Awards
2003 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
Robert Farris Thompson
Robert Farris Thompson
In its inaugural year, the CAA Award for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement for Art Writing goes to Robert Farris Thompson. This scholar’s colleagues in African art describe him as having quite literally transformed the fields of both African and African diaspora art history. He is “a brilliant thinker, tireless researcher, spellbinding lecturer, and writer of almost velvet prose” (writes one colleague) whose publications on cultures from across the African continent and on the black Atlantic diaspora have given scholars a rich body of ideas and insights with which they will continue to grapple for another hundred years. One prominent scholar remarks: “Rarely does one read his work without finding at least one major nugget that transforms one’s way of thinking.... In an era when much of the scholarship on African art was being shaped by dry and largely outmoded anthropological functionalism, he pressed for a consideration of individual artists, ideas, visual sources, and influences.”
When most historians of African art were still trying to identify “tribal styles” and to “position African art within the broad anthropological paradigms of fertility rites, initiation, chieftancy, and the ancestors,” Thompson was “discussing individual artists and their workshops” and “dealing with performance art and the philosophical nuances of harmony and balance within individual works.... In discussing the active intentionality of a male chief seated in state, for example, Thompson wrote, ‘the seated person, conscious of the privilege of his position, must show awareness of himself as an object of perception. He must teach by manner of composure. To sit well is to savor life on a plane of deliberation.’”
Thompson’s command of jazz and other African-influenced music traditions fostered a keen sensitivity to performance and the body. In his book African Art in Motion: Icon and Act in the Collection of Katherine Coryton White (1974), he “galvanized the field by pointing out that masks are ‘danced’ (not worn).” He also opened “an entire philosophical discourse on the body and its postures that was revelatory for our understanding of African sculpture…. Thompson’s insight that posture is an act expressive of the mind has become the unstated starting point for most formal analysis of African figural sculpture.” In Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1983), Painting from a Single Heart: Preliminary Remarks on Bark Cloth Designs of the Mbute Women of Haut-Zaire (1983), and other works of the 1980s, Thompson defined an entirely new aesthetic of African textiles by drawing “analogies between the juxtaposition of contrasting patterns and fields of colors and the structural organization of multiple meter in sub-Saharan African music.” Indeed, each of Thompson’s books and exhibition catalogues—Black Gods and Kings: Yoruba Art at UCLA; African Art in Motion; The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds; The Face of the Gods: Art and Altars of Africa and the African Americas; and Flash of the Spirit, to cite just a selection—has opened up entirely new fields for investigation and collectively helped to reposition the study of African art into a central field within art history.
At the same time, Thompson “has brought to this academic field a huge and highly appreciative popular audience” and has profoundly influenced scholars in many fields beyond those working just on the arts of Africa and the black Atlantic. The scholarship in postwar American art has been enriched by his important essays on figures such William Edmundson, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and David Hammons; there are also any number of visual artists who have been influenced by his work. A senior colleague in Asian studies summed it up well, describing him as a “towering figure in the history of art, whose voice for diversity and cultural openness has made him a public intellectual of resounding importance.”
Committee: Jonathan Fineberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, chair; Janet Kaplan, Moore College of Art and Design; Katy Siegel, Hunter College, City University of New York; Kenneth E. Silver, New York University; and Terrie Sultan, University of Houston.
