Skip to content

Art Historians

Fine, Elsa Honig

Full Name: Fine, Elsa Honig

Other Names:

  • Elsa Honig
  • Elsa H. Fine

Gender: female

Date Born: 24 May 1930

Place Born: Bayonne, Hudson, NJ, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): African American, American (North American), Black (general, race and ethnicity), Contemporary (style of art), feminism, and Women

Career(s): publishers

Institution(s): University of Knoxville


Overview

Feminist art historian and early scholar of African American art; founded Woman’s Art Journal. Elsa Honig was born to Samuel M. Honig and ​​Yetta Susskind (Honig). She earned her Bachelors in Fine Arts from Syracuse University in 1951 and her MEd in art from Temple University’s Tyler College of Fine Arts in 1967. She married Harold J. Fine Jr. (d. 2009), a psychologist and psychoanalyst, in 1952.

Fine earned her doctorate in education of art history from the University of Tennessee in 1970, focusing on black art historians in America in her dissertation Education and the Afro-American Artist. Fine published her first book,The Afro-American Artist: A Search for Identity. The following year the book received animadversion from Romare H. Bearden (1911-1988) who, among other things, said Fine “confuses [African-Ameican] art history with social theories that are primarily racist to anyone who has a general knowledge of art.”

In 1970, Fine was appointed as the assistant professor of art at the University of Knoxville through 1975. In 1972, Fine attended the College Art Association’s annual conference where she realized the emerging issues in the feminist art movement. Over the next ten years, Fine transitioned from African-American art history to feminist art history. When both the Feminist Art Journal and Womanart magazine ceased by 1978, Fine proposed a new feminist journal at the Women’s Caucus for Art’s 1979 meeting in Washington, D.C. The next year, Fine founded the Woman’s Art Journal—a semi-annual publication devoted to women in the visual arts. Fine worked at various colleges from 1975 until 2006, including teaching some classes at Community Scholars—a university program for adults living near Beaver College (today Arcadia University). Fine served as editor of the Woman’s Art Journal until her retirement in 2006, traveling to the UK, Israel, and Scandinavia for her work.

Fine was honored by multiple awards including the Woman’s Caucus for Art Honorary Award in 1996, The Distinguished Feminist Award from the College Art Association in 2001, and the Alumni Award from Tyler College in 2002.


Selected Bibliography

  • [dissertation] Education and the Afro-American Artist: A Survey of the Educational Background of the Afro-American and his Role as a Visual Artist(1970);
  • “The Afro-American Artist: A Search for Identity.” Art Journal 29, no. 1 (1969): 32–35. https://doi.org/10.2307/775273;
  • “Mainstream, Blackstream and the Black Art Movement.” Art Journal 30, no. 4 (1971): 374–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/775378.;
  • The Afro-American artist; a search for identity. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973
  • Annemarie Weyl Carr, Constance Scheerer, Cindy Nemser, Brenda Price, Janet Catherine Berlo, Annamarie Rousseau, Sally Webster, et al. “Feminist Art Journal.” Feminist Art Journal 5, no. 1 (April 1, 1976): 1–50. https://jstor.org/stable/10.2307/community.28036294;
  • Women Et Art: A History of Women Painters and Sculptors from the Renaissance to the 20th Century. Montclair: Allanheld et Schram, 1978;
  • Woman’s art journal. 1980. Knoxville: Tenn;
  • 1989. American women artists: the 20th century. [Knoxville, Tenn.]: Knoxville Museum of Art;
  • “Some ‘Fiftysomething’ Achievers Are Neither Silent nor Male.” The New York Times. The New York Times, January 17, 1990. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/17/opinion/l-some-fiftysomething-achieve….

Sources


Archives

  • Judith K. Brodsky collection papers, Rutgers University

Contributors: Eleanor Ross


Citation

Eleanor Ross. "Fine, Elsa Honig." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/finee/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Feminist art historian and early scholar of African American art; founded Woman’s Art Journal. Elsa Honig was born to Samuel M. Honig and ​​Yetta Susskind (Honig). She earned her Bachelors in Fine Arts from Syracuse University in 1951 and he

Hewitt, Mary Jane

Image Credit: Occidental College

Full Name: Hewitt, Mary Jane

Other Names:

  • M.J. Hewitt

Gender: female

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: 2017

Place Born: Kansas City, Wyandotte, KS, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): African American, American (North American), Black (general, race and ethnicity), and Modern (style or period)

Career(s): activists and publishers

Institution(s): Los Angeles Museum of African American Art and Occidental College


Overview

Expert on African-American art; Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles. Mary Jane Hewitt’s birth is undocumented, but likely in the 1920s. She was the youngest of four children in a single-mother household. She was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, by her mother to whom she accredited her strong will and intolerance of discrimination (Ehrhart-Morrison). Hewitt first earned a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota before traveling to Paris, France in the 1950s. In France, Hewitt worked as a French interpreter and translator for the U.S. government. Initially planning to live in Paris permanently due to the discrimination in America, Hewitt changed her mind after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in 1955 on a bus during the Civil Rights Movement. Inspired by Parks’ actions, Hewitt returned to the United States and settled in Los Angeles.

