Blondell Cummings

This section of the guide is intended to serve as an introduction to research on the intersection of dance, moving image, and art histories. Each bibliography offers a framework through which to consider Blondell Cummings. Further within each bibliography, sources on race and gender studies offer theoretical and historiographic interventions into disciplinary canons. The dance and performance studies list engages with ways that dance and performance can be contextualized by identity and ethnography, the archive, and the increasing presence of dance in the museum. The bibliography on moving image studies situates the move of video from television medium to art object and video installation. It offers a historical context for Cummings’ video work that has been understudied by placing her aesthetic investment within the genre of dances for camera, as well as within discourses on the medium’s use by women and artists of the African Diaspora. The final bibliography on art history and visual culture features discourses on blackness and image-making. As Cummings’ work finds new contexts within museums, the list cites lineages of black performance within the visual arts, visual culture, and social movements. 

These lists reflect a comprehensive bibliography for the subjects, and taken together they seek to demonstrate productive intersections of multidisciplinary study. Further scholarship on Blondell Cummings is supported by the exhibition and its forthcoming companion volume, Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures, developed by the GRI.