PRINCETON, N.J.-A selection of recent gifts and purchases will be presented in the exhibition Between Image and Concept: Recent Acquisitions in African-American Art, on view at the Princeton University Art Museum through February 26, 2006. Over the last five years, the museum has significantly increased the size of its African-American collection, adding more than thirty works by painters, sculptors, printmakers, photographers, and installation artists ranging from Henry Ossawa Tanner and Charles White to Martin Puryear and Ellen Gallagher—whose major piece Blubber, acquired in 2002, is on permanent view in the Peter B. Lewis Gallery.

“Although the exhibition features numerous images of African-Americans—as celebrated as Martin Luther King Jr., depicted in Cavin Jones’s etching, or as anonymous as photographer Gordon Parks’s Soapbox Orator—its thrust is more broadly illustrative than specifically thematic, providing a cross section of figurative and abstract works from the past century that present the black experience from a variety of perspectives,” notes Laura M. Giles, curator of prints and drawings, who organized the exhibition. “The wide aesthetic range—from iconic simplicity to conceptual complexity—invites a diversity of responses.”

Several works from the 1940s and 1950s on view were motivated by the artists’ desire to raise the viewer’s political and social consciousness by affirming the rich and heroic history and culture of African-Americans through murals, prints, and magazine illustrations that would reach a broad audience.

Sculptor and political activist Elizabeth Catlett exemplifies this concern with In Harriet Tubman I Helped Hundreds to Freedom, part of The Negro Woman, a pioneering series of fifteen linocuts from 1946/47 in which she denounced the historic oppression of African-American women while also celebrating their achievements. Like Charles White, whose monumental lithograph of Frederick Douglass (1951) is also on view, Catlett was influenced by the social realism of Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera, as is apparent in the fiercely stylized faces and dramatic shifts in scale within the surging narrative of her small but powerful print.

More quietly expressive is John Wilson’s drawing Steel Worker (1959), executed as a cover illustration for The Reporter, a progressive magazine that championed the struggles of the American working class. Composed of shifting and highly textured planes of black pastel and white gouache, this figure resonates as a symbolic and inspirational presence.

By comparison with these earlier, politically motivated works, many of the more recent prints, drawings, photographs, and mixed-media pieces by contemporary artists involve more personal explorations of cultural, gender, and racial identity. In creating new visual vocabularies and provocative commentary on the complexity of race in American and global culture, these artists draw upon such sources as childhood memory (Glenn Ligon); literature (Martin Puryear), hairstyles (Emma Amos, Ellen Gallagher, and Gelsy Verna); artifacts (Sanford Biggers); Civil War history (Kara Walker and William Earle Williams); and Japanese color woodcuts (Iona Rozeal Brown).

Two gallery handouts accompany the exhibition, written by Jeremy Braddock, assistant professor of English, and Franklin Sirmans, visiting lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Visual Arts. The exhibition was made possible with support from the University Center for Human Values.