Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2019 - Humanities — Art & Architecture — African and African American Studies

Umberger (curator of folk and self-taught art, Smithsonian American Art Museum) celebrates an extraordinary American artist and the worlds he limned. An African American born in Alabama before the Civil War, Traylor (c.1853-1949) produced roughly 1,200 works on paper in the last decade of his life. In Between Worlds, the catalogue for an exhibition of the same name, Umberger poses the important question of who speaks for the artist and his work. She divides the text into two strands: first, she reconstructs Traylor's personal biography; second, she advances the interpretation and reception of Traylor's art into the present. Her research is impeccable and her narrative compelling. Umberger contextualizes Traylor and his art within an arc of southern history that progresses from antebellum slavery through the Great Depression and the ravages of Jim Crow. She ably grounds those big stories in the artist's biography and the worlds he evoked in pencil and paint from the late 1930s until the end of his life. Umberger is methodical in reconciling folklore, art history, social history, and visual culture within the creative imaginaries Traylor represented in his art. Magnificently illustrated, cogently argued, and meticulously annotated, Between Worlds is sophisticated, generous, and triumphant--and a commanding call to more expansive and inclusive histories of American art.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.

Finley (Cornell) traces the history of a single image--a wood engraving depicting the human cargo hold of a slave ship (Plan of an African Ship's Lower Deck with Negroes in the Proportion of Only One to a Ton)--which made an initial appearance in 1788 in order to support the work of abolitionists, who created the image and controlled its meaning. Examining the image from its origins in the 18th century to the present, the author looks at the many ways in which a variety of individuals and groups have used the image to make memory and give that memory meaning. She opens by examining many of the contemporaneous works created to invoke the image of a slave ship. Later, with the advent of the the New Negro Arts Movement, the image took on new meaning as descendants of the enslaved in the US, and in the larger African diaspora, used it to illustrate the journey from enslavement to freedom. Finley includes a wonderful variety of images and examples, providing fine art, photography, and performance poetry to elucidate the change over time. Her superb analysis of this image illustrates the importance of the practice of mnemonic aesthetics, or ritualized remembering, and how the meaning of a single powerful image can change over time.Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.