Archibald Motley Jr. and Racial Reinvention

"In this engaging and well-researched book, Phoebe Wolfskill enlists the career of early twentieth-century Chicago painter Archibald Motley as a paradigm for considering the difficulties facing African American artists who have lived with cultural stereotypes their whole lives. Through a judicious balancing of insights derived from the careful analysis of individual paintings with a wide range of cultural, artistic, social, and theoretical references, Wolfskill honors the complex underpinnings of Motley’s works and explains the contradictions within them. As a whole, the book both provides an internal coherence to Motley’s career and successfully demonstrates his relation to other American artists of the period who similarly concerned themselves with questions of identity and representation during the interwar decades."--Mary Ann Calo, author of Distinction and Denial: Race, Nation, and the Critical Construction of the African American Artist, 1920-1940

"A satisfyingly inquisitive foray into the complications of an African American artist grappling with his own uneasy relationship to matters of race, gender, class, culture, and modernism. Wolfskill provides a welcomed critical probing and less romanticized account of the Harlem Renaissance."--James Smalls, author of Homosexuality in Art

"In Archibald Motley Jr. and Racial Reinvention: The Old Negro in New Negro Art, Wolfskill has composed a well-researched, insightful, and nuanced account that forces a reconceptualization of an artist and an era." --CAA.Reviews