ANNOTATING ART'S HISTORIES

The third volume in the Annotating Art’s Histories series is the forthcoming Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (inIVA and MIT Press, 2007). Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures examines pop art through a post-colonial lens that expands the study of ‘high’ and ‘low’ boundaries to include artistic practices in Third World settings that employ vernacular sources to question categories of ‘folk,’ ‘people’ and ‘nation’ in relation to issues associated with the visual realm of consumerism. Contributors include Geeta Kapur, Colin Richards, Gavin Butt, Sonia Salzstein, Martina Koppel-Yang, Tomas Ybarra-Frausto and Holly Barnet-Sanchez. Mercer’s essay, ‘Tropes of the Grotesque in the Black Avant Garde’, draws on the analytic methods of M. Bakhtin to examine the dialogical principle in African American art history, with reference to the appropriation of stereotypes, the parody of history painting and the practice of critical ‘debasement’ in works since the late 1960s and early 1970s by Betye Saar, Robert Colescott and David Hammons.

Kobena Mercer (series editor) / Projects / Contact