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Three Minority Colorists in Washington, D.C., 1950-1980 : = Morris Louis, Alma Thomas, and Sam Gilliam.

Record Type:	Language materials, manuscript : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Three Minority Colorists in Washington, D.C., 1950-1980 :/
Reminder of title:	Morris Louis, Alma Thomas, and Sam Gilliam.
Author:	Geilfuss, Robert.
Description:	1 online resource (547 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-09, Section: A.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International84-09A.
Subject:	Art history. -
Online resource:	click for full text (PQDT)
ISBN:	9798374444247

Three Minority Colorists in Washington, D.C., 1950-1980 : = Morris Louis, Alma Thomas, and Sam Gilliam.
Geilfuss, Robert.

Three Minority Colorists in Washington, D.C., 1950-1980 :Morris Louis, Alma Thomas, and Sam Gilliam. - 1 online resource (547 pages)

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 84-09, Section: A.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2023.

Includes bibliographical references

This dissertation asks what it meant for minority artists in Washington, D.C., to assimilate modernism during the Civil Rights Era, under conditions of revolutionary change in the legal status of Black citizens in the United States. Together the stories of the artistic and professional breakthroughs of Morris Louis, Alma Thomas, and Sam Gilliam constitute the major successes of minority modernism in the US capital. All three of these artists worked across the Color Line, helping to establish the unique interracial dynamic of the Washington art world. The dissertation argues that modernist painting by minority artists in Civil Rights Era Washington, D.C. may be advantageously seen as a type of assimilationism with a difference, which allowed minority modernists still to preserve and express their racial and religious identities (if even in unassertive ways).Modernism's cosmopolitanism and orientation towards the future gave rise to universalist styles of indeterminate content, which belonged to no one nation, race, or religion. Powerfully purgative in its repeated recourse to abstract negations of tradition, modernism presented a vital counterpoint to cultural constructions of identity grounded in the traditional iconographies of the past. But by the 1960s, modernism was becoming the official national culture of the United States, taking over much of the country's museum programming in a series of racially exclusive, all White exhibitions.Part I of the dissertation includes the introductory first chapter as well as chapter 2, which focuses on the 1965 exhibition The Washington Color Painters at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art. Exclusively featuring six White men, this exhibition coincided with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in Washington during the summer of 1965. I argue that, despite the concurrent enactment of major civil rights and immigration legislation, such White modernist exhibitions of the mid-1960s constituted a distinctly White high cultural sphere.Part II of the dissertation returns its focus to minority modernism and presents in-depth histories of the breakthrough art of Gilliam, Thomas, and Louis. Assimilation suggests a change of identity, as the outsider adopts the folkways of the prevailing culture. Chapter 3, on Morris Louis, tracks how the artist suppressed his probable investment in Jewish mysticism in order to position himself publicly in accord with the tenets of Clement Greenberg's formalism: instead of the "anachronistic", deeply personal art of a Jewish mystic, the public was presented with the latest exemplar of high modernism. Chapter 4, on Alma Thomas, focuses on the invention and early reception of her signature style. Thomas's unwavering commitment to community uplift co-existed alongside a willingness to collaborate with an allegedly racist Whitney Museum of American Art in order to gain recognition as a master painter in 1972. Chapter 5 focuses on Sam Gilliam's invention of his un-stretched, suspended paintings in 1968-69. By making ambiguous their status as painting or sculpture and compelling attention in terms of form, Gilliam's suspended paintings successfully allegorized, or put into other terms, their resistance to categorical definition and racial reductionism.

Electronic reproduction.
Ann Arbor, Mich. :
ProQuest,
2024

Mode of access: World Wide Web

ISBN: 9798374444247Subjects--Topical Terms:

1180038
Art history.
Subjects--Index Terms:

Thomas, AlmaIndex Terms--Genre/Form:

554714
Electronic books.

Three Minority Colorists in Washington, D.C., 1950-1980 : = Morris Louis, Alma Thomas, and Sam Gilliam.
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520 $a This dissertation asks what it meant for minority artists in Washington, D.C., to assimilate modernism during the Civil Rights Era, under conditions of revolutionary change in the legal status of Black citizens in the United States. Together the stories of the artistic and professional breakthroughs of Morris Louis, Alma Thomas, and Sam Gilliam constitute the major successes of minority modernism in the US capital. All three of these artists worked across the Color Line, helping to establish the unique interracial dynamic of the Washington art world. The dissertation argues that modernist painting by minority artists in Civil Rights Era Washington, D.C. may be advantageously seen as a type of assimilationism with a difference, which allowed minority modernists still to preserve and express their racial and religious identities (if even in unassertive ways).Modernism's cosmopolitanism and orientation towards the future gave rise to universalist styles of indeterminate content, which belonged to no one nation, race, or religion. Powerfully purgative in its repeated recourse to abstract negations of tradition, modernism presented a vital counterpoint to cultural constructions of identity grounded in the traditional iconographies of the past. But by the 1960s, modernism was becoming the official national culture of the United States, taking over much of the country's museum programming in a series of racially exclusive, all White exhibitions.Part I of the dissertation includes the introductory first chapter as well as chapter 2, which focuses on the 1965 exhibition The Washington Color Painters at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art. Exclusively featuring six White men, this exhibition coincided with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in Washington during the summer of 1965. I argue that, despite the concurrent enactment of major civil rights and immigration legislation, such White modernist exhibitions of the mid-1960s constituted a distinctly White high cultural sphere.Part II of the dissertation returns its focus to minority modernism and presents in-depth histories of the breakthrough art of Gilliam, Thomas, and Louis. Assimilation suggests a change of identity, as the outsider adopts the folkways of the prevailing culture. Chapter 3, on Morris Louis, tracks how the artist suppressed his probable investment in Jewish mysticism in order to position himself publicly in accord with the tenets of Clement Greenberg's formalism: instead of the "anachronistic", deeply personal art of a Jewish mystic, the public was presented with the latest exemplar of high modernism. Chapter 4, on Alma Thomas, focuses on the invention and early reception of her signature style. Thomas's unwavering commitment to community uplift co-existed alongside a willingness to collaborate with an allegedly racist Whitney Museum of American Art in order to gain recognition as a master painter in 1972. Chapter 5 focuses on Sam Gilliam's invention of his un-stretched, suspended paintings in 1968-69. By making ambiguous their status as painting or sculpture and compelling attention in terms of form, Gilliam's suspended paintings successfully allegorized, or put into other terms, their resistance to categorical definition and racial reductionism.
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