Funding Source: Richard D. Cohen Fellowship. W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute. Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. Harvard University. 2016-17. Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship. 2016-2017 – In Rhythms of Grease, Grime, Glass, and Glitter: The Body in Contemporary Black Art, I present a new interpretation of the work of Renée Stout, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Radcliffe Bailey, and David Hammons, using key examples of painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation by these prominent artists of African descent as case studies in a re-examination of the conventions and stereotypes employed in the making of works of art and in the representations of black bodies and black identity in the 20th and 21st centuries. Through the working (and re-working) of bodies and body parts that are identified as black through signs – kinky hair imprinted onto paper, a woman’s body molded and adorned with roots, a performance in a museum and as a museum, room installations of disengaged piano keys – the work of these four artists offers new ways of looking at and conceiving of black identity: by undermining familiar imagery, and shaking the viewer into a realization of the presence of the black body, their works break new ground not only in American art, but in contemporary art and American culture broadly construed.