John W. Ott

Spanning the Scottsboro Boys trial to Brown v. Board of Education, this project investigates black and white artists’ efforts to achieve racial integration in their imagery as well as within art institutions. Chapters address images of racial solidarity produced in New Deal art programs, Jacob Lawrence’s paintings of the armed forces’ desegregation, and black modernists’ efforts to claim abstraction as an integrationist visual style. The grant will support research in Washington, DC at the Archives of American Art, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.