John Jay College Of Criminal Justice | The City University of New York

 

By Jennifer Nislow

Frustrated by teaching classes on African American women artists with no textbook on the subject and only a cobbled together reading list of scholarly articles and exhibition catalogs, Professor Lisa Farrington decided to take matters into her own hands. Her solution was to write Creating Their Own Image, a collection of monographs published in 2005 on the work of various black female artists who, as a group, have been overlooked by academia.

Farrington joined John Jay’s Department of Art, Music and Philosophy this year after serving as Senior Art Historian at Parsons School of Design. She is a CUNY graduate, having earned her doctorate in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Creating Their Own Image is the first comprehensive history of African American female artists. It has been hailed by reviewers as “an exemplary piece of scholarship,” “a clearly written and beautifully illustrated text,” and “the kind of book anyone interested in art, women’s art or African American art will want to own and refer to constantly.”

The book’s title is taken from the name of the course Farrington taught at Parsons on African American female artists.

“I just pieced the course together as best I could,” Farrington recalled. “There was no such thing as a book on that. The biggest problem in this country is that with scholarship on African American art, 90 percent of the artists are men. If you pick any other book called ‘women’s art,’ 90 percent of the women are white. This group of women who were black was being left out of both camps.”

Farrington had been working on the manuscript of Creating Their Own Image for a number of years by the time she showed it to Oxford University Press. It turned out to be the first art book published by the firm’s New York office. Although it is used as an academic text, the book has also proved to have extraordinarily popular appeal she said.

“I always thought these African American women were really underappreciated in art, but I didn’t know others would be as enthusiastic,” said Farrington.

While attending Howard University as an undergraduate, she fell under the spell of two dynamic scholars: David Driskell and Tritobia H. Benjamin. The courses they taught on African American art were breakthrough programs in the 1970s, said Farrington.

For the past two decades, Driskell has been curator of comedian Bill Cosby’s collection of African American art, and Benjamin is now associate dean of Howard’s College of Arts and Sciences. The two, said Farrington, “opened my eyes how important knowing art history was, not just being able to make art...the two of them turned my head. I’m so lucky I went to Howard because I would never have really learned any of this, anywhere else.”

Before returning to school to get her doctorate, Farrington worked for nearly a decade at the Museum of Modern Art as an assistant to its legendary chief curator of painting and sculpture, William Rubin. She later worked at the Marlborough Gallery, and managed a graphic design firm that specifically catered to galleries. But she no longer found the work challenging.

“I got into the CUNY Graduate Center where half a dozen scholars who I knew from MOMA were teaching,” said Farrington. “It was a great program at that time; extremely rigorous… I do believe that program ranks in the top 10 routinely in U.S. News & World Report of art programs in the country. If I thought I was smart before, I really became a scholar at the Graduate Center.”

Farrington wrote two books about African-American artist Faith Ringgold, on whom she had done her dissertation. Ringgold, who grew up in Harlem, “experienced the Civil Rights and Black Power eras firsthand,” wrote Farrington in Creating Their Own Image. Ringgold also had “an affinity,” she wrote, with the women’s movement that stemmed from her years of experience with gender bias.

Creating Their Own Image has earned Farrington the 2005 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians, and the Outstanding Contribution to Publishing citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award Committee.

Jennifer Nislow is assistant publications director at John Jay College.