Black Art Renaissance

Joshua I. Cohen

"Taking African art's impact on modernism as a global phenomenon, The Black Art Renaissance tracks a series of engagements with canonical African sculpture by European, African American, and African modernists from 1905 to the 1980s. Although it was an episode from the benighted colonial period, the Parisian avant-garde 'discovery of African sculpture-known then as 'art nègre,' or black art-came eventually to permeate Afro-modernisms, wherein black artists and critics commandeered visual and rhetorical uses of the same sculptural canon and the same term"--