilation, and Dreams" does not offer a re-examination of its use by black artists. Powell, like others before him, discusses the idea of black abstraction as based in music and black "signifying" (in the case of Norman Lewis). Yet he provides little sense of the connections between these artists and the larger worlds of abstract art. As such, we may assume that black abstraction is different, but the book leaves us asking the perhaps unanswerable yet important questions, "What is black about black abstraction?" and "Is abstract work by black artists necessarily racially based?"