Bound to appear

Around 1990, Black artists in the United States began to appear regularly in the country's mainstream art institutions, gaining visibility and exhibition opportunities they had rarely had before. Civil rights gains and the growth of multicultural thinking had opened these doors, yet many of these artists turned back toward slavery as their subject. This study examines four figures, Renee Green, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, and Fred Wilson, whose large installations have shaped American art across the last twenty years. Their works broke with earlier ways of depicting enslaved people.

Huey Copeland argues that these artists borrow from minimalism, conceptual art, and institutional critique to portray the enslaved person as a contradictory figure, at once subject and object, possession and human being. The projects also address how racial meaning has operated within modern visual culture, and how Black people still negotiate those pressures today. Copeland contends that this work changes how representation is approached and how Blackness can be pictured and experienced long after slavery's formal end.

As the first in-depth treatment of these four artists' engagement with slavery, the book is aimed at readers of modern and contemporary art history.