Black is a Color (book review, Art Monthly)

Black is a Color claims to be ‘both a historical study and a critical analysis [that] paints a picture of an America marked by its slave past, in which African American contemporary artists have been able to build a remarkable and engaged body of work to challenge the cultural and political consequences of racial discrimination’. Recently published by the French publisher Dis Voir this book takes its place alongside a fairly crowded bookshelf of introductory texts on the history of African American art. Beginning with James Porter’s pioneering study Modern Negro Art, first published in 1943 and reprinted several times since, through to the recent Thames & Hudson ‘World of Art’ offering, Black Art: A Cultural History, first published in 1997, reissued in 2002 and written by Richard J Powell, the student of African American art has no shortage of historical overviews to choose from. It is in many ways a brave scholar who seeks to bring something new and original to the study of the discipline…

…Rather than offering a dispassionate chronology of the major African American artists of the 20th century, Zabunyan chooses instead to look at the specifics of a handful of artists that she feels have a particular relevance to debates about identity and the ways in which certain artists have taken to task the American cultural hegemony. So we read detailed, involved overviews of the practice of artists such as David Hammons, Adrian PiperCarrie Mae Weems and Renée Green. These chapters are particularly useful as they provide a much-needed supplement to the reductive ways in which these artists’ work is often discussed by contemporary art critics. Artists such as Piper and Hammons distinguished themselves by consistently stepping outside the boundaries of accepted art practice. Yet in doing so, they have it seems rarely been discussed as anything other than, or more than, late 20th-century African American artists. Within the space available (or the space she gives herself) Zabunyan attempts to put the work of these artists into wider contexts, as well as discussing its relationship to the dominant racial, cultural and political hegemony…

The above extracts are from a book review of Elvan Zabunyan, Black is a Color (A History of African-American Art), Dis Voir, Paris, 288pp, bw & col illus, £29.00, 2 914 563 20 5. by Eddie Chambers, "Black is a Color”, Art Monthly, London, Number 294, March 2006: 36-37