In the 1960s with the rise of black consciousness at universities, Hewitt became a program director at UCLA and worked under Abbott Kaplan (1912-1980) to develop classes on race. Hewitt was involved in the campus’ Black Student Union and was promoted to run UCLA’s High Potential and Equal Opportunity Program in 1968. Hewitt advised UCLA’s High Potential Program (Hi-Pot), which enrolled minority groups in preparatory education so they could qualify to attend UCLA. After becoming frustrated with the coordination of the program, Hewitt resigned from UCLA in December 1969 and joined the faculty of Occidental College as an American Studies professor.

Hewitt taught at Occidental College from 1969 to 1978 where she offered courses on race, literature, and the Caribbean. She founded a campus committee on multicultural education and brought musicians and poets to campus. In 1976, Hewitt won $5,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation to complete a Master’s and Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from the University of West Indies in Jamaica. Hewitt decided to study in Jamaica as she wanted to “be part of the majority for once,” and wrote her doctoral thesis comparing Zora Neale Hurston and Louise Bennett, two diaspora women writers.

In 1978, Hewitt was denied a promotion for the third time at Occidental College. As the only African-American professor at the university, advisory council members accused her of grading Black students with extra leniency. Hewitt resigned that year, and, although she never stated her reasoning, Occidental College students have argued that institutional racism forced her resignation (Tranquada).

After leaving Occidental College, Hewitt opened the Los Angeles Museum of African American Art with friend and fellow art historian Samella Lewis. Initially a buildingless museum, Hewitt and Lewis arranged for exhibitions including a collaboration with UCLA’s Visual and Performing Arts Academy. Eventually, Hewitt and Lewis expanded the museum’s board to include Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Catlett, artists, and music industry professionals—over time raising enough money to construct a museum. Hewitt worked at the Museum of African American Art until the late 1980s.

Outside of academia, Hewitt ran Samjai Fine Arts, Inc. and was the Associate Editor of The International Review of African American Art, a quarterly publication for African-American artists. She was on the editorial board and an artistic consultant for Black Art and Vice Chairman of the California Art Council’s Multicultural Advisory Panel. Hewitt helped create the Emmy-Award-winning television series “The Negro in American Culture” where she spoke with Maya Angelou about how American culture is rooted in African-Americans. In 1985, Hewitt won the Vesta Award to honor her outstanding achievements in the arts. In 2017, an anonymous gift of $500,000 endowed the Mary Jane Hewitt Department Chair in Black Studies at Occidental College to honor Hewitt as the first Black woman to serve as a tenured faculty member.

Hewitt was married twice. Her second husband, Edward Rubin (d. 2011), was a businessman, and together they had an early bi-racial marriage.


Selected Bibliography

  • [dissertation] Hewitt, Mary Jane. “A Comparative Study of the Careers of Zora Neale Hurston and Louise Bennett as Cultural Conservators.” Ph.D. University of the West Indies, 1986;
  • 1973. Cultural nationalism and Africa. Waltham: Asa;
  • “Freedomways.” Freedomways 20, no. 3 (January 3, 1980): 1–132. https://jstor.org/stable/10.2307/community.28037052;
  • “The Long Black Line.” California History 60, no. 1 (1981): 12–13. https://doi.org/10.2307/25158017;
  • Lewis, Samella S., and Jacob Lawrence. 1982. Jacob Lawrence. Santa Monica, Calif: Museum of African American Art;
  • 1989. “The eye music of Gordon Parks”. International Review of African American Art. 8: 50-63;
  • Howard, M. (1992). Mildred Howard: TAP : investigation of memory : November 16 – December 31, 1992. New York, INTAR Latin American Gallery;
  • 1999. Beyond the veil: art of African American artists at century’s end : [exhibition]. Winter Park, Fla: Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College;
  • Lewis, Samella S., and Floyd W. Coleman. 2006. African American art and artists. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Sources



Contributors: Eleanor Ross


Citation

Eleanor Ross. "Hewitt, Mary Jane." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/hewittm/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Expert on African-American art; Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Museum of African American Art in Los Angeles. Mary Jane Hewitt’s birth is undocumented, but likely in the 1920s. She was the youngest of four children in a single-mother household.

