The Art of Remembering: Essays on African American Art and History

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw's The Art of Remembering explores African American art and representation from the British colonial period to the present, emphasizing rememory to recover forgotten facts and narratives. She demonstrates how embracing rememory expands the possibilities of history by acknowledging multiple forms of knowledge and ways of understanding.

Format: Hardback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 02 April 2024
Publisher: Duke University Press

The Art of Remembering: African American Art and Representation from the British Colonial Period to the Present by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is a groundbreaking exploration of African American art and representation. Shaw engages in the process of rememory, which involves the recovery of facts and narratives of African American creativity and self-representation that have been purposefully set aside, actively ignored, and disremembered. Through analyses of the work of artists such as Scipio Moorhead, Moses Williams, Aaron Douglas, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Kara Walker, Kehinde Wiley, and Deana Lawson, Shaw demonstrates that African American art and history can be remembered and understood anew through a process of intensive close looking, cultural and historical contextualization, and biographic recuperation or consideration. Shaw shows how embracing rememory expands the possibilities of history by acknowledging the existence of multiple forms of knowledge and ways of understanding an event or interpreting an object. In so doing, Shaw thinks beyond canonical interpretations of art and material and visual culture to imagine "what if," asking what else did we once know that has been lost.

Weight: 748g
Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478025924