Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (Paperback)

by Lucy Lippard (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Attempting to examine how Native, African, Asian and Latino Americans "see themselves and others" and to analyze "the ways cross-cultural activity is reflected in the visual arts," Lippard ( Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory ) has compiled a daunting amount of information about the history, religion and aesthetic traditions of these cultures. But she includes so many artists, working in a wide variety of media, that the reader, inundated, tends to lose sight of her broader themes. In the chapter on cultural mixing, for example, Lippard segues from a discussion on tribalism and ethnocentrism to an appreciation of graffiti as a form of creative expression to a brief history of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. With this excess of data, there is probably something to pique everyone's interest, but readers will have to sift through to find it. Other topics embrace the relationship between primitivism and popular culture, the link between traditional tribal ceremonies and contemporary performance art, and issues of racism and miscegenation. The photographs provide adequate illustration, but the tangential captions distract the reader even further.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
"This is more than a book about art. I call it a round dance of cultural concepts, ideas, and meanings that prove what American art is really up to in these last days of the century. Lippard affirms that the melting pot was an idea that never happened; in this beautiful book we experience a crossroads of memory expressed in form, color, spirit, words.What a gift!" -- Joy Harjo, poet and associate professor, University of Arizona

"Lucy Lippard's intellectual devotion to the power of women and persons of color enacted and idealized within their works of visual art has brought her to level of discourse that is rich in democratic possibility and promise. I love this book, in short, and recommend it highly." -- Robert Farris Thompson, professor of African and African-American art history, Yale University -- Review

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Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Pantheon (October 31, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679729666
• ISBN-13: 978-0679729662
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #937,101 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent text required by Academy of Art University course, March 8, 2007

By	Angela D. Penland "Horsedancer" (Bay Area, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (Paperback)

Covers minority art, lots of colored pictures and artist comments/barriers in representation and discrimination. A must read for all artists.

5.0 out of 5 stars Cross Cultural Acitivities as Reflected in Visual Arts in the U.S., April 17, 2009

By	BYF "Backyard Flix" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America (Paperback)

From Introduction:

"The cross-cultural process is a recalcitrant, elusive subject, and I have tried to respect is urgency without succumbing entirely to its contradictions. This book's title, 'Mixed Blessings,' is an ambivalent play on the possibilities of an intercultural world that reflects not doubt about its value, but a certain anxiety about the forms it could take.

Although the book concentrates on art made in the United States, the 'America' of the subtitle refers to the entire hemisphere.



Each chapter is defined by a gerund because the gerund (from the Latin 'to carry on') is the grammatical form of process.

The first chapter is 'Naming.' It is about self-naming and being labeled, about coming to terms with self-representation, despite the shape-shifting identities most of us are forced to assume.

The next chapter is 'Telling,' about history, family, religion, and storytelling. It looks back to where the intercultural process began and weighs the burdens of the past on the present.

'Landing' is about roots and points of departure, about taking place and being displaced.

The fourth chapter, 'Mixing,' is about 'mestizaje,' or miscegenation -- the double-edged past of rape and colonization, the double-edged future of a new and freely mixed world.

The last chapter is 'Turning Around,' about subversion and trickery, the uses of humor and irony by which subjugated people survive. The brief postface is 'Dreaming,' proof that this subject has no conclusion.


*****

I want to make it clear from the outset that this book is not a survey of art from Native, African, Asian, and Latino American communities. It is not a book 'about' artists of color in the United States.
The art reproduced here demonstrates the ways in which cultures see themselves and others; it represents the acts of claiming turf and crossing boundaries 'now', in 1990, two years before the 500th anniversary of Columbus's accidental invasion of the Americas.

Most specifically, it deals with the ways cross-cultural activity is reflected in the visual arts, what traces are left by movements into and out of the so-called centers and margins.

This is not intended as a book about 'the Other,' but a book about the common 'anotherness.' Thinking about crossing cultures makes us look more closely at our own environments. Most of us cross cultural borders every day, usually unconsciously. Assuming a dynamic rather than a passive role for the arts in society, one of my goals is to raise these daily encounters -- at least in the realm of language and imagery -- to a conscious level."