Rebecca Giordano

My project explores how US Black muralists adapted cultural anthropology to articulate particular racial identities in and beyond the nation-state during the late Jim Crow era. Considering artists Charles White, Hale Woodruff, and Thelma Johnson Streat, I draw out the impact of anthropology’s research practices and lively academic debates about racial and cultural identity on US Black muralism of the 1940s. Influenced by the Mexican Muralists’ investment in anthropology, these muralists deployed anthropological tools such as ethnography, theories of diaspora, and cultural baselines; adopted anthropological methods such as Katherine Dunham’s dance anthropology; and consistently used anthropological texts as references. Cultural anthropology provided these artists a way to combat biological essentialist approaches to race while also highlighting legacies of Black culture as the basis of group identity. This project addresses a lacuna in social art histories of US Black art between the concept of the New Negro of the 1920s and the Civil Rights Movements and Pan Africanism of the 1960s. Focusing on these artists reveals an underappreciated dimension of Mexican muralism’s influence on American art and provides a new take on the rhetoric of US cultural nationalism and belonging.