"The Paul R. Jones collection is one of the oldest, largest, and most comprehensive holdings of African American art in the world. Jones, who was named by Art and Antiques as one of the top one hundred collectors in the United States, began buying paintings, prints, photographs, and sculpture four decades ago and has now amassed over fifteen hundred works, many of them by well-known artists. Among the sixty-six represented in A Century of African American Art are Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Henry Ossawa Tanner, James VanDerZee, Carrie Mae Weems, and Hale Woodruff." "Lavishly illustrated with over one hundred color photographs, this book provides an important resource for the study of the works included in the Jones collection, the artists who created them, as well as the social and historical contexts that engendered them."--BOOK JACKET.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Political sight : on collecting art and culture / Amalia K. Amaki Collage and photomontage : Bearden's spiralist reflections of America and Africa / Sharon Pruitt Nanette Carter's discursive modernism : the collage aesthetic in Light over Soweto #5 / Ann Eden Gibson Reign(ing) in color : toward a wilder history of American art / Ikem Stanley Okoye On the surface : color, skin, and paint / Marcia R. Cohen and Diana McClintock Collecting memory : portraiture, posing, and desire / Carla Williams

Flash from the past : hidden messages in the photographs of Prentice Herman Polk / Amalia K. Amaki African American printmakers : toward a more democratic art / Winston Kennedy Afterword : a personal appreciation - art, race, and biography / Margaret Andersen Preservation for posterity : the Paul R. Jones photography collection / Debra Hess Norris Plates.