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Kerry James Marshall's Mementos is a sadly beautiful reminder of the Civil Rights movement - a reminder that provokes us to question the closed-book, "memorial" status that history has attributed to this moment of inspired social action. In Marshall's banner-like paintings appear bittersweet visions of 30 years past, in which the heroes of modern black history appear as ghosts frozen in time, and in oversized stamps, the empowering slogans of the movement are rendered uncomfortably silent. This...

This striking exhibition catalog celebrates the late artist whose deeply emotional works intermingled realism with abstraction to address complex themes of identity, race, and community. American artist Noah Davis (1983–2015) believed ‘painting does something to your soul that nothing else can. It is visceral and immediate.’ Drawing on art history, personal archives, anonymous photography found in Los Angeles’ flea markets, and his own imagination, he compiled a ravishing body of figurative pa...

An exploration of the rich history of printmaking at Cleveland’s Karamu House, a center of Black arts, culture, and community since 1915   Karamu House, founded as a settlement house in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1915, is one of the preeminent homes of Black arts, culture, and community in America. Noted for its theater program, Karamu House also hosts a rich legacy in the graphic arts. Printmaking workshops open to artists and community alike launched in the 1930s, allowing a young Langston Hughes—a...

What’s new, now and next from contemporary Black artists A New York Times 2020 holiday gift guide pick This book surveys the work of a new generation of Black artists, and also features the voices of a diverse group of curators who are on the cutting edge of contemporary art. As mission-driven collectors, Bernard I. Lumpkin and Carmine D. Boccuzzi have championed emerging artists of African descent through museum loans and institutional support. But there has never been an opportunity to consi...

Focusing on black Americans' participation in world's fairs, Emancipation expositions, and early black grassroots museums, "Negro Building" traces the evolution of black public history from the Civil War through the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Mabel O. Wilson gives voice to the figures that conceived the curatorial content - Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Horace Cayton and Margaret Burroughs. As the 2015 opening of the National Museum of African A...

This important book showcases institutional and private efforts to collect, document, and preserve African American art in American’s fourth largest city, Houston, Texas. Eminent historian John Hope Franklin’s essay reveals his passionate commitment to collect African American art, while curator Alvia J. Wardlaw discusses works by Robert S. Duncanson, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Horace Pippen, and Bill Traylor as well as pieces by contemporary artists Kojo Griffin and Mequitta Ahuja. Quilts, pottery, a...

Felrath Hines (1913–1993), the first African American man to become a professional conservator for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, was born and raised in the segregated Midwest. Leaving their home in the South, Hines's parents migrated to Indianapolis with hopes for a better life. While growing up, Hines was encouraged by his seamstress mother to pursue his early passion for art by taking Saturday classes at Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. He moved to Chicago in 1937, where he...

A gorgeous, performative object translating Dyson’s liberatory art into book form In her multidisciplinary practice guided by her working philosophy of Black Compositional Thought, New York–based Torkwase Dyson (born 1973) creates curvilinear and rectangular hypershapes and abstractions that speak to infrastructures of liberation and resistance. Dyson's recent exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York, with its site-specific installations and layered paintings, explored these geometries on an arc...

The first survey of Joe Overstreet, abstract painter of the Black Arts Movement and forecaster of Afrofuturism   This groundbreaking survey of abstract paintings by Joe Overstreet (1933–2019) recognizes his energizing presence in the Black Arts Movement and situates his socially engaged and spatially challenging work within today’s crucial redefinition of the modernist canon. Overstreet’s Flight Patterns series, created from 1969 to 1973, is at the center of this book. These intensely colored...

The Julius Rosenwald Fund has been largely ignored in the literature of both art history and African American studies, despite its unique focus, intensity, and commitment. Spertus Museum in Chicago has organized an exhibition, guest curated by Daniel Schulman, that presents and explores the work of funded artists as well as the history of the Fund. Through it, and this accompanying collection of essays, illustrations, and color plates, we see the Fund's groundbreaking initiative to address issue...

Embodying Black Experience places a spotlight on spectacular acts of racial violence--from police stops (racial profiling) to lynching campaigns--and shows how African American men and women have employed performance to respond to the intrusion of such events within their daily lives. Masterfully blending biography, archival history, performance theory, and phenomenology, Harvey Young centers selected artistic and athletic performances--photography, boxing, theatre/performance art, and museum di...

Art historian Darby English is celebrated for working against the grain and plumbing gaps in historical narratives. In this book, he explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of black cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in America, shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, an integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto.1971 takes an in...

"AfroCuba" focuses on the rich AfroCuban influence in the visual art of Cuba during the post-revolutionary period. It represents the first opportunity for U.S. audiences to appreciate nearly four decades of artistic production shaped by the influential forces of AfroCuban religion, social struggle, questions of cultural heritage, and personal and diplomatic relations with Africa. Representing the work of twenty-six artists residing in Havana and Santiago de Cuba, "AfroCuba" includes sixty prints...

In November 1977, The New Yorker published a feature-length biography of artist Romare Bearden by Calvin Tomkins as part of its “Profiles” series. The essay, titled Profile: Putting Something Over Something Else (using Bearden’s words to describe the creative process), brought national focus to Bearden, whose rise had seemed meteoric since the late 1960s. The experience of the interview prompted Bearden to launch an autobiographical collection he called Profiles. He sequenced the project in two...

A comprehensive, in-depth presentation of African-Americana, also known as black memorabilia or collectibles, generously illustrated with over 500 color photos. This gorgeous photo essay and extensively researched historical perspective includes a broad sampling of black memorabilia, encompassing everything from "Little Black Sambo" and "Aunt Jemima" to photography, figurines, and dolls. Social, economic, and historical influences are examined while supplying the identification and value inform...

A sweeping retrospective of Alma W. Thomas’s wide-reaching artistic practice that sheds new light on her singular search for beauty Achieving fame in 1972 as the first Black woman to mount a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Alma W. Thomas (1891–1978) is known for her large abstract paintings filled with irregular patterns of bright colors. This insightful reassessment of Thomas’s life and work reveals her complex and deliberate artistic existence before, during, and after the yea...