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Biography Information
Huey Copeland is Assistant Professor of Art History at Northwestern University. An alumnus of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Copeland received his PhD in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on modern and contemporary art with emphases on articulations of blackness in the visual field, theories of subject formation, twentieth-century sculpture, histories of slavery, and African-American cultural politics. Copeland’s curatorial projects include the exhibitions Interstellar Low Ways, co-curated with Anthony Elms for the Hyde Park Art Center, and Big House/Disclosure, an intermedia suite by Mendi+Keith Obadike co-organized with Lane Relyea and executed in collaboration with Northwestern students. His writing has appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, and Qui Parle as well as in several international catalogues and critical volumes, most recently Modern Women: Women at the Museum of Modern Art, edited by Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz. Copeland’s first book, Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Radical Imagination, was recently awarded an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Foundation Arts Writers Grant and is now under advanced contract with the University of Chicago Press. Focused on figurations of the ‘peculiar institution’ in African-American installation art of the early 1990s, Bound to Appear examines the synchronic dimension of what Frantz Fanon has called “the fact of blackness” as a visual form and form of knowledge. While in residence at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, Copeland will shift to the genealogical in considering the historicity of this ‘fact’ and in framing his second book project, which explores the visual profile of the negress, a key figure within Western representation from the 19th century to the present, whose shifting contours enable a new interrogation of the assumptions that have shaped modern and contemporary artistic practice.
Project Description
While still poorly represented in museum collections, amongst monographic titles, and within the critical literature, of late, the art of black women has gained a foothold in the mainstream art world. This sea change is best emblematized by the career of Kara Walker, whose success has derived from her black construction paper silhouettes, which perversely reimagine American slavery from the perspective of, in her words, “an emancipated negress.”
Walker’s work highlights the fact that modern and contemporary art has time and again called upon fictions of African diasporic femininity. As her role-playing suggests, these fictions—Mammy, Superwoman, Sable Venus—arguably take their measure from the négresse, a figure first named in seventeenth-century France, who continues to represent difference doubled, race and gender unmoored from any particular black female subject. It is the history of this figure that I will continue excavating while in residence at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and that forms the basis for my second book project, tentatively entitled In the Arms of the Negress: A Brief History of Modern Artistic Practice.
Think back to Edouard Manet’s Olympia of 1863, often cited as the inaugural painting of the modernist tradition: the work’s figuration of an African diasporic woman allowed for the sexual amplification of the white model’s boldly confrontational attitude. Or consider how the renowned appropriation artist Cindy Sherman corked up her entire body to channel a Puerto Rican prostitute in one of her earliest photographic series, the relatively obscure, yet absolutely foundational Bus Riders of 1976. Taken together, these examples attest to the ways that the negress’s shifting profile productively shifts the contours of modernist art history. Accordingly, my project engages watershed pieces by canonical and lesser-known practitioners such as Romare Bearden, Eugène Delacroix, Ernest Mancoba, Kori Newkirk, Joe Overstreet, Pablo Picasso, and Doris Ullman.
Despite the varying racial, national, and sexual identities of their makers and the divergent historical circumstances that shaped them, all of these works attest to the black woman’s corporeal availability and global presence. These qualities have rendered her an indispensable vehicle of critique for both modern aesthetic interventions and black radical feminist modes of contestation. Thus, equally crucial to my account of the negress’s storied career are the critical strategies developed by African diasporic female artists, who have turned a wary eye toward raced and gendered fictions while mobilizing them to emphasize the material conditions shaping black women’s lives. This roster is just as temporally and geographically expansive, including Meta Warrick Fuller, Lubaina Himid, Wangechi Mutu, Rose Piper, Faith Ringgold, and Carrie Mae Weems.
However, along with Walker, several figures stand out who dramatically illustrate the cross-purposes to which the negress has been put. Native- and African-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis’s Forever Free of 1867, for example, is a neoclassical composition created in Rome after the abolition of slavery in the United States that reproduces the suffering slave while registering the partiality of freedom for black women. Some seventy years later, the dancer, folklorist, and painter Thelma Johnson Streat would self-consciously construct herself and her art using the same primitive motifs as her white male counterparts. Although now neglected, in their day, Streat’s paintings and performances made her the toast of Europe and the first black woman to have her work collected by the Museum of Modern Art.
I would argue that no matter their valence—mournful or fetishistic, liberatory or imperious—these conjurings illuminate the shadow that the negress casts over the field of artistic production. To be sure, “negress” is an absurd appellation and I use it precisely for that reason. Marked by the trauma of colonial enterprise, the dislocations of the transatlantic slave trade, and the logic of international capital, women of African descent have been imbued with what literary critic Hortense Spillers calls a “signifying property plus.” The trope of the negress allows us to freshly consider how this semiotic surplus has enabled radical approaches to representation and how investments in “the black woman” continue to shape artistic practice.
Wending its way through a range of periods, In the Arms of the Negress is meant to offer a racially integrated and transnational account of modern art that serves as a corrective to mainstream surveys and as a complement to cultural studies that examine black female contributions to the modern West. Ultimately, I hope to write a book about modern art that centers on the work of black women while bringing to light the specific forms of racial affiliation, gendered subjugation, and radical image-making that differentially produce the negress, a figure who continues to challenge our understandings of Western culture both past and present.