Mary Ann Calo
Distinction and Denial: Race, Nation, and the Critical Construction of the African-American Artist, 1920–40
Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press,
2007.
280 pp.
Paper
$29.95
(9780472032303)
About caa.reviews
Whether it is called the fruit of the Harlem Renaissance, of the Negro Renaissance, or of the New Negro Movement, the art produced by African Americans in the interwar decades of the twentieth century has long fascinated audiences hungry for celebratory and affirming representations of and by blacks. Handsome genre portraits, poignant scenes of cities and rural landscapes, tough realist sculpture, and modernist tableaus are oft-exhibited and oft-reproduced subjects in the United States, and increasingly,...