Suzanne Preston Blier
Suzanne Preston Blier is Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Blier, Suzanne Preston
Blier, Suzanne Preston
United States of America
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Description: Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place
Fon native and historian Paul Hazoumé, from what is today the Republic of Benin, authored not only the first Fon...
PublisherBard Graduate Center
Related print edition pages: pp.241-253
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00203.014
Description: The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00136
The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art asks how the black figure was depicted by artists from the non-Western world. Beginning with ancient Egypt—positioned properly as part of African history—this volume focuses on the figure of the black as rendered by artists from Africa, East Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. The aesthetic traditions illustrated here are as diverse as the political and social histories of these regions. From Igbo Mbari sculptures to modern photography from Mali, from Indian miniatures to Japanese prints, African and Asian artists portrayed the black body in ways distinct from the European tradition, even as they engaged with Western art through the colonial encounter and the forces of globalization.

This volume complements the vision of art patrons Dominique and Jean de Menil who, during the 1960s, founded an image archive to collect the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. A half‐century later, Harvard University Press and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research completed the historic publication of The Image of the Black in Western Art—ten books in total—beginning with Egyptian antiquities and concluding with images that span the twentieth century. The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art reinvigorates the de Menil family’s original mission and reorients the study of the black body with a new focus on Africa and Asia.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date February 2017 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674504394
EISBN 9780300244731
Illustrations 265
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art
What factors mattered to Africans in representing themselves through their arts? How are these visual forms to be understood in the broader spectrum of time and space? In many ways these issues speak to the larger ones of what it means to be human. Important here is how one portrays oneself as opposed to others. However, there are other questions in play as well: concerns as varied as the...
PublisherHarvard University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.19-52
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00136.006
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume V: The Twentieth Century, Part 1: The...
African art, evolution, racial aesthetics, colonialism, and world fairs were among the common threads that helped to shape the image of the black in France in the first decade of the twentieth century. For...
PublisherHarvard University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.77-98
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00145.010