A selection of Art History front covers since February 2020, featuring works by: Abe Odedina; Jeannette Ehlers; Aubrey Williams; Betye Saar; Romare Bearden; Rotimi Fani-Kayode; Maud Sulter; Mary Lee Bendolph; and Seydou Keïta.

Editing Art History for the past four and a half years has been an enormous privilege: an opportunity to help think about new directions in the discipline in collaboration with the editorial team, the journal's advisory boards, our authors, readers, and reviewers. Writing this, my valedictory editorial, provides a moment of reflection on some of the aims of the current editors since we began in 2018, what we have done, how we have done it, and where there is still much work to do.

On taking up the post together with the new Deputy Editor, and in conjunction with the existing team of the Reviews Editor and Managing Editor, we were all poised to attend to the look, feel, and shape of the journal, and the visual impact that it undoubtedly has on how we think about the subjects and objects of the discipline. The vision which I had put forward when I applied for the role in 2017 had been premised on the urgent need for the field to attend more explicitly to its racialized fault lines, and to centre the long overdue implications of critical race for art history. In issue 41.1 in February 2018, my opening piece included an analysis of Marlene Smith's 1987 installation Art History, and raised questions about the extensive delay between her production of the work and the wider discipline's attention to it;¹1 See Dorothy Price, ‘Editorial’, Art History, 41: 1, February 2018, 8-11.
in issue 42.1 in February 2019, I followed this up with a second editorial that reflected on the disproportionate public outcry engendered by Sonia Boyce's 2018 performance installation Six Acts.²2 See Dorothy Price, ‘Art History at the Barricades’, Art History, 42: 1, February 2019, 8-15.
Both Smith's and Boyce's artworks were reproduced on the journal's inside pages to accompany the two respective editorials.

By December 2019, as we were preparing to publish in issue 43.1 the first questionnaire of its kind, ‘Decolonizing Art History’, our collective editorial attention turned towards the front cover.³3 See Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price, ‘Decolonizing Art History’, Art History, 43: 1, February 2020, 8-66.
We chose a painting made in 2018 by Nigerian-born, London-based artist Abe Odedina, called Just Looking. The selection was based on a few factors, including the structure and title of the image in relation to the field of vision. From John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972) to Rosemary Betterton's Looking On (1987), Griselda Pollock's analysis of Robert Doisneau's An Oblique Look in her ground-breaking essay ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’ (1988), and others besides, the title of Odedina's work recalled those moments in the history of the discipline's reckoning with its gendered biases.⁴4 See: John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London, 1972; Rosemary Betterton, Looking On: Images of Femininity in the Visual Arts and Media, London, 1987; and Griselda Pollock, ‘Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity’, in Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art, London, 1988, 85-90.
Yet Just Looking centralizes a Black gaze that signalled aspects of the decolonial imperatives which had prompted our questionnaire. Odedina's protagonist covers one eye with their hand, and in doing so pulls viewers' attention straight towards the other. Who is just looking at whom, and why? The operations of the composition belie the passivity implied by the work's title; an encounter with critical race art history is staged.

It was from that point onwards that we decided to continue to reinforce the editorial agenda for the remainder of my tenure through further selections of front cover images made by artists of colour. For the previous sixteen years, from volume 27 in February 2004, the point at which Art History first began running images of artworks on its cover, there had only been seventeen images produced by artists of colour on the front page of the journal out of a potential eighty (five issues per year over a sixteen-year period). Prior to my editorship, only two of these covers had been works made by women of colour, Ana Mendieta's Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico) (1976) on the cover of 30.1, and Mona Hatoum's Hot Spot (2006) on 30.3, both issues from 2007 under the editorship of Deborah Cherry.⁵5 Ana Mendieta's Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico) appeared as part of Susan Best's essay ‘The Serial Spaces of Ana Mendieta’, Art History, 30: 1, February 2007, 57-82; Mona Hatoum's Hot Spot was published on the cover of the special issue ‘About Mieke Bal’, Art History, 30: 3, June 2007.
If the editorial vision of the journal during my tenure was to interrogate its unrelenting whiteness in intersectional terms, then it seemed appropriate to start thinking through which artists were being given prominence within its overall design on the front cover. Given that Art History foregrounds the qualities of the visual that are its raison d'être, it also seemed important to turn our attention to the ways in which strategically selected front covers might be able to underline our declared editorial imperatives.

