The books here 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.
Kevin Beasley
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Beasley deploys sound and clothing as his core artistic materials, combining them in stunning, densely packed sculptures and immersive acoustic experiences. In his live performances, Beasley has embedded microphones or other electronic sound equipment in sculptures made of objects and materials such as sneakers, foam, and resin, exploiting and manipulating their sonic possibilities.
Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal
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Copublished by Aperture and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, to accompany Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal, an exhibition organized by the Portland Art Museum and curated by Julia Dolan and Sara Krajewski, on view October 2019-January 2020.
Isaac Julien: Riot
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Riot is an intellectual biography of artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien (born 1960), looking at key moments in his career and discussing the influences that shaped them. Julien’s trail-blazing career has moved across film and art, documentary, biography, narrative film and multi-screen installation, and has drawn on influences as disparate as silent cinema, cultural studies, Chinese myth and pirate radio culture.
Yinka Shonibare: Criminal Ornamentation
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In this book, British Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare (born 1962) challenges conceptions of "good taste," presenting works from the Arts Council Collection―from sculpture and painting to wallpaper and handbags―that provocatively oppose the anti-decorative stance of Adolf Loos' 1908 Ornament and Crime.
William Pope. L.: the Friendliest Black Artist in America
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This book, which accompanies a nationally touring exhibition of Pope.L's work, explores his impact on American art and culture. It contains sections on practices, body, performance, dialogue, consumption, and a selection of the artist's writings and a chronology. The essays are by Mark H. C. Bessire, Suzanne Preston Blier, C. Carr, Geoffrey Hendricks, Stuart Horodner, Lowery Stokes Sims, Kristine Stiles, and Martha Wilson.
Rashid Johnson: Within Our Gates
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Theaster Gates
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Whitfield Lovell: All Things in All Time
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One of the contemporary art world's finest interpreters of lost or contested history, Lovell, born in the Bronx in 1959, is internationally recognized for large-scale tableaux and wall-size installations. Combining evocative found historical objects with exquisitely rendered life-sized charcoal portraits frequently based on historic photographs, Lovell creates a dramatic situation or scene.
El Anatsui: New Worlds
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This book was published on the occasion of the exhibition El Anatsui: New Worlds. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 21 January-8 June 2014
Martin Puryear
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Published in conjunction with the exhibition Martin Puryear, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 4, 2007-January 14, 2008, organized by John Elderfield
Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race
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Rebecca Peabody uses the work of contemporary American artist Kara Walker to investigate a range of popular storytelling traditions with roots in the nineteenth century and ramifications in the present. Focusing on a few key pieces that range from a wall-size installation to a reworked photocopy in an artist's book, and from a theater curtain to a monumental sculpture, Peabody explores a significant yet neglected aspect of Walker's production: her commitment to exploring narrative depictions of race, gender, power, and desire.
Glenn Ligon
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Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions 1965–2016
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Published in conjunction with the most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date, this catalog presents more than 280 artworks that encompass the full range of Piper’s mediums: works on paper, video, multimedia installation, performance, painting, sound and photo-texts.
Nick Cave: Until
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Cave takes us inside the belly of one of his iconic sculptures with an immersive environment populated by a dazzling array of found objects, echoing some of Cave's and America's most confounding dilemmas: gun violence, racial inequality, injustice within our cities' police departments, and death. An installation diary and numerous images reveal how an idea becomes reality. Until also incorporates special appearances by dancers, singer/ songwriters, and poets, as well as community forums, and opportunities for public debate and engagement.
Alternative Histories
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Dancing at the Louvre
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Mark Bradford
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Publication accompanies the exhibition, Mark Bradford, at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, May 8-August 15, 2010, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, November 19, 2010-March 13, 2011, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Summer 2011, Dallas Museum of Art, October 16, 2011-January 15, 2012, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, February 18, 2012-May 20, 2012.
Alison Saar: Artist-in-residence, Spring 2003 April 1 - May 4, 2003
Fred Wilson
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Betye Saar: Still Tickin'
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Betye Saar has created powerful artworks that question traditional roles and representations of African Americans and women in the US, as well as deeply personal works about her family history and spirituality. Betye Saar: Still Tickin’ considers the breadth of the artist’s career and its key themes. To contextualize Saar’s works, this volume includes writings by the artist from the 1970s to the present day as well as a recent interview with Saar.