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Art Crow / Jim Crow

Art Crow / Jim Crow

Artist: Howardena Doreen Pindell (American, born 1943)
Date: 1988
Dimensions:
box: 9 1/8 x 8 1/4 x 1 1/4 in. (231 x 209 x 31mm)
book: 7 1/4 x 7 1/16 in. (184 x 180mm)
page: 7 3/16 x 7 3/16 in. (183 x 183mm)
sheet: 7 3/16 x 111 15/16 in. (183 x 2844mm)
Medium: Reproductions: photo-etchings Text: letterpress in white (typefaces: Foundry and Linotype Helvetica) Paper: black wove Canson Mi-Teintes paper
Classification: Books
Credit Line: Mrs. George W. Stevens Fund
Object number: 1990.8
Label Text:Howardena Doreen Pindell
American, born 1943

Art Crow/Jim Crow
Book with photo-etchings and letterpress, 1988
Mrs. George W. Stevens Fund, 1990.8

The words “Art Crow” and “Jim Crow” repeat throughout the pages of this accordion-fold book, along with facsimiles of photographs taken in the Deep South in the days of officially mandated segregation. Photography of blatant racial exclusion was often met with anger at the time. An official from Lane College, Jackson, Tennessee, for example, was arrested and fined for photographing a Coca-Cola machine with cold drinks for “white customers only!”

Howardena Pindell found the photographs reproduced in this book in pictorial histories of the South. The artist draws a parallel between segregation and the closed art dealer/gallery system in New York by including a listing of 35 New York galleries that represented only white artists in 1987–88.

The profits from the sale of this book were donated to assist the victims of racially motivated crimes.

Not on view
In Collection(s)