Archer-Straw, Petrine

Image Credit: PetrineArcher.com

Full Name: Archer-Straw, Petrine

Other Names:

  • Petrine Archer
  • P.A. Straw
  • P. Archer-Straw
  • Pet Archer-Straw

Gender: female

Date Born: 26 December 1956

Date Died: 05 December 2012

Place Born: Birmingham, West Midlands, England, UK

Place Died: Mona, Jamaica

Home Country/ies: Jamaica and United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Afro-Caribbean (style and culture), avant-garde, Black (general, race and ethnicity), Caribbean, Jamaican, and Modern (style or period)

Institution(s): Courtauld Institute and Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts


Overview

Historian of art, educator, and curator who specialized in art of the Caribbean.

Born in Great Britain to Jamaican parents, Archer-Straw attended the University of the West Indies in 1975 and completed her B.A. in Theology, History, and Sociology in 1978. She also trained in visual arts at the Jamaica School of Art from 1979 to 1982, receiving a diploma in painting. She went on to receive a M.Phil in Cultural History (1983-87). She later gained her M.A. and PhD (study in Negrophilia)  in Art History from the Courtauld Institute at the University of London, where she subsequently taught between 1994 and 1995.

After receiving her doctorate in 1994 she worked as a consultant for a number of institutions in the Caribbean and Great Britain including the Royal Academy, London where she was coordinating editor for the exhibition and publication Africa the Art of a Continent (1995). Archer-Straw assisted curator and editor Tom Phillips (b. 1937) on the book specifically, consisting of over 600 pages that document the continent, including ancient Egypt and Nubia, North and Northwestern Africa as well as the sub-Saharan region. In 1990 Archer-Straw published Jamaican Art, the first book of its kind. The book was co-authored with editor-in-chief of Jamaica Journal and Caribbean Quarterly Kim Robinson-Walcott (b. 1956), in addition to a foreword by curator of the National Gallery of Jamaica, David Boxer (b. 1946). She chronicled for the first time the evolution of Jamaican art, highlighting key artists in the nation’s history, like well-known sculptor Edna Manley (1900-1987), but also David Pottinger (1911-2007), Cecil Baugh (1908-2005), and Carl Abrahams (1913-2005). Her essays emphasize the distinctive and diverse nature of Jamaican art, despite its inherent connections to the European art scene, especially within the United Kingdom. In 2000, Archer-Straw was also the editor and curator of Fifty Year: Fifty Artists, an exhibition and publication in commemoration of a 50-year milestone in the development of fine art training in Jamaica, for the School of Visual Arts (Jamaica). Archer-Straw wrote two essays for the book, the first an introduction about the College’s history and the second an examination of the development of its fine arts programs. Fifty years-Fifty Artists demonstrated the significant progression in fine arts teaching since the Jamaica School of Arts and Crafts received its charter back in the 1950s under the guidance of its founder, Edna Manley. Archer-Straw became famous for her 2000 publication of Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s, which discusses Europeans fetishization and passion for Black culture with the mass exodus of African-American artists, writers, and musicians following WWI.

Archer-Straw worked with the National Gallery of Jamaica where she had been a visiting curator member of the Board of Directors from 2000 until her death. She was a consultant for the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas where she spearheaded the development of the gallery’s curatorial policies following its establishment until 2002. Between 2002 and 2004, she worked with the School of Visual Arts in Jamaica where she designed the college’s first degree program in Art History. She was also arts editor and a consistent writer for the Jamaica Journal, a quarterly for the sciences and arts, published by the Institute of Jamaica. Her articles primarily focus on historical themes of the African diaspora and artistic connections across the Atlantic.

In her final years, she co-curated the online exhibition About Face: Revisiting Jamaica’s First Exhibition in Europe with Claudia Hucke, Senior Lecturer in Art History at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts, in Kingston, Jamaica. Archer-Straw died unexpectedly, aged 55, as the result of a sickle-cell crisis.

Most of Petrine’s curatorial work focused on Jamaica and Jamaican artists. Her exhibitions included: New World Imagery: Contemporary Jamaican Art (South Bank Centre and National Touring Exhibitions, 1995), Photos and Phantasms: Harry Johnston’s Photographs of the Caribbean (Royal Geographical Society, London, 1998), and Back to Black (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2005), which she co-curated with Richard Powell and David A Bailey.


