ODES TO BLACKNESS: Gender Representation in the Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kara Walker - Softcover

Fedorchak, Iryna

9781522092964: ODES TO BLACKNESS: Gender Representation in the Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kara Walker

Softcover

ISBN 10: 152209296X ISBN 13: 9781522092964

Publisher: Independently published, 2017

The Post-black generation of artists, namely the generation born after the Civil- Rights Era, spawned with the new concept of black aesthetics and its artistic language that has been reflected in the visual arts, using the white supremacist’s image of the Negro in order to provide a reinterpretation of history by ironizing stereotypes. This is an issue of growing importance that this book aims to discuss along with the further exploration of self-representation and cultural belonging in the paintings of Jean- Michel Basquiat and various art creations of Kara Walker. The investigation of the cultural taboos highlighted controversial artistic means of Jean-Michel Basquiat by exploring the influence of the Post-Civil Rights concept and fusing it with ambiguous and ironic perspective of the Black male hero, while Kara Walker reworked the old South realities by affiliating with her Negress. The analysis carried out in this book, sheds the light on the nature of irony and the stereotype in the way that it was explicated in the art reproduction of Basquiat and Walker. The results of the investigation have proven that the notion of irony as artistic means became an inevitable element of the artistic representation which is inherent in contemporary Black American artistic discourse. Visual imageries of both artists project social constructions of irony and controversy whosen values and meanings promote social healing from unconscious racialization.

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