These books are a selected representation of what is available. Search the library catalog to discover more!
Freestyle
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Exhibit catalog to accompany a 2001 art exhibit at the Studio Museum in Harlem. 90 pages of full color reproductions of the art featured in this unique exhibit. Significant works by African American artists.
Gathered Visions: Selected Works by African American Women Artists
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Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Anacostia Museum Washington DC from November 18, 1990, to April 28, 1991
Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980
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This comprehensive, lavishly illustrated catalogue offers an in-depth survey of the incredibly vital but often overlooked legacy of Los Angeles's African American artists, featuring many never-before-seen works.
Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power
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In the period of radical change that was 1963-1983, young black artists at the beginning of their careers in the USA confronted key questions and pressures. How could they make art that would stand as innovative, original, formally and materially complex, while also making work that reflected their concerns and experience as black Americans? T
We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, New Perspectives
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Illustrated volume to accompany an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum opening April 2017, including an introduction by the exhibition co-curators; three scholarly critical essays; remarks from a symposium held in conjunction with the exhibition on April 21, 2017, consisting of personal reminiscences of the theater group Rodeo Caldonia.
Blackness in Abstraction
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Blackness in Abstraction, an exhibition curated by Adrienne Edwards tracing the persistent presence of the color black in art, with a particular emphasis on monochromes, from the 1940s to today. Featuring works by an international and intergenerational group of artists, the exhibition explores blackness as a highly evocative and animating force in various approaches to abstract art.
Black Is, Black Ain't
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Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, April 20-June 8, 2008.
Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art
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Comprehensive survey of performance art by black artists working from the perspective of the visual arts from the 1960s to the present.
Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art
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Black Male is the catalog for what was a major and somewhat controversial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In her introductory essay, curator Golden explains that she used "five historic signposts" to guide her study of the evolution of images of African American men in the years following the civil rights movement. The first was the aggressive and rampantly sexual look of the black power era, followed by blaxploitation films, the tragic "endangered" status of black men in America, the rise of rap and hip-hop, and the "video-imaging" of such high-profile tragedies as the Rodney King incident, the Clarence Thomas hearings, Magic Johnson's AIDS confession, and O. J. Simpson's arrest and indictment.
In Extremis: Death and Life in Twenty-First-Century Haitian Art
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Focusing on artistic evocations of the irrepressible Gedes-an increasingly dominant family of trickster deities-In Extremis examines the striking disjunction between social collapse and artistic flourescence in twenty-first century Haiti. It brings together the work of 34 artists, most of them living in Port-au-Prince, where they produce remarkable and controversial bodies of work in a variety of media while confronting on a daily basis the realities of Haiti's frustratingly slow recovery.
Ruffneck Constructivists: Dineo Seshee Bopape, Kendell Geers, Arthur Jafa, Jennie C. Jones, Kahlil Joseph, Deana Lawson, Rodney McMillian, Pope. L, Tim Portlock, Lior Shvil, Szymon Tomsia
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Ruffneck Constructivists," published to accompany a group exhibition curated by artist Kara Walker, brings together 11 international artists in order to define a contemporary manifesto of urban architecture and change. Inspired by both the Russian Constructivists and McLyte's 1993 hit song "Ruffneck," the phrase "Ruffneck Constructivists" evokes thuggishness as an expression of abjection.
Travel and See: Black Diaspora Art Practices Since the 1980s
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Mercer presents a diasporic model of criticism that gives close attention to aesthetic strategies while tracing the shifting political and cultural contexts in which black visual art circulates. In eighteen essays, which cover the period from 1992 to 2012 and discuss such leading artists as Isaac Julien, Renée Green, Kerry James Marshall, and Yinka Shonibare, Mercer provides a counternarrative of global contemporary art.
Blacktino Queer Performance
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Staging an important new conversation between performers and critics, Blacktino Queer Performance approaches the interrelations of blackness and Latinidad through a stimulating mix of theory and art.
Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance
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McMillan contends that black women artists practiced a purposeful self- objectification, transforming themselves into art objects. In doing so, these artists raised new ways to ponder the intersections of art, performance, and black female embodiment. McMillan reframes the concept of the avatar in the service of black performance art, describing black women performers'skillful manipulation of synthetic selves and adroit projection of their performances into other representational mediums.
How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness
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Work by black artists today is almost uniformly understood in terms of its "blackness," with audiences often expecting or requiring it to "represent" the race. In How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, Darby English shows how severely such expectations limit the scope of our knowledge about this work and how different it looks when approached on its own terms.
Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights
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Murray argues that the rise of female, gay and lesbian artists as legitimate African-American creative voices is essential to the development of black art. He considers iconic works by artists including Glenn Ligon, Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas and Kalup Linzy, which question whether it is possible for blackness to evade its ideologically over-determined cultural legibility.
Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace
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This anthology brings together twenty-two essays in which key critical thinkers, scholars and artists explore a wide range of subjects including contemporary African art, cinema and photography. They lay out theoretical and critical frameworks for engaging with these practices, locating them within the context of current debate and the continent's peculiar history.
A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire
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In A Taste for Brown Bodies, Hiram Pérez traces the development of gay modernity and its continued romanticization of the brown body. Focusing in particular on three figures with elusive queer histories—the sailor, the soldier, and the cowboy— Pérez unpacks how each has been memorialized and desired for their heroic masculinity while at the same time functioning as agents for the expansion of the US borders and neocolonial zones of influence.
Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture
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Migrating the Black Body explores how visual media—from painting to photography, from global independent cinema to Hollywood movies, from posters and broadsides to digital media, from public art to graphic novels—has shaped diasporic imaginings of the individual and collective self. How is the travel of black bodies reflected in reciprocal black images? How is blackness forged and remade through diasporic visual encounters and reimagined through revisitations with the past?
Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics
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In Cameroon, a monumental “statue of liberty” is made from scrap metal. In Congo, a thriving popular music incorporates piercing screams and carnal dances. When these and other instantiations of the aesthetics of Africa and its diasporas are taken into account, how are ideas of beauty reconfigured? Together the essays suggest that beauty is in some sense future-oriented and that taking beauty in Africa and its diasporas seriously is a way of rekindling hope.
Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics
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Margo Natalie Crawford argues that we have misread the Black Arts Movement's call for blackness. We have failed to see the movement's anticipation of the 'new black' and 'post-black.' Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics.
The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art
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"The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art features a broad selection of outstanding works from this important private collection. Eighty color plates illustrate the aesthetic legacy created by African American artists over more than one hundred fifty years.
To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities
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To Conserve a Legacy documents an outstanding sampling of paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, and sculptures owned by Clark Atlanta University, Fisk University, Hampton University, Howard University, North Carolina Central University, and Tuskegee University."
Jennifer Packer: Tenderheaded
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For her first solo institutional exhibition, New York-based artist Jennifer Packer presents new and recent paintings. Tenderheaded brings together multiple strands in the artist’s practice, ranging from portraiture to funerary bouquets. Based in observation, improvisation, and memory, Packer’s canvases are intimate and contemplative, rendered in loose strokes and strong color. Like the exhibition title, the juxtaposition of these various modes of representation and production point to possibilities both bodily and emotional, fragile and strong.
Traveling the Rainbow: the Life and Art of Joseph E. Yoakum
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Reveals how the artist recorded his memories of the American railroad and the traveling circus as landscapes.
Bill Traylor: High Singing Blue
Catalog of an exhibition held Jan. 18-Mar, 1997 at Hirschl & Adler Modern in New York and May 30-July 5, 1997 at Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago.
Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush
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Nina Chanel Abney's portrait of a society in the media age / Marshall N. Price -- Saying so / Nina Chanel Abney and Jamillah James -- Social insurrection and racial justice in the twilight of the Obama era / Natalie Y. Moore.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1960-1988: the Explosive Force of the Streets
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Presents the life and career of the artist, including his childhood in Brooklyn, years as a graffiti artist, rise to stardom as a painter, collaborations with Andy Warhol, and death from a drug overdose at twenty-seven.
Romare Bearden: Black Odyssey
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Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, DC Moore Gallery, November 13, 2007 - January 5, 2008.
Walls That Speak: The Murals of John Thomas Biggers
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Howardena Pindell: Odyssey
Catalog of an exhibition held at the Studio Museum in Harlem, February 12-June 12, 1986.
Thornton Dial: Image of the Tiger
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A former Alabama steel worker, Dial "made things" without acclaim for the first 60 years of his life. Since his "discovery," the self-taught African American artist has gained international attention. The tiger symbolizes both Dial and the African American male. It acts as protagonist in highly sculptural paintings constructed from found objects, scraps of carpeting, rope, and Bondo. Though the paintings are nearly abstract, close examination reveals a complex narration among the vivid colors, energetic lines, and bold design.
Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting
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Showcasing approximately 60 canvases, this survey--the first substantial volume on the artist--reveals Whitten as an innovator who uses abstraction in its newest idioms to achieve an enduring gravitas. Whitten's abiding engagement with scientific systems (as structure), social issues (as evidence) and commitment to the power of visual expression (materiality) show him to be an artist both of his time and for the present.
Ellen Gallagher: Accidental Records
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Accidental Records includes new paintings and drawings that continue the artist's exploration of the complex histories of the Black Atlantic and the afterlives of the Middle Passage. Widely associated with a resurgence in this diasporic critical space, Gallagher has developed her own genre of history painting which makes us question our geographies. The slowly layered surfaces of her work becomes a kind of reckoning, the way sailors mark their locations at sea, determined to return.
