Abstract

In 1965, the artist Benny Andrews travelled from New York City to his hometown of Plainview, Georgia, to embark on a suite of paintings focused on his up bringing in the Jim Crow South. Entitled the Autobiographical Series, these works depict farming, domestic life, and other scenes drawn from Andrews’s experiences as the child of sharecroppers. These works are often compared to American Regionalism. Like the movement’s pioneers, Andrews highlights the quotidian power of rural America, capturing its power, relevance, and modernity through realism rather than aggrandizement. But, by asserting the power of place through the experience of the Black poor in the wake of slavery, his Autobiographical Series challenges Regionalism’s traditional emphasis on whiteness and its association with the Midwest. This paper asks: What might it mean for Andrews and the history of Regionalism to see these works within the movement’s purview? What power does the “regional” have for Black histories, whether in the era of Jim Crow (the subject of the works) or in the era of Civil Rights (when the works were made)? And how do these histories, in turn, shape how the framework of “Regionalism” is used to interpret works of American art?  By placing the paintings in dialogue with intertwined histories of American art and racial justice, this paper examines how the Autobiographical Series poses questions about the afterlives of Regionalism as both an artistic strategy and a tactic in struggles for Black freedom.

About the presenter

Maya Harakawa is an assistant professor in the department of Art History at the University of Toronto. A specialist in the art of the African Diaspora in the United States, her research lies at the intersection of Black studies and art history. She received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, CUNY in 2022 and has received fellowships from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The David C. Driskell Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Getty Research Center. Her current book project is the first art historical study of artistic production associated with Harlem in the 1960s. A second book project will focus on the work of Benny Andrews.