The Art of Remembering: Essays on African American Art and History is a collection of essays written by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw that address African American artists working in the United States from the end of the eighteenth century to today. Many of the essays are revised and expanded from previously published works and taken together demonstrate both the breadth and focus of Shaw’s scholarly and curatorial work over a twenty-year period: to challenge the discipline of art history for its exclusions, to grapple with the imperatives of history and representation in Black aesthetic practices, and to call for critical engagement with the longer history of art at a time when interest and visibility of contemporary Black artists are ascendant. As such, the collection evinces the vibrancy and struggle of timely art historical writing, even if the results often seem contradictory.

Throughout the collection, Shaw grapples with how art and art history might intervene in the ways racialization in the United States distorts the historical record and our social imaginations. Shaw frames her task to write art history, following Christina Sharpe, “in the wake” of the dehumanization of Black people under chattel slavery (In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, 2016). However, without fully engaging the polarizing disciplinary debates, Shaw rejects the Afropessimist premise that “living in Blackness becomes akin to a perpetual cycle of slavery” (5). Rather, Shaw offers “rememory” as a compelling alternative conception of history as potentially reparative. Rememory, a narrative strategy developed by Toni Morrison in her 1987 novel Beloved, is the simultaneous remembering and disremembering necessary for formerly enslaved persons to tell their stories without reliving their traumas. It proves to be a capacious framework for Shaw, allowing her to address an incomplete historical record and look anew at historical works while acknowledging how absences necessitate more “speculative and open-ended” narratives (9). In so doing, Shaw returns history to the task of Black subject-creation as it was for earlier cultural workers such as historian Arthur Schomburg, who wrote in 1925 that “history must restore what slavery took away” (“Negro Digs Up His Past,” The New Negro, reprinted 1992, 237).

Interweaving her own biography, she frames her project as a way to address the lack of African American artists in the art historical canon—a lack she felt keenly during her own education. Yet she eschews revisionism, instead suggesting that African American artists who do not conform to the standard canons and art historical narratives might disrupt and reinvigorate art history more broadly as a discipline. She refers to this as “embracing apocrypha”—that is, the stories that lack historical authority, may always be incomplete, or contradict what is considered acceptable—these apocryphal stories “haunt the margins” of the field (6). Ultimately, she seeks to assert African American art history “as vitally integral to a history of both diasporic African art and especially American art” (14).

The essays are organized chronologically in three parts. In the first part, “Past is Prelude,” Shaw focuses on portraiture to explore how Black subjecthood and freedom were imagined in relation to chattel slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She revisits portraits of formerly enslaved poet Phyllis Wheatley and silhouettist Moses Williams, as well as family and marriage portraits of free Black people in Philadelphia, elucidating their correspondences with contemporaneous representational conventions and argues that these early portraits of Black people were acts of self-creation, bolstering the sitters’ statuses as “fully socialized subjects” (63). In the final essay in the section, “Landscapes of Labor,” Shaw considers how Edward Mitchell Bannister’s painting Workers in the Fields (1890) critically recalls the history of Maryland’s slave plantations and demonstrates Bannister’s struggle to reconcile the history of chattel slavery with the aesthetic protocols of pastoral landscape painting. However, her careful attention to formal analysis and the artist’s biography does not ultimately support her inference that Bannister’s landscape is a racial allegory. Shaw acknowledges that some essays are “more information driven than thesis driven,” but here her commitment to detailing the historical conditions that shaped the lives of African American artists threatens to displace the art at hand (14).

