Mapping a New Humanism in the 1940s: Thelma Johnson Streat between Dance and Painting

Arts

Abbe Schriber¹ 

[1] Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA;

关键词: performance;    primitivism;    modernism;    dance;    african american art;   

DOI  :  10.3390/arts9010007

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Thelma Johnson Streat is perhaps best known as the first African American woman to have work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. However, in the 1940s−1950s she inhabited multiple coinciding roles: painter, performer, choreographer, cultural ethnographer, and folklore collector. As part of this expansive practice, her canvases display a peculiar movement and animacy while her dances transmit the restraint of the two-dimensional figure. Drawing from black feminist theoretical redefinitions of the human, this paper argues that Streat’s exploration of muralism, African American spirituals, Native Northwest Coast cultural production, and Yaqui Mexican-Indigenous folk music established a diasporic mapping forged through the coxtension of gesture and brushstroke. This transmedial work disorients colonial cartographies which were the products of displacement, conquest, and dispossession, aiding notions of a new humanism at mid-century.

【 授权许可】

Unknown