'The discontents of modernity:' Race, politics, and figuration in the 1960s

During the 1960s, a hegemonic moment for abstraction, a few artists mobilized a figurative idiom to engage directly such pressing social issues as civil rights, Black Power, and opposition to the war in Viet Nam. In form and content, their art thematized discontent with dominant paradigms of modern art and with social conventions in modern life. Critical reaction at the time was uneven, and their art still awaits full integration into the modernist canon. Through case studies of three prominent practitioners of this mode---Romare Bearden, Philip Guston, and Faith Ringgold---this dissertation examines the dialectical construction and expression of racial subjectivity as manifest in their art and its reception. In addition to providing a thorough account of their projects, this study raises questions about conceptions of subjectivity, ideology, and identity in the 1960s and works to answer them through readings of the artistic production and the published record that trace how social and cultural expectations influenced the construction of identity for blacks and whites. Moreover, close study of the response to Bearden's, Guston's, and Ringgold's projects of the 1960s illuminates the mechanisms at play in the formation of a canon, the social stakes of such operations, and their consequences, especially for accounts of the decade's nexus of art and politics. In that way, the case studies function as microcosms through which to explore the means by which cultural history is constructed and perpetuated.