Embodied: Black Identities in American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery

A collaboration among a team of students from Yale University and the University of Maryland, College Park, Embodied: Black Identities in American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery features works that address, question, and complicate the paradigms that have mapped meanings onto African American bodies throughout history. The 54 works in this exhibition catalogue, which represent the Gallery’s commitment during the past decade to growing this area of its collection, include paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, prints, drawings, and photographs. The publication includes an essay on the Gallery’s history of collecting African American art, a personal reflection on the subject by renowned scholar of African American art and culture Robert E. Steele, and brief catalogue entries on each object written by the student curators. The works convey a multiplicity of ideologies, identities, and self-fashionings—and will thus prompt the reader to question the category of “African American art.”