The Great Demographic Illusion: Majority, Minority, and the Expanding American Mainstream
by Richard Alba
Dangerously Divided: How Race and Class Shape Winning and Losing in American⨠Politics
by Zoltan L. Hajnal
The Case for Identity Politics: Polarization, Demographic Change, and Racial Appeals
by Christopher T. Stout
University of Virginia Press, 2020, 268 pp.
In a commencement address at the University of California, San Diego in 1997, President Bill Clinton spoke of a time when white people would no longer constitute a majority in the United States. In the decades since, the idea that growing diversity will bring about a âmajority-minorityâ America in the near future has become a widespread belief across the ideological spectrum, propelled by periodic Census updates, like a report that 2013 marked the first year that more nonwhite babies had been born in the United States than white ones.
Berry Campbell is pleased to present
Lilian Thomas Burwell: Soaring. This exhibition marks the esteemed Maryland-based artist’s first solo exhibition in New York. The exhibition title,
Soaring, is an homage to the late Dr. David Driskell’s essay,
Soaring With a Painterly Voice, written on the occasion of Burwell’s 1997 survey exhibition at Hampton University Museum, Virginia. Driskell described Burwell’s work as, “transcendental in showing stylistic diversity of earthly beauty and cosmic vision.”
Lilian Thomas Burwell: Soaring, organized by guest curator, Melissa Messina, highlights the dynamic transition in Burwell’s abstract visual language from two-dimensional painterly planes to three-dimensional sculptural forms. Burwell’s paintings from the late 1970s and early 1980s employ a distinctly bold palette and reference organic forms found in natural floral and earthly phenomena. The exhibition centers on the painting
BERRY CAMPBELL PRESENTS LILIAN THOMAS BURWELL: SOARING CURATED BY MELISSA MESSINA artfixdaily.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from artfixdaily.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Recently, English shared with me his reflections on our current moment, how art has changed over the past several decades, and why generalizations of Black art are so problematic.
You are very keen on the problems of generalization within the art world with regards to how African American art is taught, critiqued, and discussed. What is your biggest problem with these generalizations? How, in your opinion, can historians work to remove and/or reduce their use of generalizing?
My issue with generalization is that it feels an irresponsible way to respond to art’s diversity and specificity. If you understand art as something different from yourself, as the work of another consciousness, then it is very hard to generalize about it. Art reflects the immense variation in the field of experience, offers us opportunities to explore and come to terms with that plenitude. Accounts of art that suppress variation, that are nonchalant about those precious opportunities, need to be resisted.