On Adrian Piper's radical pedagogy of transgression and the importance of soul and funk music in the African American struggle for emancipation. From 1982 to 1984, Adrian Piper staged a number of audience-interactive performances in universities or museum settings, under the title Funk Lessons. Using the didactic format of a "lesson" (including characteristic paraphernalia such as blackboards), Piper endeavored to teach the basic moves of funk dance to a mostly white, college-educated audience....
The first extended monograph on Saar, featuring older and more recent works, gorgeously bound in cloth with embossed details Drawing inspiration from the imagery of African, Caribbean and Latin American folk art as well as found objects and her own upbringing in a multiracial artist family, Los Angeles artist Alison Saar (born 1956) creates works that reflect on the duality of body and spirit within the context of a larger cultural setting, focusing in particular on black womanhood. In life-siz...
Received the 2018 Honorable Mention for the Joe A. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama or Theatre Black Movements analyzes how artists and activists of recent decades reference earlier freedom movements in order to imagine and produce a more expansive and inclusive democracy. The post–Jim Crow, post–apartheid, postcolonial era has ushered in a purportedly color blind society and along with it an assault on race-based forms of knowledge production and coalition formation. Soyica Diggs Col...
African-American Art (Artists & Art Movements S.)
by Crystal A. Britton
Growing up in Seale, Alabama as a Black Queer kid, then attending the Rhode Island School of Design as an undergraduate, Jon Key hungered to see himself in the fields of Art and Design. But in lectures, critiques, and in the books he read, he struggled to see and learn about people who intersected with his identity or who GOT him. So he started asking himself questions: What did it mean to be a graphic designer with his point of view? What did it mean to be a Black graphic designer? A Queer gr...
A richly illustrated history of self-taught artists and how they changed American artArtists without formal training, who learned from family, community, and personal journeys, have long been a presence in American art. But it wasn’t until the 1980s, with the help of trailblazing advocates, that the collective force of their creative vision and bold self-definition permanently changed the mainstream art world. In We Are Made of Stories, Leslie Umberger traces the rise of self-taught artists in t...
A collection of essential quotations and other writings from artist and icon Jean-Michel BasquiatOne of the most important artists of the late twentieth century, Jean-Michel Basquiat explored the interplay of words and images throughout his career as a celebrated painter with an instantly recognizable style. In his paintings, notebooks, and interviews, he showed himself to be a powerful and creative writer and speaker as well as image-maker. Basquiat-isms is a collection of essential quotations...
Promise, Witness, Remembrance
by Speed Art Museum, Stephen Reily, Allison Glenn, and Toya Northington
Marking Lévy Gorvy’s first solo exhibition with acclaimed conceptual artist and philosopher Adrian Piper (born 1948), this focused presentation includes examples from The Mythic Being series (1973–75), It’s Just Art (1980) and Here, an installation work conceived in 2008 and realized for the first time at the gallery. Together, these three bodies of work delve into interrelated themes Piper has explored throughout her career—the intersubjective formation of self, identity, race and gender; racis...
Featuring foldouts, candid photographs, and full-page color installation shots, this beautiful new book celebrates the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat over his brief but meteoric career. Dozens of historical photographs, both black-and-white and color, connect the text with the close to sixty color plates, providing invaluable insight into the life and work of this seminal artist. Art historian Robert Farris Thompson delivers a detailed analysis of some of Basquiat's most iconic paintings, situatin...
This publication highlights nearly 150 objects in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art that were created by American artists of African descent. Introduced with an essay by the distinguished scholar Richard J. Powell, the volume includes paintings, sculpture, works on paper, decorative arts, costume and textiles, and photography by some 100 artists, from classically trained painters such as Henry Ossawa Tanner to self-taught artists such as Bill Traylor. Informative, thematic essays...
Gorgeous African American Coloring Book for Adults
by Nova Dawn Creations
A rich reconsideration of a short-lived but visionary voice in twentieth-century American painting and his enduring relevance Bob Thompson (1937–1966) came to critical acclaim in the late 1950s for paintings of unparalleled figurative complexity and chromatic intensity. Thompson drew upon the Western art-historical canon to formulate a highly personal, expressive language. Tracing the African American artist’s prolific, yet tragically brief, transatlantic career, this volume examines Thompson’s...
Archibald Motley
Featuring more than 200 color illustrations, the catalogue Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist accompanies the first full-scale survey of the work of Archibald Motley, on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from January 30, 2014, through May 11, 2014. Archibald John Motley, Jr., was an American painter, master colorist, and radical interpreter of urban culture. Among twentieth-century American artists, Motley is surely one of the most important and, paradoxically, also one of th...
Visible Man provides an in-depth look at the work of Atlanta-based artist Fahamu Pecou (born 1975) from the past two decades, showing how Pecou’s work investigates the concept of black masculinity and provides new modes for the representation of black bodies. Starting with his self-assumed persona “Fahamu Pecou is the Shit!” and his early NEOPOP works—in which he places himself on the covers of prestigious art and culture magazines—the catalog shows the trajectory of his work, ending with the DO...
We all can name some of the Africanist aesthetic-structures that fuel African American and American art ... Syncopation, Improvisation, Call and Response, Cool, Polyrhythm, or Innovation as an ambition- But there are many, many more. What Makes That Black? The African-American Aesthetic identifies and defines seventy-four elements of the aesthetic through text and illustration. Using the magnificent camerawork of R.J. Muna, Sharen Bradford, Jae Man Joo, Rachel Neville, James Barry Knox, and more...