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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...

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...

"Black People Are My Business": Toni Cade Bambara's Practices of Liberation studies the works of Bambara (1939-1995), an author, documentary filmmaker, social activist, and professor. Thabiti Lewis's analysis serves as a cultural biography, examining the liberation impulses in Bambara's writing, which is concerned with practices that advance the material value of the African American experience and exploring the introspection between artist production and social justice. This is the first monogr...

One may visit famous gardens in Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka-or one may visit Japanese-styled gardens in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Berlin, London, Paris, Sao Paulo, or Singapore. We often view these gardens as representative of the essence of Japanese culture. Christian Tagsold argues, however, that the idea of the Japanese garden has less do to with Japan's history and traditions, and more to do with its interactions with the West. The first Japanese gardens in the West appeared at the w...

Take a visual trip around the United States, with stop-offs in many locations and insights on every page, and illuminate the past and future of American calligraphy.   For centuries, American calligraphers have accepted the legacy of the classic Roman, Gothic, and Italic calligraphy they inherited from Europe without realizing that there are more alphabet treasures to be found in a larger pool of uniquely American alphabet designs. Wild West, New Deal, Prairie—all were made in America, and th...

This text is an entertaining account of one man's journey through distant lands. Artist Harry Holcroft visits over 20 countries across Africa and America as he retraces the path of the ancient slave routes, adopting the various historical means of travel along the way. An enthusiastic storyteller, Holcroft's diary conveys the idiosyncratic charm of these exotic lands, while a unique collection of over 100 paintings and sketches capture the haunting atmosphere of some of the world's most evocativ...

Renowned artist Andy Jurinko believed the golden age of baseball was 1946-1960, an era that, not coincidentally, coincided with his childhood. It was a time that welcomed such legendary stars as Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams, and Henry Aaron into the national consciousness, a fifteen year stretch marked by Robinson's breaking of the color barrier in 1947 and by ten Yankee championships. Jurinko spent twenty years creating more than 600 portraits of the colorful charac...

From abolitionist medallions to statues of bondspeople bearing broken chains, sculpture gave visual and material form to narratives about the end of slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery sheds light on the complex—and at times contradictory—place of such works as they moved through a world contoured both by the devastating economy of enslavement and by international abolitionist campaigns. By examining matters of making, circulation, display, and re...