Selected Bibliography

  • [dissertation:] Negrophilia: Paris in the 1920’s. A Study of the Artistic Interest in and Appropriation of Negro Cultural Forms in Paris During that Period. University of London, 1994;
  • Back to Black: Art, Cinema and the Racial Imaginary. Whitechapel Gallery: London, 2005;
  • Past, Present and Personal; The Dawn Davies Collection. National Art Gallery of The Bahamas: Nassau, 2004;
  • One Man’s Vision; The D’Aguilar Collection. National Art Gallery of The Bahamas: Nassau, 2003;
  • Creolite and Creolization, Documenta 11- Platform 3, kessel, 2002;
  • Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s, Thames & Hudson: London, 2000;
  • Fifty Years – Fifty Artists (Ed) Ian Randle Publishers: Kingston, 2000;
  • Photos and Phantasms: Harry Johnston’s Photographs of the Caribbean, London: The British Council, 1998;
  • New World Imagery: Contemporary Jamaican Art London: National Touring Exhibitions, 1995;
  • Africa: The Art of a Continent (Ed) Royal Academy, London: Prestel Verlag, 1995;
  • Home and Away: Seven Jamaican Artists London: The Arts Council, 1994;
  • Jamaican Art: An Overview 1922 – 1982, Kingston Publishers, 1989.

Sources


Archives

“Petrine Archer.” n.d. https://petrinearcher.com/


Contributors: Alana J. Hyman


Citation

Alana J. Hyman. "Archer-Straw, Petrine." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/archer-strawp/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Historian of art, educator, and curator who specialized in art of the Caribbean. Born in Great Britain to Jamaican parents, Archer-Straw attended the University of the West Indies in 1975 and completed her B.A. in Theology, History, and Sociology in

Simon, Walter Augustus

Full Name: Simon, Walter Augustus, Jr.

Other Names:

  • Walter A. Simon
  • W.A. Simon

Gender: male

Date Born: 18 June 1916

Date Died: 28 August 1979

Place Born: Brooklyn, Cattaraugus, NY, USA

Place Died: Richmond, VA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): African (general, continental cultures), African American, African diaspora, Ancient African, Black (general, race and ethnicity), Ceylonese, Cubist, Harlem Renaissance, Islam, Islamic (culture or style), Nubian (culture or style), South Asian, Sri Lankan, and Sudanese

Institution(s): New York University and Virginia Union University


Overview

Historian of art, professor in art education and visual artist. Born in 1916 to Gay Crichton (1855-1966) and Walter Augustus Simon Sr., Simon Jr. grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. Despite the racism prevalent in schools at this time, Simon received an unconventionally thorough education for an African-American, which would serve as a solid foundation for his love of administration in higher education. He attended the School of Fine and Applied Arts at the Pratt Institute, receiving a certificate in commercial design in 1936.In 1939, Simon also trained at the National Academy of Design in New York City for a certificate in fine arts. He married Virginia Spottswood Simon on March 20th, 1941 in Washington, D.C., right before leaving to serve in WWII in the U.S. Army from 1941-1945. After the end of the war, from September 1948 to June 1949, Simon began his career as an instructor in the art department at Georgia State College (modern: Savannah State College) organizing the department of art education and serving as chairman of the curriculum committee. Between 1949 and 1961 Simon was a professor in the Art Education Department at Virginia State College (1949-1953) and at New Jersey State College (1953-61). Simon also served as the Chairman of the Art Education Department at Atlanta University, now Clark Atlanta University, in Atlanta, Georgia in the summers between 1949 and 1951. Simon completed his B.S. in Art Education in 1948 followed by an MS in Art Education in 1950 and finally his PhD in Education in 1961, all at New York University. His doctoral dissertation, entitled, “Henry O. Tanner – A Study of the Development of an American Negro Artist: 1859-1937,” is an extensive analysis of an Tanner, an American artist and the first African-American painter to gain international acclaim. Tanner moved to Paris, France, in 1891 to study painting and continued to reside there after his success in French artistic circles, which was something that would heavily influence Simon’s own aims as a visual artist to work on an international scale.

In 1961, Simon moved to Cairo, Egypt where he became an attache for the American Embassy there and served as the director of the Embassy’s special educational program for African-American students in Cairo. In 1966, Simon was appointed attache for the American Embassy in Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) until 1968 when he was transferred to the American Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan where he was in charge of the Fulbright Program, the United States Information Service libraries, and served as a liaison to Kabul University and chairman of the U.S. educational foundation. In 1971 he became a professor of art history at Bloomsburg State College, Bloomsburg Pennsylvania as well as their Director of the Educational Opportunity Program until 1977. The fall of 1977, Simon was appointed Charles W. Florence Distinguished professor of art history at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia. Simon joined the NAACP in September of 1978, and wrote for The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1910 by W. E. B. Du Bois. Throughout his teaching career, Simon lectured on Ceylonese art, the arts of Nubia, Islamic art, Picasso and Cubism, and the Harlem Renaissance, speaking to his highly varied range of interests and life experiences. Simon died in August 1979 after complications following a kidney transplant operation earlier that year. He left behind an incomplete autobiography that he worked on over the span of 5 years until his death, describing his background in detail until World War II (now housed in the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives at Emory University).


