Darby English is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness.
"1971: A Year in the Life of Color is a powerful, polemical, and
much-needed work. It forces us to rethink the terms of politics and
abstraction, African American art, representation, and modernism in
a way that is at once historically rigorous and theoretically
expansive, no small thing indeed."--Pamela M. Lee, Stanford
University
"Darby English's 1971: A Year in the Life of Color enters the
discussion of modernism where one least expects it: in Black
artists' pursuit of colour field painting, the non-objective,
highly geometric, large-format works of the late 1950s and 1960s. .
. .English portrays Black abstractionists as dissenters who refused
to conform to dominant paradigms for African-American art."--
"Journal for the Association of Art History"
"More than a study of African American engagement with modernist
aesthetics, Darby English's 1971: A Year in the Life of Color is an
intelligent and provocative call for the necessity of abstraction,
idiosyncrasy, and unexpected forms of rebellion in the production
of art and the development of cultural studies. English crosses the
most sacrosanct ideological boundaries as he argues for the
necessity of untamed and previously unimagined forms of
creativity."--Robert F. Reid-Pharr, CUNY Graduate Center
"What is more urgently demanded, for current art and its histories,
than the rethinking of how activism, identity, and art interact?
Perhaps only an understanding of the particular complexity of black
American identity, which in 1971: A Year in the Life of Color
reveals a radical oppositionality within modernism that many had
already given up on. Profoundly lucid, intensely felt, archivally
deep, and utterly persuasive, English's book reorients our
understanding of both that time and our own."--Rachel Haidu,
University of Rochester
"1971 clears space for art historians, curators, and cultural
producers to complicate black artists' participation in modernism
as a multicultural process, not as a separate or oppositional
endeavor. . . . [This book] captures quite concretely a shared
moment in the art world when color defied any singular
narrative."-- "Hyperallergic"
"English's polemical account of black abstraction, 1971: A Year in
the Life of Color, has arrived right on time. . . the book promises
to add a much-needed historicizing dimension to the spate of recent
exhibition catalogues focused on black abstract artists as well as
a welcome corrective to African American art historiography, which
has tended to focus on representational practices, usually framed
as imbued with political intent, whether direct or implicit."--
"Art Journal"
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