Gee's Bend
by Paul Arnett, William Arnett, Bernard Herman, Maggi Gordon, Diane Mott, Dilys Blum, Lauren Whitley, Amei Wallach, and Joanne Cubbs
Aesthetic of the Cool Afro-Atlantic Art and Music
by Robert Farris Thompson and Lowery Stokes Sims
Yale professor Robert Farris Thompson is a living legend. He started writing about the African heritage in the art and music of the Americas when no one recognized the continuities, when African-American studies did not exist and the Civil Rights Movement still met with violent opposition. This book presents the best of the essays on Afro- Atlantic art and music that Thompson wrote from 1963 to 2006. Edited for this publication, they offer a riveting guide to Afro-Atlantic culture, from the tang...
Essays and interviews explore the work of Carrie Mae Weems and its place in the history of photography, African American art, and contemporary art.In this October Files volume, essays and interviews explore the work of the influential American artist Carrie Mae Weems—her invention and originality, the formal dimensions of her practice, and her importance to the history of photography and contemporary art. Since the 1980s, Weems (b. 1953) has challenged the status of the black female body within...
Never Late for Heaven chronicles an odyssey in American art and social events beginning with the often-romanticized Harlem Renaissance and traveling through the Great Depression and beyond. Gwen Knight’s story reveals the life and the passion for painting of a young woman who was surrounded and supported by her community.Her formal education cut short by the Depression, Knight left Howard University and returned to Harlem, where her real art education began. For several years she participated in...
Pope.L: Proto-Skin Set explores early works the artist (William) Pope.L (born 1955) made between 1979 and 1994 exploring materiality and language. Published in this volume for the first time are the artist’s Proto-Skin Sets, a selection of mixed-media collages and assemblages that the artist began making as a student in the 1970s engaging the social constructions of language, race and gender. Treating language as an image and images as a language, these works anticipate his ongoing project Skin...
Are You Listening? Thoughts of a Travelling Soul
by Alonzo S Whitehead
Tell It With Pride (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C (YUP))
by Sarah Greenough and Nancy K. Anderson
A rich narrative and detailed documentation of the 54th regiment give insight into Augustus Saint-Gaudens' famous Civil War Memorial On July 18, 1863, six months after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, one of the first American units composed of African Americans stormed Fort Wagner in South Carolina, led by Colonel Robert Shaw Gould. Although the regiment suffered great losses, the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Infantry legitimized the idea of blacks serving in the...
As both an activist and the dynamic editor of Negro Digest, Hoyt W. Fuller stood at the nexus of the Black Arts Movement and the broader black cultural politics of his time. Jonathan Fenderson uses historical snapshots of Fuller's life and achievements to rethink the period and establish Fuller's important role in laying the foundation for the movement. In telling Fuller's story, Fenderson provides provocative new insights into the movement's international dimensions, the ways the movement took...