Selected Bibliography

  • [dissertation:] Henry O. Tanner – a Study of the Development of an American Negro Artist: 1859-1937. New York University, 1961.

Sources


Archives


Contributors: Alana J. Hyman


Citation

Alana J. Hyman. "Simon, Walter Augustus." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/simonw/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Historian of art, professor in art education and visual artist. Born in 1916 to Gay Crichton (1855-1966) and Walter Augustus Simon Sr., Simon Jr. grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. Despite the racism prevalent in schools at this time, Simon received an unconv

Murray, Freeman Henry Morris

Full Name: Murray, Freeman Henry Morris

Other Names:

  • F. H. M. Murray
  • Freeman Murray

Gender: male

Date Born: 22 September 1859

Date Died: 20 February 1950

Place Born: Cleveland, Cuyahoga, OH, USA

Place Died: Alexandria, VA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): African American, American (North American), and sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): activists, art historians, authors, educators, and publishers

Institution(s): Howard University, Mount Pleasant Academy, and Niagara Movement


Overview

African-American author, lecturer, and civil rights activist; first author to publish a book on African-American art. Freeman Henry Morris Murray was born in 1859 in Cleveland, Ohio to John M. Murray (d. 1862), a tailor, and Martha [Mary] Bentley (Murray). Murray’s ethnic background was diverse; his father was a white man of Scottish descent and his mother had Irish, Native American, and African roots. By age two, Murray had lost both of his parents – his abolitionist father was killed fighting for the Union Army at Bull Run Ridge and his mother died of influenza – so he and his older brother were raised by their maternal grandparents. Murray completed his primary education in Cincinnati and attended Mount Pleasant Academy as one of only three African-American students. After graduating in 1875 with a teaching degree, Murray became a teacher in Covington, Kentucky at a school for impoverished African-American children. He also became an apprentice journalist for the Cincinnati Enquirer. Through his early work as a journalist, he learned the value of the news industry as a means to disseminate social and political messages.

In 1883, Murray married Laura Hamilton. By the following year, he passed a civil service examination, moved to Alexandria, Virginia, and started his tenure as a clerk for the War Department. At this point in his life, Murray devoted himself to civil rights activism. According to journals, Murray converted his Alexandria residence into a “safe house” where he provided refuge for fugitives from Southern lynchings (Hills). He also joined forces with prominent civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois to combat Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist ideology. In 1905, he and Du Bois founded the Niagara Movement in New York, which became the United States’s first civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Murray edited the organization’s journal, the Horizon: A Journal of the Color Line.

As early as 1904, he started an independent study called “Black Folk in Art,” which he delivered as a series of lectures at the Chautauqua National Religious Training School (now North Carolina Central University). The lectures had an intense focus on the representation of African-American people in Western art. He scrutinized painters such as John Trumbull (1756-1843), Emanuel Leutze (1816-1868), Winslow Homer (1836-1910), William Sidney Mount (1807-1868), and sculptors such as Augustus Saint Gaudens (1848-1907) during parts of the lecture series for their portrayal of African-American art subjects.

In 1916, Murray published Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation, the first book on the treatment of African-American art history. Murray’s primary motivation for publishing the book came in response to a volume issued by the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Hills). The volume, The Negro’s Progress in Fifty Years, by W.E.B. Dubois honored the Jubilee Year of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Disappointed in the volume’s coverage of African-American contributions to the field of art history in “The Negro in Literature and Art,” Murray pursued a more robust study of the subject that he estimated would span several monographs (Hills). Once he published Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation, he traveled around the United States lecturing to small churches and community gatherings, both white and African-American audiences, about what he had found in his research.

Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation asks pointed questions to the reader, emphasizing the cultural significance of the artistic representations of African-Americans and encouraging the reader to critically reflect on imagery and the corresponding impressions it makes on the viewer (Powell). Throughout the book, Murray critiqued a wide range of sculptures with African-American art subjects and challenged the writings of several early American art scholars, including Henry Theodore Tuckerman, James Jackson Jarves, Lorado Taft, and Charles H. Caffin. An overarching theme of the book is “sculpture’s capacity to communicate the social consciousness and political status of its black subjects” through the specific form the piece takes (Powell). The book was the first example in art history of a specific focus on racial representation (Hills). It was “surprisingly ahead of its time and even visionary in terms of articulating what decades later would be… critical analyses of the probative function and social impact of art” (Powell). The art historian Albert Boime referred to Murray’s book as “‘one of the most remarkable and idiosyncratic texts of art criticism in the modern epoch’” and described him as a progressive “‘Foucauldian critical theorist’” (Powell).

