University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations Spring 2010 Art Fronts: Visual Culture and Race Politics in the Mid-Twentieth- Century United States Erin P. Cohn University of Pennsylvania,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the African American Studies Commons, American Art and Architecture Commons, Other American Studies Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Cohn, Erin P., "Art Fronts: Visual Culture and Race Politics in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States" (2010). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 156. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/156 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/156 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Art Fronts: Visual Culture and Race Politics in the Mid-Twentieth-Century United States Abstract ART FRONTS: VISUAL CULTURE AND RACE POLITICS IN THE MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY UNITED STATES Erin Park Cohn Supervisor: Kathy Peiss Art Fronts argues that visual culture played a central and understudied role in the African American freedom struggle in the middle part of the twentieth century. In particular, it traces the political lives and cultural productions of a generation of visual artists, both black and white, who seized on the Depression-era ethos of art as a weapon to forge a particular form of visual activism that agitated for social, political, and economic equality for African Americans. Participating in the proliferation of visual culture that characterized early twentieth-century America, the activist artists of this generation took advantage of opportunities to reproduce images widely and thus convey political messages in powerful and immediate ways.