NEW YORK.-The Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries at Parsons School of Design presents Creating Their Own Image, an exhibition that offers a stirring, honest, and complex re-examination of the image of the black female as conveyed by contemporary African-American women artists including Elizabeth Catlett, Emma Amos, Faith Ringgold, Renée Cox, Chakaia Booker, Pamela Jennings, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems, among others. Roughly 50 paintings, sculpture, photography, and mixed-media work by 25 artists, including nine selections from the New School University art collection, will be on view through February 1.

Curated by Lisa E. Farrington, Ph.D, a senior faculty member in Parsons’ Critical Studies department, the exhibition will focus on the second half of the twentieth century to the present, and will be divided into six historical sections beginning with the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, continuing on with Black Feminist Art, Abstraction, and Conceptual Art movements to arrive at Postmodernism, and later, “Post-black” or Afrofuturist Art.

A tremendous vitality and plurality marks each era, as styles range from figurative and didactic to nonrepresentational and conceptual. Faith Ringgold’s feminist, Op Art political poster, Woman Freedom Now, 1971; Renée Cox’s silver gelatin print, Hot-en-tot, 1994; and Pamela Jennings’s Solitaire: Dream Journal, 1996, an interactive computerized exploration of class and personal oppression, are among the many powerful forms of expression on view that have served to counteract racial and gender stereotyping over the last fifty years. By placing these selections in a greater context, Dr. Farrington hopes to offer viewers a substantive, thought-provoking commentary on the prevailing conditions which have influenced ideas about race and cultural identity. For Farrington, “the history of black women’s monumental struggles against racism and sexism in order to become artists is no less worthy of veneration and celebration than is their art.”

Many of the artists in the exhibition have been critically recognized for over a quarter of a century, yet their place in art history has received little academic attention. While conducting course preparation for a historical survey of black women artists at Parsons in the late 1990s, the lack of sufficient source material available prompted Dr. Farrington to write her own textbook on the subject. Now completed, her findings will be published by Oxford University Press this January.

Both the textbook and the accompanying exhibition were conceived to encourage further scholarship concerning the role of black women in contemporary art. In support of this effort, exhibition-related artist talks, lectures, panel discussions, and book signings will also take place throughout the run of the show as listed below.

Lisa Farrington is an author, art historian, and curator. She received her B.F.A. from Howard University, her M.A. in Art History from American University, and her Ph.D. in Art History from the Graduate School & University Center. Dr. Farrington has served on the staffs of the National Gallery of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, and Marlborough Gallery. She has taught art and design history at Parsons over the last 10 years, and has curated exhibitions on Haitian art and women’s art for the City University of New York, on fine art quilts for the U.S. State Department, and on African-American art for Parsons. In addition to writing numerous books and articles on African-American art and women’s art, Dr. Farrington has also recently completed a monograph on the artist Faith Ringgold (Pomegranate 2004).

Creating Their Own Image (Oxford University Press 2005) marks the first comprehensive history of African-American women artists, from slavery to the present day. Using an analysis of stereotypes of Africans and African-Americans in western art and culture as a springboard, Lisa Farrington richly details hundreds of important works to craft a portrait of artistic creativity unprecedented in its scope and ambition. Farrington expertly guides the reader through the fertile period of the Harlem Renaissance, the "New Negro Movement," and the tumultuous, explosive years of the Civil Rights Movement. Drawing on revealing interviews with numerous contemporary artists, including Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, Nanette Carter, Camille Billops, Xenobia Bailey, Creating Their Own Image also probes more recent stylistic developments, such as Abstraction, Conceptualism, and Post-modernism. 368 pages, 150 color illus.