Shaw introduces part II, “Modern Blackness,” intending to reassess Black artistic practice in the twentieth century. In shorter essays on Sargent Johnson’s innovative take on Black banjo players in Singing Saints (1940), Norman Lewis’s realist depiction of a Dan mask in the Museum of Modern Art, and the correspondences among the political radicalism and class consciousness of the Mexican muralists and African American artists in the early decades of the twentieth century, Shaw locates Black modernist artists in international networks and transcultural aesthetic dialogues. In one of the stronger essays in the section, Shaw decries the limited critical interpretation of Chase-Riboud’s minimalist Malcolm X sculptures that too often foreclose understanding of how her sculptures can commemorate Black life in phenomenological rather than representational modes. Her approach to Chase-Riboud is in some ways in marked contrast to two biographical essays on artists May Howard Jackson and Richard Yarde that bookend the section. In the first essay, Shaw focuses primarily on how the circumstances of Jackson’s life as a Black woman at the turn of the twentieth century shaped her artistic practice and limited her opportunities. Similarly, she presents a poignant portrait of Richard Yarde’s life and career, shaped by the historical exigencies of the racial and gender politics in the mid-twentieth century. Again, the longer biographical explication comes at the expense of a closer examination of Yarde’s early works based on historical photographs. However, her sensitive exploration of his later works, made at the end of his life while in failing health, such as Mojo Hand (1995–96) which draws on Afro-diasporic spiritual and cosmological symbols, demonstrates that turning toward history can be a spiritual as well as factual journey. Missing from her essay on Yarde, however, are the more complex investigations into history, aesthetics, and representation that she brings to bear in her analysis of Chase-Riboud. While the limitations of biography-as-method come to the fore here, Shaw’s explication of the complex factors that informed these artists’ aesthetic experiments throughout the twentieth century bolsters her broader argument that Black artistic modernism was a transcultural rather than essentialized production.

In the final section, “Beginning Again,” Shaw addresses contemporary artists and projects who share her interest in the ongoing resonances and complexities of history. Several essays consider the landscape as an important site of memory where past and present are brought into tension. In “Remembering the Remnants,” Shaw puts together artistic responses to Hurricane Katrina that both excavate historical and media narratives that traffic in tropes of Black trauma and foreground Black residents who refuse to be silent in the face of their historic abandonment following the storm. In one of the more theoretically cogent essays in the book, “The Wandering Gaze of Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louisiana Project,” Shaw utilizes the sublime and the psychoanalytic theory of the gaze to argue that Weems positions herself in relation to the spaces and architecture of former slave plantations to allow the viewer to see these places, their pasts, and our inheritances from them differently. Similar themes emerge in her analysis of performances by Wando Raimundi-Ortiz and Sheldon Scott in “No Man Is an Island” in which they address the complex positionality of the people of African descent in the so-called New World as the simultaneous receivers and progenitors of Afrodiasporic cultures and histories.

Two essays in the final section stand out as Shaw’s main intervention in disciplinary debates over race and representation: “Ten Years of 30 Americans” and “What Deana Lawson Wants.” Shaw argues that 30 Americans, a traveling exhibition of contemporary Black artists from the Rubell Family Collection, demonstrates the practical ways that exhibitions can redress the exclusion of Black artists from mainstream institutions. Perhaps most important for Shaw, when circulated more widely, work by Black artists—such as the Obama portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald—can contribute to "positive identity formation” for African American audiences, especially young children (227). However, celebration turns to concern when Shaw discusses the work of photographer Deana Lawson. In stark contrast, Lawson’s photographs prompt Shaw to call for more critical engagement with work by contemporary Black artists who are readily incorporated into private collections and institutions where there are “more Black people on the walls than in the halls” (244). Shaw is rightly weary of photography’s historical role in racialization and exploitation, and questions whether Lawson’s subjects have the agency, dignity, and self-possession that critics often attribute to them and is crucial to the criticality of self-reflexive, post-documentary realism. It is difficult not to hear echoes of the time-worn debates over positive and negative representations of Black people in Shaw’s argument. Nevertheless, her essay raises important questions about the limits of self-reflexive critique at the fraught intersection of race, photography, and America’s ever-present appetite for spectacular Black culture that will certainly engage readers whether they agree with her polemic or not.

As a whole, The Art of Remembering touches on some of the most important debates in the field of African American art history. Those looking for more theoretical engagements with historiography will be disappointed, however, Shaw convincingly argues that there is still an urgent need to reassess the past and trace its throughlines to today.