ABSTRACT
African American art is a term or a category that should rightly come with a range of necessary caveats. Until relatively recently, the term could largely be understood as relating to the art of African America, the art made by black American artists; the latest incarnation of a nomenclatural trajectory that began with Negro Art, before progressing, some decades later, to Afro American Art, and then in more recent decades, on to African American Art, taking in Black American Art along the way. But to fully appreciate the complications of the category, we need to draw in a range of factors that in many respects expose its most pronounced fissures. We likely each think we know what we mean when we refer to African American art and its history, but upon closer inspection any supposed certainties about these constructs start to dissipate. What, after all, is the relationship between artists who might individually describe themselves as African American, and the mass noun, African American Art? Given that so much art practice is pursued by individuals decidedly not operating in concert with each other, what are we to make of books, exhibitions, catalogues, museum sections, and so on, in which African American artists are treated and regarded as some sort of logical, recognizable, distinctive, self-referencing whole? Outside of the strident utterances of advocates of the Black Arts Movement, we can imagine a great many artists having degrees of ambivalence as to the imposition of an art world classificatory label such as African American. Perhaps it’s the loaded and raced prefix of African which is a chief contention. After all, to signify an artist as African American is quite different from signifying that same artist as American, if he or she is American by birth, citizenship, or residence. What is at stake if we embrace or maintain use of the term African American art and what is at stake if we were to actively resist it? What are the consequences and implications of a continued use of the term, resting as it does on a range of presumptions and assumptions?
