Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Tuesday, April 10, 2018 in HART, News, Vanderbilt University, VRC.

Loïs Mailou Jones (1905–1998) began traveling to Haiti in the summer of 1954. In the 1960s the artist produced a series of collages that signaled, via text and symbols, her experiences with and protracted study of Haitian Vodou ceremonial practices.

Rebecca VanDiver’s cover article, “The Diasporic Connotations of Collage: Loïs Mailou Jones in Haiti, 1954–1964,” featured in American Art (Spring 2018), examines the artist’s aesthetic transformation over the next decade—the move from her representational paintings of the 1950s to her abstract collages of the 1960s. VanDiver, assistant professor of African American art, argues that Jones’s eventual turn to collage is connected to her acquisition of a diasporic literacy and her ongoing study of Vodou symbolism, particularly the emblematic drawings known as vèvè.

After discussing prior African American artistic engagements with Haiti, trends in modern Haitian art, Jones’s role as cultural ambassador, and the specifics of the multilayered Haitian Vodou rituals, VanDiver turns her attention to the ways in which collage offered the artist an opportunity to experiment with and make sense of an unfamiliar cultural practice.

“Finally, this focused analysis of Jones’s collages suggests this medium/technique is especially appropriate to diasporic expression because it is predicated on the cut and the subsequent combination of disparate elements,” wrote VanDiver, who is completing a book-length manuscript on Loïs Mailou Jones.

Her research, centered on twentieth-century black women artists, African American artistic engagements with Africa, and the politics of exhibition and display, has appeared in Archives of American Art Journal, Space and Culture, and Transition.

*Cover of American Art 32, no. 1 (Spring 2018): Loïs Mailou Jones, Textile Design for Cretonne, 1928. Watercolor on paper, 28 × 21 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Bequest of the artist, 2006.24.10. Courtesy Loïs Mailou Jones Pierre-Noël Trust