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Knowing where to start isn't always easy, especially when you're dealing with an unfamiliar subject. Sometimes the best place to start is a subject specific dictionary or encyclopedia. Below is a selected list of online reference resources.
Available Online
- Oxford Bibliographies This link opens in a new windowLiterary guide to significant sources on a variety of subjects. Works as an annotated bibliography and a high-level encyclopedia.
- Oxford Research Encyclopedias This link opens in a new windowLong-form overview articles written, peer-reviewed, and edited by leading scholars. Both foundational and cutting-edge topics are covered in order to develop, over time, an anchoring knowledge base for major areas of research.
Access to selected content only. Some articles may not be available. - Oxford Art Online This link opens in a new window
Oxford’s art reference works: Grove Art Online, the Benezit Dictionary of Artists, the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, The Oxford Companion to Western Art, and The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms.
- American National Biography Online This link opens in a new windowBiographical essays profiling people from all periods of American history and culture. Bibliographic information, some illustrations, and online resources are included.
- Britannica This link opens in a new windowAuthoritative references, including articles from the print Encyclopædia Britannica, articles specially written for Britannica Online, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the Britannica Book of the Year, etc.
The Black Arts Movement
Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. In this comprehensive analysis, James Smethurst examines the formation of the Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply influenced the production and reception of literature and art in the United States through its negotiations of the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement.
Now Dig This! : art & Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980
This comprehensive, lavishly illustrated catalog offers the first in-depth survey of the incredibly vital but often overlooked legacy of Los Angeles's African American artists, featuring many never-before-seen works, some of which were previously considered lost.
South of Pico: African American artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s
In South of Pico Kellie Jones explores how the artists in Los Angeles's black communities during the 1960s and 1970s created a vibrant, productive, and engaged activist arts scene in the face of structural racism. Emphasizing the importance of African American migration, as well as L.A.'s housing and employment politics, Jones shows how the work of black Angeleno artists such as Betye Saar, Charles White, Noah Purifoy, and Senga Nengudi spoke to the dislocation of migration, L.A.'s urban renewal, and restrictions on black mobility.
Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement
With a heightened consciousness of black agency and autonomy—along with the radical politics of the civil rights movement, the Black Muslims, and the Black Panthers—the Black Arts Movement (BAM) represented a collective effort to defy the status quo of American life and culture. In Encyclopedia of the Blacks Arts Movement, Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis have collected essays on the key figures of the movement, including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Neal, Sun Ra, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, and Archie Shepp.
With fists raised : radical art, contemporary activism, and the iconoclasm of the Black Arts Movement
This collection reconsiders the Black Aesthetic and the revolutionary art of the Black Arts movement (BAM), forging connections between the recent past and contemporary social justice activism. Focusing on black literary and visual art of the Black Arts Movement, this collection highlights artists whose work diverged from narrow definitions of the Black Aesthetic and black nationalism.
Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the cultural politics of the 1960s
This project explores the history of the Black Arts Movement through the experience of activist and organizer, Hoyt W. Fuller (1923-1981). An innovative study that approaches the movement from a historical perspective, Building the Black Arts Movement is a much-needed reassessment of the trajectory of African American culture over two explosive decades.
The Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Party in American Visual Culture
This book examines a range of visual expressions of Black Power across American art and popular culture from 1965 through 1972. It begins with case studies of artist groups, including Spiral, OBAC and AfriCOBRA, who began questioning Western aesthetic traditions and created work that honored leaders, affirmed African American culture, and embraced an African lineage. Also showcased is an Oakland Museum exhibition of 1968 called "New Perspectives in Black Art," as a way to consider if Black Panther Party activities in the neighborhood might have impacted local artists' work.
The Soul of a Nation Reader: writings by and about Black American artists, 1960-1980
In newspapers, magazines, exhibition catalogues, and panel discussions, an intense debate arose about how Black artists should or should not engage with politics, what audiences they should address and inspire, where they should exhibit, how their work should be curated, and even whether such a category as "Black art," or the "Black aesthetic," existed in the first place. This anthology collects over 200 texts from the artists, critics, curators and others who sought to shape and define the art of their time.
Black American Portraits
A celebratory visual chronicle of the many ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves. This selection of approximately 140 works from LACMA's permanent collection highlights emancipation, scenes from the Harlem Renaissance, portraits from the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, multiculturalism of the 1990s and the spirit of Black Lives Matter.
Black Post-Blackness
Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics. She uncovers the circle of black post-blackness that pivots on the power of anticipation, abstraction, mixed media, satire, public interiority, and the fantastic.
