2025/01/02 by Ben Jones · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Poetry Analysis and Criticism
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/00043249.2025.2485847
openalex publication_date 2025/01/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
:Sound of Silence is the final series of lithographs produced by Charles White, one of the most prodigious American artists of the twentieth century. It is but one example of how White’s practice emphasizes artistic mastery in a way that paradoxically seeks to undo the legacies of slavery (i.e. mastery over other people). Despite the importance of this work, scholarship on it has been sorely underdeveloped. A mere four publications have substantively historicized or theorized Sound of Silence and even these discuss the work only briefly. I attribute the lack of scholarship primarily to Sound of Silence being overshadowed by the artist’s death as well as the sheer volume of art produced by this tireless maker, whose career touched five decades. In this article, I argue that Sound of Silence takes its title from a song by Simon and Garfunkel and that the song emblematizes this particular work while it also eulogizes White, and eerily locates him in art history. No source other than the title indicates the meaning of the lithographs; it is also not known why White chose this particular title. I take up “critical fabulation,” a term borrowed from Saidiya Hartman, as both a methodology and theoretical investment in order to unpack my hypotheses. In the absence of concrete evidence, this method allows me to explore how White used some of the tools of the masters of Western Culture to critique the concept of mastery in Western Civilization.