Journal Article

The Hearing Eye: Jazz and Blues Influences in African American Visual Art

LIPSITZ, GEORGE, Lock; Murray, Graham; David

2010

Overview

From Paul Oliver's explorations into the advertising art used to promote early blues recordings to Graham Lock's examination of Rose Piper's representations of blues and folk songs in her 1940s paintings, from Sara Wood's study of the influence of bebop on the abstract expressionist paintings of Norman Lewis to Richard King's sensitive critique of Bob Thompson's struggles to blend particular idioms with universal concerns, this volume consistently illuminates both the similarities and the differences that characterize music and art production among African Americans in the twentieth century. Richard Ings's knowing study of the jazz photographs taken by Roy DeCarava not only focusses attention on a different visual medium, but also reveals how African American music and visual art alike emerged from a complex social world where different forms of dance, display, style, and speech served as sites of struggle and self-affirmation, as repositories of collective memory, and as ways of calling communities into being through performance. Devoting attention both to the internal aesthetic issues that artists face and to the external pressures on African American art and artists imposed by oftentimes hostile critics, curators, and patrons, The Hearing Eye correctly locates artistic choices within a complex matrix of social and cultural institutions. Rhythm and blues artist Johnny Otis won a citywide art contest for his painting of Nat Turner in 1964, exhibited a series of sculptures based on the African understanding of a chair as a symbolic locus of power, and created a series of paintings titled Rhythm and Blues featuring renditions of the microphones, clothing, and neon signs Otis encountered in black night clubs during the 1940s and 1950s.

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Subject: African Americans / Bearden, Romare (1911-88) / DeCarava, Roy / Hearing