As would seem logical, cover images are usually selected by the editors either from the subject matter of the essays within any given issue of the journal to which they pertain, or from within the publications that are treated in the book reviews section of the same issue. Yet our editorial clarity of purpose may not always have been as self-evident as we would have hoped, nor may it have served its intended purpose. In 2021, one of our former International Advisory Board members wrote to the editorial team to raise some significant challenges to a book review that we had recently published. During the course of their critique, they commented that they found it ironic that a work by African American artist Betye Saar, I've Got Rhythm (1972), appearing on the cover of 43.5, was not explicitly discussed, which seemed to suggest a certain kind of instrumentalization of Saar's work, deployed to signal a commitment to Blackness that was not, in their view, fulfilled within the pages of Art History. As the journal's first, and so far only, woman of colour Editor in its forty-five-year history, such important critique foregrounds the conundrum of a discipline undergoing radical changes too slowly. Centring critical race art history will unavoidably rub up against the complexly-entangled, deeply-rooted structures of the discipline's white-centric past, and potential missteps are inevitable in a representational field already stacked in favour of whiteness. I found the letter very sobering, and whilst I was not in full agreement with all of its targets, the episode was a valuable lesson in vigilance and care. Editorial commitment to centralizing works by artists of colour on the journal's cover during the months of my tenure since this exchange has continued, and will carry on to do so in those that remain. This is evident in the current issue by the mesmerizing photography of Seydou Keïta considered in Katarzyna Fale˛ cka's book review of Allison Moore's Embodying Relation: Art Photography in Mali; but the tensions inherent in such choices are not forgotten. We all have much work to do in constantly unpicking the deeply-seated biases of our discipline if it is to continue to thrive amidst the precarity of the COVID-ridden world in which we find ourselves. Relearning how to navigate, survive, and treat one another with respect and care in the new conditions of our time remains, I think, the challenge ahead.

Notes

中文翻译：

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封面故事

自 2020 年 2 月以来的一系列艺术史封面，包括以下作品：Abe Odedina；珍妮特·埃勒斯；奥布里·威廉姆斯；贝蒂萨尔；罗马尔·比尔登；Rotimi Fani-Kayode; 莫德·苏尔特；玛丽·李·本多夫；和赛杜凯塔。

在过去四年半的时间里，编辑艺术史是一项巨大的特权：有机会与编辑团队、期刊顾问委员会、我们的作者、读者和审稿人合作，帮助思考该学科的新方向。写这篇，我的告别社论，提供了一个时刻反思自 2018 年开始以来当前编辑的一些目标，我们做了什么，我们是如何做到的，还有很多工作要做。

在与新的副主编一起上任后，与现有的评论编辑和总编辑团队一起，我们都准备好关注期刊的外观、感觉和形状，以及它的视觉冲击力。毫无疑问，它与我们如何看待学科的主题和客体有关。我在 2017 年申请该职位时提出的愿景的前提是，该领域迫切需要更明确地关注其种族化的断层线，并将批判性种族对艺术史的早该产生的影响作为中心。在 2018 年 2 月的第 41.1 期中，我的开篇文章包括对 Marlene Smith 1987 年装置艺术史的分析，并就她的作品创作与更广泛的学科对它的关注之间的广泛延迟提出了质疑；¹1见 Dorothy Price，“社论”，艺术史，41:1，2018 年 2 月，8-11。
在 2019 年 2 月的第 42.1 期中，我随后发表了第二篇社论，反映了索尼娅·博伊斯 2018 年的表演装置《六幕》引起的不成比例的公众抗议。²2参见 Dorothy Price，“街垒的艺术史”，艺术史，42:1，2019 年 2 月，8-15。
史密斯和博伊斯的作品都被转载在期刊的内页上，以配合两个各自的社论。