Wangechi Mutu: a Fantastic Journey
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This full-color catalog accompanies the first major solo museum exhibition and most comprehensive survey of the artist Wangechi Mutu's work, on view at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University from March 21, 2013, through July 21, 2013, before traveling to the Brooklyn Museum. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1972, and now based in Brooklyn, Mutu renders the complex global sensibility of the early twenty-first century through a distinctly hybrid aesthetic.
Julie Mehretu: Black City = Ciudad Negra
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Julie Mehretu / Lawrence Chua -- Mehretu's explorations of the Arcadian enigma / Cay Sophie Rabinowitz -- Tracing the universe of Julie Mehretu : a choral text / Agustín Pérez Rubio -- Art as an assertion of form / Marcus Steinweg -- Plates.
Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic
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The works presented in Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic raise questions about race, gender, and the politics of representation by portraying contemporary African American men and women using the conventions of traditional European portraiture. The exhibition includes an overview of the artist's prolific fourteen-year career and features sixty paintings and sculptures.
Alma Thomas
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This exhibition features works from every period in Thomas's career, including rarely exhibited watercolors and early abstractions, as well as her signature canvases drawn from a variety of private and public collections.
Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson
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Profiles the life and work of the noted African American painter William H. Johnson
Njideka Akunyili Crosby: I Refuse to be Invisible
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This catalogue is the first publication to focus on the work of Nigerian-born, L.A.-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby. It accompanied an exhibition of the artist's work held at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, FL January 28 - April 24, 2016.
[Projects 75 : Laylah Ali]
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Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Mar. 12-May 21, 2002.
Bob Thompson
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Bob Thompson (1937-1966) found his voice in the novel hybrid forms that emerged from postwar American culture: Abstract Expressionism and abstract figuration, and jazz and rhythm and blues. This catalogue, the first comprehensive book on Thompson's work, accompanies a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and provides an opportunity to celebrate the brief but intense career of an artist who managed to create over a thousand works in the short span of seven years.
From the Margins: Lee Krasner, Norman Lewis, 1945-1952
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Norman Lewis' parents were immigrants from Bermuda. His family lived on Lenox Avenue in Harlem. He studied drawing and commercial design in high school before joining the merchant marine and sailing throughout the Caribbean and South America. In the early 1930s Lewis worked with Augusta Savage, the founder and director of the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts in Harlem.
Middle Passage
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A powerful visual record & concise narrative of the slave trade that describes life in Africa & horrifying details of slave ships. Sixty-four narrative paintings chronicle the journey of a slave ship & a historical introduction traces four centuries of slave trade. Map of the slave routes.
Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series
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In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then just 23 years old, completed a series of 60 small tempera paintings with text captions about the Great Migration, the mass movement of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North that began in 1915-16. Within months of its making, the Migration Series was divided between The Museum of Modern Art (even-numbered panels) and the Phillips Memorial Gallery (odd-numbered panels). In 2015 and 2016, the panels were reunited in exhibitions.
Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love
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The first full-scale American museum survey of the work of artist Kara Walker premieres at the Walker Art Center February 17–May 13, 2007.
Robert Colescott: Recent Paintings
This exhibition was organized to represent the United States at the 47th Venice Biennale ; shown at the U.S. Pavilion in Venice from June 15 to November 9, 1997.
Black Folk Art in America, 1930-1980
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What it is / Jane Livingston -- Black American folk art : origins and early manifestations / Regenia A. Perry -- Spiritual epics : the voyage and the vision in black folk art / John Beardsley -- The artists. Jesse Aaron ; Steve Ashby ; David Butler ; Ulysses Davis ; William Dawson ; Sam Doyle ; William Edmondson ; James Hampton ; Sister Gertrude Morgan ; Inez Nathaniel-Walker ; Leslie Payne ; Elijah Pierce ; Nellie Mae Rowe ; James "Son Ford" Thomas ; Mose Tolliver ; Bill Traylor ; George White ; George Williams ; Luster Willis ; Joseph Yoakum.
Sam Gilliam
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Sam Gilliam established himself as a major artist in 1968 when he jettisoned the wooden stretcher bars that had previously determined the shape of his paintings and allowed his vivid, sometimes ecstatic, rushes of color-stained canvas to hang, billow, and swing through space.
Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit
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A complex overview of the life and career of the pioneering African American artist Henry O. Tanner (1859–1937). Recognized as the patriarch of African American artists, Tanner forged a path to international success, powerfully influencing younger black artists who came after him.
Kerry James Marshall: Look, See
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With a career spanning almost three decades, Kerry James Marshall is well known for his complex and multilayered portrayals of youths, interiors, nudes, housing estate gardens, land- and seascapes, all of which synthesize different traditions and genres while seeking to counter stereotypical representations of black people in society.
Barkley L. Hendricks
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Published in conjunction with the exhibition, Barkley L. Hendricks : birth of the cool, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, February 7, 2008-July 13, 2008
Chris Ofili
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Published on the occasion of the exhibition held at Tate Britain, London, 27 Jan.-16 May 2010.