Word: avail
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first important figure of a black in American art is in Copley's Watson and the Shark, 1778. The black has just thrown a line, without avail, to naked Watson, who wallows helplessly in the green waters of Havana Harbor as the shark charges in to bite his leg off. As McElroy observes, the outstretched arms of Watson and the black "mirror each other," and it may even be that Copley meant Watson's presence in the water to remind us, by reversal as it were, of the slavers' practice of dumping dead Africans into...