Murray refused to separate art and the socio-political context in which it was created (Smalls). Whereas other art historians of the time placed great emphasis on a piece’s adherence to formal conventions, Murray evaluated the “interpretive malleability” of the work (Smalls). The best application of this “interpretive malleability” concept came in his critique of Thomas Ball’s (1819-1911) statue Emancipation Group. He argued the monument ignored the role that African-Americans played in their own emancipation and glorified the concept of white benevolence and bestowal (Smalls). Murray’s discontent with Ball’s statue was yet another example of his continuous artistic battle with the idea of the representation African-American art subjects.

Murray was not only concerned with what was present in the depictions of African-Americans, but strongly believed “what is elided, covered up, dismissed, or degraded is quite often conscious and insidious disparagement in the service of race and class hegemony” (Hills). His critique of demeaning representations and celebration of accurate depictions of the African-American experience were his contributions to the field of African-American art history (Hills). His willingness to “write an art history that was directed to black audiences” and publication of Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation has earned him the status of “a pioneering American art scholar – the first African-American to hold this distinction” (Powell). Murray’s legacy is also shaped by what he did as a civil rights activist, both his work in the Niagara Movement and the brave actions he took to protect African-Americans from lynchings (Hackley-Lambert).


Selected Bibliography

  • Murray, Freeman Henry Morris. Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation. Washington, D.C.: Murray Brothers, 1916.

    Sources

    • Hackley-Lambert, Anita. F. H.M. Murray: First Biography of a Forgotten Pioneer for Civil Justice. Fort Washington, MD: HLE Pub., 1997;
    • Jones, Angela. African American Civil Rights: Early Activism and the Niagara Movement. Westport: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2011;
    • Powell, Richard. “Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture by Freeman Henry Morris Murray” (Book Review) The Art Bulletin 2013, vol. 95, no. 4, pp. 646-649;
    • Hills, Patricia. “‘History Must Restore What Slavery Took Away.’” in Ed. Chambers, Eddie. The Routledge Companion to African American Art History. New York, NY : Routledge, 2020;
    • Smalls, James. “Freeman Murray and the Art of Social Justice.” in Parfait, Claire and Le Dantec-Lowry, Hélène and Bourhis-Mariotti, Claire, eds. Writing history from the margins : African Americans and the Quest for Freedom. New York, NY : Routledge, 2017;
    • Ater, Renée, “Slavery and Its Memory in Public Monuments.” American Art Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 2010), pp. 20-23 https://www-journals-uchicago-edu.proxy.lib.duke.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/652738
    • Powell, Richard J. Black Art: A Cultural History. London: Thames & Hudson, Ltd., 2002.


    Contributors: Paul Kamer


Citation

Paul Kamer. "Murray, Freeman Henry Morris." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/murrayf/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

African-American author, lecturer, and civil rights activist; first author to publish a book on African-American art. Freeman Henry Morris Murray was born in 1859 in Cleveland, Ohio to John M. Murray (d. 1862), a tailor, and Martha [Mary] Bentley (Mu

Romanini, Angiola Maria

Full Name: Romanini, Angiola Maria

Gender: female

Date Born: 26 February 1926

Date Died: 18 January 2002

Place Born: Legnano, Milan, Lombardy, Italy

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style) and Medieval (European)

Institution(s): Sapienza University of Rome


Overview

Professor of art history; directed the publications of the Enciclopedia Italiana, founder and director of the magazine Arte Medievale. Romanini was born in Legnano and trained at the University of Pavia under Eduardo Yetwart Arslan (1899-1968). She then continued her studies at the Scuola di specializzazione di Roma under  Geza De Francovich and Guilo Carlo Argan where she focused on late medieval art and architecture. She wrote extensively on the humanistic culture of northern Italy including works on Donatello, Mategna, and Bramante. She contributed to important works on Lombard architecture throughout the 13th to 15th century and also Romanques art during the Veronese era. She argued that the formation of the Cistercians and their development of the fulcrum marked a transition between the Romanesque and Gothic in Lombardy. Her monograph on Arnolfo di Cambio marked a transition in the scholars focus from individual artists to scientific research. In 1972, she transferred to the University of Rome as the Chair of the Medieval Art History department. She organized Settimane di Storia dell’arte medievale, a weekly international conference that has been fundamental for international bibliography. Many of these conferences lead to publications.  She was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei beginning in 1987, the Pontificia Accademia di Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte, and the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften of Vienna. The first of her twelve publications for the l’Enciclopedia dell’arte medievale was released in 1991. These monumental volumes, noted for their scholarly approach, were promoted by the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana.

