Sharif Bey

This article examines the process by which early twentieth-century European modernists and African American artists of the Harlem Renaissance negotiated the influence of traditional African sculpture. With a focus on African American painter Aaron Douglas, the author investigates how and to what end his generation of African American artists incorporated these influences. The author additionally discusses how their methods, and the conditions surrounding them, compare to the aforementioned modernists. In examining the roots of these respective trajectories, the author discovered that various people and factors –including critics, cultural and political leaders, patrons, philanthropists, artistic/aesthetic movements, colonization, commercialization, racism, and social responsibility – impacted the abilities of modernists and African American artists to embrace or reject the influence of traditional African sculpture. The author urges art teachers and studio art professors to be mindf...

This autoethnographic study examines the social history of bodybuilding along with personal testimonies of those with experience in weight training and bodybuilding to raise awareness of aesthetic experiences found within the culture of physique. The author explores aesthetic experiences in both the formal and performative sense as frames for reflecting on his adolescent pursuits as an amateur bodybuilder in order to deconstruct the visual archetypes of bodybuilding and their impact on his formative notions of maleness.