Beyond Literature: Toni Morrison’s Musical and Visual Legacy For Black Women Artists

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze Toni Morrison’s understudied influence on music and visual art. In 1994 she established the Atelier Program in Princeton University as an interdisciplinary arts program that supported and nurtured multifaceted collaborations between artists and students from different disciplines. Moreover, her oeuvre shows her craft in a number of literary and artistic spheres that include writing novels, short stories, children’s books, literary criticism, song cycles and the script for a musical and a play. Keeping in mind Morrison’s multidimensional engagement with literature and the other arts, the first half of the article delves into the contemporary musical responses to the writer, placing special emphasis on black women musicians such as rapper Akua Naru, neo-soul vocalist India Arie, and singer and songwriter Janelle Monáe. Morrison’s intersectional representations of gender and race relations across the history of the U.S. have similarly inspired visual artists. The second half of the article explores the visual creations by U.S. black women artists Kara Walker, Lorna Simpson and Amy Sherald. Morrison’s manifold articulations of blackness and womanhood similarly resonate on the other side of the Atlantic through the work of Lubaina Himid, the first black British artist to win the prestigious Turner Prize in 2017.