In addition to her work in academia, she promoted the discipline of art history through her organization of international conventions which lead to the formation of Storia dell’arte medioevale in Italia, a university textbook. Her commitment to the field of art history and work on the prestigious magazine Arte medievale contributed to a revival of medieval studies in Italy.

 


Selected Bibliography

  • [Complete bibliography]: https://biblio.saras.uniroma1.it/sites/default/files/Bibliografia%20ROMANINI.pdf
  • L’architettura Gotica in Lombardia. Milan: Casa Editrice Ceschina, 1964;
  • Arnolfo di Cambio e lo “Stil Novo” del gotico italiano. Florence: Sansoni, 1980;
  • ”Nuovi dati sulla statua bronzea di San Pietro in Vaticano”. Arte medievale Ser. 2, vol. 4, p. 1-50, 1900;
  • directed, Enciclopedia dell’arte medievale. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1991;
  • L’arte medievale in Italia. Milan: Sansoni, 1996;

Sources

  • Cadei, Antonio. 1994. “Romanini, Angiola Maria in ‘Enciclopedia Italiana.’” Treccani. 1994. https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/angiola-maria-romanini_%28Enciclopedia-Italiana%29/;
  • De Angelis, Elettra. “Fondo Romanini, Biblioteca Dipartimento di Storia Antropologia Religioni Arte Spettacolo.” Sapienza Universita di Roma. Accessed April 5, 2021. https://biblio.saras.uniroma1.it/node/7110;
  • Pilo, Giuseppe Maria. “Angiola Maria Romanini: [in memoriam].”  Arte documento, 16 (2002): 257–258;
  • Pistilli, Pio Francesco. “L’avvento Del Medioevo. Angiola Maria Romanini e La Rivista ‘Storia Dell’arte’ (1976-1983). (Italian).” Storia Dell’Arte (2019): 151/152 (1/2): 111–120;
  • Righetti, Marina. “Ricordo Di Angiola Maria Romanini.” Obituary, no. 101 (January 2002): 6;



Contributors: Denise Shkurovich


Citation

Denise Shkurovich. "Romanini, Angiola Maria." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/romaninia/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Professor of art history; directed the publications of the Enciclopedia Italiana, founder and director of the magazine Arte Medievale. Romanini was born in Legnano and trained at the University of Pavia under Eduardo Yetwart Arsl

Greene, Carroll

Image Credit: Savannah Now

Full Name: Greene, Carroll Theodore Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 17 June 1931

Date Died: 30 May 2007

Place Born: Washington, DC, USA

Place Died: Savannah, Chatham, GA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): African American, American (North American), Modern (style or period), nineteenth century (dates CE), and twentieth century (dates CE)

Career(s): art critics, curators, and publishers

Institution(s): The Smithsonian Institute


Overview

Smithsonian curator of 19th & 20th century African American Art; Romare Bearden scholar. Carroll Greene was born in 1931 in Washington D.C., and studied at Columbia University and New York University, earning degrees in History and English. Greene’s combining of his passions for African American history and art began in the 1960s while teaching English at NYU and co-curating collections on campus as a hobby. In 1967, he co-curated The Evolution of Afro-American Artists: 1800-1959 with prominent African-American artist Romare Bearden at the College of the City University of New York. The following year, he began a fellowship in Museum Studies at the Smithsonian and published 1969, Twelve Afro-American Artists, a catalog highlighting the first major exhibition of black artists in a New York midtown commercial gallery. In 1970, Greene was hired by the Museum of Modern Art as a consultant to its director, John Hightower (1933-2013). Greene also maintained his close relationship with Bearden, publishing The Prevalence of Ritual, an essay on the themes of childhood memories and urban life present in Bearden’s 1971 exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Greene privately purchased artifacts to save them from destruction and neglect. Furthermore, he advised curators throughout the U.S. on how to form and expand their collections of African American art. In the mid- to late-1980’s, Greene worked as a writer and editor of American Visions, a popular scholarly publication on African American art published by the American Visions Foundation and supported in part by the Smithsonian Institution. Greene’s work appeared in the inaugural edition of this magazine. In 1984, he moved to Savannah. Greene published American Visions, Afro-American Art, 1986, an overview of all African American art museums at the time. Greene used his collection of works to form the basis of the Acadia Collection, a collection of African American artifacts, including arts and charts, furniture, pottery, musical instruments, quilts and tools, in 1989. The mission statement of this collection was “to collect, research, preserve and exhibit selected artifacts created by African Americans, especially those inspired by or related to historic traditions.” Throughout the 1990s, Greene curated several shows at the Beach Institute in Savannah, including the Ulysses Davis Folk Art Collection, which received the W.W. Law Legacy Award.  He conducted oral history interviews with noted African-American artists, including Jacob Lawrence.  Greene was a guest curator at the Beach for “Look Back, Ponder, and Move On: Glimpses of the African-American Experience in Savannah 1750-1900.” He died in 2007 at age 75 at his home in Greene Square, Savannah.