到 2019 年 12 月，当我们准备在第 43.1 期发布​​第一份此类问卷“非殖民化艺术史”时，我们的集体编辑注意力转向了封面。³3参见 Catherine Grant 和 Dorothy Price，“去殖民化艺术史”，艺术史，43:1，2020 年 2 月，8-66。
我们选择了尼日利亚出生的伦敦艺术家 Abe Odedina 于 2018 年创作的一幅名为 Justlooking 的画作。选择基于几个因素，包括与视野相关的图像结构和标题。从约翰·伯杰（John Berger）的《观看方式》（1972）到罗斯玛丽·贝特顿（Rosemary Betterton）的《看着》（1987），格里塞尔达·波洛克（Griselda Pollock）在她开创性的文章《现代性和女性气质的空间》（1988）中对罗伯特·杜瓦诺（Robert Doisneau）的斜视的分析，除此之外， Odedina 的作品的标题让人想起了该学科历史上的那些时刻，它考虑到了其性别偏见。⁴4参见：John Berger，《观看方式》，伦敦，1972 年；Rosemary Betterton，《展望：视觉艺术和媒体中的女性形象》，伦敦，1987；和 Griselda Pollock，“现代性和女性气质的空间”，《视觉与差异：女性气质、女性主义和艺术史》，伦敦，1988 年，85-90。
然而，《只看》集中了一种黑色的凝视，它表明了促使我们进行问卷调查的非殖民主义要求的各个方面。Odedina 的主人公用手遮住一只眼睛，这样做将观众的注意力直接吸引到另一只眼睛上。谁在看谁，为什么？作品的运作掩盖了作品标题所暗示的被动性；一场与批判性种族艺术史的邂逅正在上演。

正是从那时起，我们决定通过进一步选择有色艺术家制作的封面图片，继续加强我剩余任期内的编辑议程。在过去的 16 年中，从 2004 年 2 月的第 27 卷，即《艺术史》第一次开始在其封面上刊登艺术品图像的那一刻起，只有 17 幅由有色艺术家在期刊首页上制作的图像潜在 80 期（在 16 年内每年发行 5 期）。在我担任编辑之前，这些封面中只有两个是有色女性的作品，Ana Mendieta 的Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico) (1976) 在 30.1 的封面上，以及 Mona Hatoum 的Hot Spot（2006 年） 30.3，从 2007 年开始，由 Deborah Cherry 编辑。⁵5 Ana Mendieta 的无题（Silueta 系列，墨西哥）作为 Susan Best 的文章“Ana Mendieta 的系列空间”的一部分出现，艺术史，30:1，2007 年 2 月，57-82；Mona Hatoum 的热点发表在特刊“关于 Mieke Bal”的封面上，艺术史，30:3，2007 年 6 月。
如果在我任职期间该杂志的编辑愿景是用交叉的术语来质疑其无情的白人，那么开始思考哪些艺术家在封面的整体设计中被赋予了突出地位似乎是合适的。鉴于艺术史突出了作为其存在理由的视觉品质，将我们的注意力转向战略性选择的封面可能能够强调我们宣布的编辑要求的方式似乎也很重要。

看起来合乎逻辑的，封面图片通常由编辑从与他们相关的期刊的任何给定期刊中的论文主题中选择，或者从同一期刊的书评部分处理的出版物中选择. 然而，我们的编辑目的可能并不总是像我们希望的那样不言而喻，也可能没有达到预期的目的。2021 年，我们的一位前国际顾问委员会成员写信给编辑团队，对我们最近发表的书评提出了一些重大挑战。在他们的批评过程中，他们评论说，他们觉得讽刺的是，非洲裔美国艺术家贝蒂萨尔的作品，我有节奏（1972），出现在 43.5 的封面上，没有明确讨论，这似乎暗示了对萨尔作品的某种工具化，用于表明对黑色的承诺，在他们看来，在艺术的页面中没有实现历史. 作为该杂志在其 45 年历史中的第一位，也是迄今为止唯一的一位女性色彩编辑，如此重要的批评突出了一个学科正在发生根本性变化太慢的难题。以批判性种族艺术史为中心将不可避免地与该学科过去以白人为中心的复杂纠缠、根深蒂固的结构发生冲突，在已经有利于白人的代表性领域中，潜在的失误是不可避免的。我发现这封信非常发人深省，虽然我并不完全同意它的所有目标，但这一事件是关于警惕和关怀的宝贵教训。在我任职的几个月里，编辑承诺将有色人种艺术家的作品集中在杂志封面上，因为这种交流一直在继续，并将在剩下的人中继续这样做。体现关系：马里的艺术摄影；但这种选择所固有的紧张关系并没有被遗忘。如果要在我们发现自己所处的充满 COVID 的世界的不稳定中继续蓬勃发展，我们都有很多工作要做，以不断消除我们学科中根深蒂固的偏见。我认为，在我们这个时代的新条件下，重新学习如何导航、生存和相互尊重和关怀仍然是未来的挑战。

笔记