Overview

In Art as Sanctuary, Michael D. Harris considers literal and metaphorical uses of sanctuary in the Black experience and African diaspora art, including locales of spiritual expression, self-renewal, and cultural celebration. Harris offers an alternative framework to the Duboisian philosophy of double consciousness, pushing the boundaries of Africana aesthetic analysis by exploring the cultural signifiers embedded consciously or unconsciously in African diaspora art. Within these works, he reveals how these cultural cues speak to the vibrancy of African American life. While acknowledging the presence of the white observer’s gaze, Harris wishes to relieve the black interior from the panoptic assumptions of that gaze and its disciplines. Art as Sanctuary provides innovative pathways to understand African American visual culture and music as autobiographies of cultural identity and experience.

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9781478015062

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Reviews

“In Art as Sanctuary, Michael Harris revisits a selection of significant works by African American artists and reframes them in ways that expands their meaning through new, globally focused contextualizations. In highlighting the importance of art as both shelter and balm he offers us imaginative refuge in today’s world.”—Kellie Jones, author of, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s

""In Art as Sanctuary, Michael Harris revisits a selection of significant works by African American artists and reframes them in ways that expands their meaning through new, globally focused contextualizations. In highlighting the importance of art as both shelter and balm he offers us imaginative refuge in today's world.""--Kellie Jones, author of, South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s

Author Information

Michael D. Harris (1948–2022) was an artist, curator, and scholar and the author of Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation. Dianne M. Stewart is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Emory University. Theophus H. Smith is Emeritus Associate Professor of Religion at Emory University. Richard J. Powell is John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History at Duke University and editor of Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist, also published by Duke University Press.

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