CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

Africans in black and white: images of blacks in 16th- and 17th-century prints

Exhibition: 2 September - 3 December 2010

From the museum website, 7 September 2010

Figures of black Africans are a common but often disregarded presence in European works of art, especially in Renaissance and Baroque prints. This exhibition, which is drawn mostly from the Harvard Art Museums’ collections, shows the roles they occupy, most prominently in representations of the adoration of the magi and the baptism of the (Ethiopian) eunuch, and as bystanders in other biblical scenes. Artists include Albrecht Dürer, Hendrick Goltzius, Rembrandt, and Peter Paul Rubens. Held in conjunction with the publication by Harvard University Press of the first books in the series The image of the black in western art, edited by David Bindman, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art, University College London, and a 2010 Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University; and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University, and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute. Curated by Bindman and Anna Knaap, former Theodore Rousseau Postdoctoral Fellow, Division of European and American Art, Harvard Art Museums, and current Visiting Fellow, Jesuit Institute, Boston College. Organized by the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute.

Publications

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume I: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire
Edited by David Bindman
9 3/4 x 11 inch, 416 pp.
ISBN: 9780674052710
Cambridge (Harvard University Press) 2010

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume II: From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery”, Part 1: From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood
Edited by David Bindman
9 3/4 x 11 inch, 336 pp.
ISBN: 9780674052567
Cambridge (Harvard University Press) 2010

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume II: From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery”, Part 2: Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World
Edited by David Bindman
9 3/4 x 11 inch, 400 pp.
ISBN: 9780674052581
Cambridge (Harvard University Press) 2010

The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition, Part 1: Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque
Edited by David Bindman
9 3/4 x 11 inch
ISBN: 9780674052611
Cambridge (Harvard University Press) 2010