A culmination of her Summer 2021 research fellowship, Giordano will workshop research from her chapter on the artist Hale Woodruff (1900-1980) and his place in an interdisciplinary intellectual social formation addressing the meaning of culture for Black groups in the Americas. Anthropologist Mark D. Anderson (UC Santa Cruz) will serve as a respondent. Session attendees are encouraged to read the pre-circulated section of a chapter from Giordano’s dissertation considering the transnational relationship between US Black artists, Mexican Muralism, and Cultural Anthropology in the 20th century that will be made available two weeks ahead of the presentation at the Humanities Center's shared folder.
This workshop with Rebecca Giordano, (History of Art and Architecture), focuses on Hale Woodruff’s Art of the Negro (1950-51), a six-panel mural at Clark Atlanta University, and its relationship to contemporaneous theories of cultural anthropology, particularly Boasian anthropologist Melville Herskovits’s concept of African Cultural Survivals. This mural differs from Woodruff’s earlier murals which framed US Black belonging through histories of state-based institution building, specific social crises, and legal advances. Bridging intellectual histories of the social sciences and African American art history, Giordano considers how anthropological models derived from the circles of anthropologist Franz Boas enabled Woodruff to present his vision of Black artistic identity as a combination of multivalent influences. Woodruff drew attention to the singular importance of West African cultural forms while framing Black art in the Americas as a combination of ‘Western’ and African cultures. This text reveals Woodruff’s larger intellectual networks and demonstrates how his artistic expertise was direct dialogue with Boasian thinking from the 1920s to the 1970s. Anthropologist Mark D. Anderson (UC Santa Cruz) will serve as a respondent. Session attendees are encouraged to read the pre-circulated section of a chapter from Giordano’s dissertation considering the transnational relationship between US Black artists, Mexican Muralism, and Cultural Anthropology in the 20th century that will be made available two weeks ahead of the presentation at the Humanities Center's shared folder.
To learn more about the event, please visit the University's Events calendar.