The Black Artist and the Colored World

Abstract

In the summer of 1959, the sculptor Nancy Elizabeth Prophet wrote Dover a curt note. Dover was preparing a volume on “American Negro Art” and had asked Prophet if she wanted her work to be included. Prophet had met Dover years earlier. “If I remember correctly,” she wrote, “you are an anthropologist, so you must certainly know that I am not a negro.” Prophet was of both African American and Native American descent. She denied, however, that her work belonged in a book on “American Negro” art. “Though I am of mixed blood,” she informed Dover, “the two races which I represent are quite different from that which you wish your publication to represent.”

In universalized particularity, there has always resided the world’s greatest and most enduring art.

—Alain Locke, “Self-Criticism”¹