Carroll Greene was an ardent advocate for increased African art presence throughout his time in D.C. and Savannah. During his 1968 fellowship at the Smithsonian, Greene learned that the institute had inadequate research on African American culture to support his work, and had since sought to increase the knowledge base of African American art and culture. He insisted on his collections like the Arcadia being placed in universities, museums, and other research-oriented settings. In his catalogue for 1969: Twelve Afro-American Artists, Greene criticized the separation of African artists from mainstream culture, citing a fundamental lack of the equality of opportunity that America advertises. His strong opinions on what constituted African American culture preserving art extended to the curation of the Arcadia collection. For instance, Greene avoided collecting many slave-made objects because he believed such objects reflected what the slave-owning class wanted to impose on black individuals, rather than their personal creativity and culture. One of the U.S.’s biggest collectors of African American art, Dr. Walter O. Evans (b. 1943), said Greene “was extremely important. He was a giant in the field, a leading proponent of African-American art long before it was a fashionable thing to do.”  Overall, Greene’s goals were to highlight an aesthetic rooted in the will of African Americans maintaining their cultural values in the midst of economic and social oppression.


Selected Bibliography

  • 1969, Twelve Afro-American Artists. NAACP Special Contribution Fund, 1969;
  • American Visions: Afro-American Art, 1986. Visions Foundation, 1987;
  • Romare Bearden: the Prevalence of Ritual. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971;
  • The Evolution of Afro-American Artists: 1800-1950. New York:  City University of New York, 1967;

Sources

  • [Obituaries:] “Carroll Greene.”Savannah Morning News. June 5, 2007. https://www.legacy.com/amp/obituaries/savannah/88688193;
  • Wyatt, Doug. “African-American Art Expert Carroll Greene Dies.” Savannah Morning News, May 31, 2007. https://www.savannahnow.com/article/20070531/NEWS/305319858;
  • [dissertation:] Landsmark, Theodore C. “Haunting echoes”: Histories and exhibition strategies for collecting nineteenth-century african-american crafts. Boston University, 1999;

Archives


Contributors: Zahra Hassan


Citation

Zahra Hassan. "Greene, Carroll." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/greenec/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Smithsonian curator of 19th & 20th century African American Art; Romare Bearden scholar. Carroll Greene was born in 1931 in Washington D.C., and studied at Columbia University and New York University, earning degrees in History and English. Greene

Schaefer, Karl

Full Name: Schaefer, Karl

Other Names:

  • Karl Schäfer

Gender: male

Date Born: 03 March 1870

Date Died: 16 December 1942

Place Born: Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Place Died: Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany


Overview

Art historian and controversial museum director in Lübeck and Cologne.  Dismissed from the Kunstgewerbe-Museum, Cologne for having an affair a museum curator, Elizabeth Moses, who was later exonerated. He was replaced in Cologne by by Karl With.






Citation

"Schaefer, Karl." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/schaeferk/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Art historian and controversial museum director in Lübeck and Cologne.  Dismissed from the Kunstgewerbe-Museum, Cologne for having an affair a museum curator, Elizabeth Moses, who was later exonerated. He was replaced in Co

Wilson–Bareau, Juliet

Full Name: Wilson–Bareau, Juliet

Other Names:

  • Juliet Wilson

Gender: female

Date Born: 1935

Subject Area(s): eighteenth century (dates CE), painting (visual works), and Spanish (culture or style)


Overview

British art historian, curator, and independent scholar, Goya and Manet specialist. Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford.1994-1995.  Co-authored Goya monography with Pierre Gassier.






Citation

"Wilson–Bareau, Juliet." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/wilsonbareauj/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

British art historian, curator, and independent scholar, Goya and Manet specialist. Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford.1994-1995.  Co-authored Goya monography with Pierre Gassier.

Baticle, Jeannine

Full Name: Jeannine Baticle

Gender: female

Date Born: 1920

Date Died: 2014

Subject Area(s): eighteenth century (dates CE), painting (visual works), and Spanish (culture or style)


Overview

Specialist in Spanish painting;;curator of painting at Louvre Museum; co-authored the Propyläen Kunstgeschichte volume on eighteenth-century art with Harald Keller.






Citation

"Baticle, Jeannine." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/baticlej/.


More Resources

Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Specialist in Spanish painting;;curator of painting at Louvre Museum; co-authored the Propyläen Kunstgeschichte volume on eighteenth-century art with Harald Keller.