
McGee considers David Driskell's catalogue essay, "The Evolution of a Black Aesthetic, 1920-1950," in the context of the author, the times, and exigencies behind the exhibition "Two Centuries of Black American Art." She infers that Driskell's essay manifests the dominant voices and parameters relative to race and artistic practice in African-American art at that time, and that it is also a deeply individualistic essay, written from the perspective of a practicing artist significantly indebted to modernist conceptions of art and scholastic aesthetic philosophy.