Beyond monographic texts dedicated to single artists, it is rare to find book-length studies that solely focus African American sculpture—or, sculpture made by African Americans. The reasons for this are many and complex. Although sculpture was a mainstay of 19th-century arts education in Europe and the Americas, in the latter half of the 20th century sculpture was newly questioned as a stable category of production. Between the 18th century and today media-specific practices have been broadly replaced with multimedia ones. This begs the question: what constitutes sculpture in any history or reference text that purports to span a number of centuries? An artist like Renée Green (b. 1959), for example, creates sculpture—discrete, three-dimensional objects—but also multi-part environmental installations, sound works, videos, architecture, and websites, as well as photography and prints. In light of these historical shifts, this bibliography takes a broad view of sculpture, and includes the work of self-described sculptors, such as the 19th-century sculptor Edmonia Lewis, as well as those with pluralistic practices like Green. Similarly, the category of “African American” has come under scrutiny, as the various signifiers of such an identity (for example, phenotype and/or ancestry) shift with broader social, economic, aesthetic, and political systems. Terminology has also changed a great deal since the 18th century—with popular linguistic designations moving from “negro,” to “colored,” to “black,” to “Afro-American,” to “African American,” and back to “black” again. Each contains historical political import, tied to both in-group empowerment and extrinsic, sometimes derogatory, uses. The visual arts are uniquely positioned to approach, understand, question, and challenge these changing social and semiotic conditions, and the anxieties and pleasures of black identification are often registered in nuanced and multifaceted ways within the realm of the visual. It would be a mistake to assume that the term “African American” encompassed the full political force of all artists included here, many of whom experience(d) the reality of intersectional identities and oppressions attached to gender, race, ability, class, and sexuality. For a more complete accounting of the visual arts beyond sculpture, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies article Visual Arts.
African-American and White Living Standards in the 19th Century American South: A Biological Comparison
