Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition

A timely consideration of African-American artists’ rich engagement with the history of art from the twentieth century.

Riffs and Relations: African-American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition presents works by African-American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries together with works by the early-twentieth-century European artists with whom they engaged. Black artists have investigated, interrogated, invaded, entangled, annihilated, or immersed themselves in the aesthetics, symbolism, and ethos of European art for more than a century. The powerful push and pull of this relationship constitutes a distinct tradition for many African-American artists who source the master narratives of art history to critique, embrace, or claim their own space. This groundbreaking catalog–accompanying a major exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.–connects the work of artists such as Romare Bearden with Pablo Picasso; Renee Cox and Robert Colescott with Édouard Manet; Norman Lewis with Paul Klee; and Leonardo Drew with Piet Mondrian. The volume explores how blackness has often been conceived from the standpoint of these international connections and presents the divergent and complex works born of these important dialogues.