Associate Professor of Art Tanya Sheehan coauthored with Henry Louis Gates Jr. the essay “Marketing Racism: Popular Imagery in the United States and Europe,” recently published in The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. 5: The Twentieth Century, Part I.

Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, as well as director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Sheehan is a former residential fellow at the Du Bois Institute.

The essay surveys white fantasies of blackness in illustrated children’s literature, advertisements, postcards, and other forms of popular visual culture, mindful of the ways in which they worked against and motivated the work of twentieth-century black artists.

The Image of the Black in Western Art book series is edited by Gates and David Bindman. Vol. 5, Part I in the series was reviewed by Hilton Als in The New Yorker on June 18, 2014.