Black Studies: Visual Arts

Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights by Derek Conrad Murray 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.

Blacktino Queer Performance by E. Patrick Johnson (Editor); Ramón H. Rivera-Servera (Editor) 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.

A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire by Hiram Pérez 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.

Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life by Tavia Nyong'o Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory and imagination through which a queer and black polytemporality is invented and sustained. Moving past the antirelational debates in queer theory, Nyong'o posits queerness as “angular sociality,” drawing upon queer of color critique in order to name the gate and rhythm of black social life as it moves in and out of step with itself. He takes up a broad range of sites of analysis, from speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence to Blaxploitation cinema. Reading the archive of violence and trauma against the grain, Afro-Fabulations summons the poetic powers of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life.

Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity by Monica L. Miller Slaves to Fashion is a pioneering cultural history of the black dandy, from his emergence in Enlightenment England to his contemporary incarnations in the cosmopolitan art worlds of London and New York. Dandyism was initially imposed on black men in eighteenth-century England, as the Atlantic slave trade and an emerging culture of conspicuous consumption generated a vogue in dandified black servants. Tracing the history of the black dandy forward to contemporary celebrity incarnations such as Andre 3000, Miller explains how black people became arbiters of style and how they have historically used the dandy's signature tools—clothing, gesture, and wit—to break down limiting identity markers and propose new ways of fashioning political and social possibility in the black Atlantic world.

Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic by Eugenie Tsai; Connie H. Choi (Contribution by); Kehinde Wiley; Brooklyn Museum Staff (Contribution by) 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.

Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama = Hail the Dark Lioness by Zanele Muholi; Renée Mussai (Interviewer) The book features over ninety of Muholi’s evocative self-portraits, each image drafted from material props in Muholi’s immediate environment. These portraits reflect the journey, self-image, and possibilities of a black woman in today’s global society. A powerfully arresting collection of work, Muholi’s radical statements of identity, race, and resistance are a direct response to contemporary and historical racisms.

Mark Bradford by Christopher Bedford; Hilton Als; Robert Storr; Richard Shiff; Katy Siegel; Carol Eliel; Hamza Walker; Eungie Joo 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.

Isaac Julien: Riot by Isaac Julien 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.

Fred Wilson by Richard Klein; Fred Wilson

Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush by Marshall N. Price 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.

Deana Lawson: an Aperture Monograph by Deana Lawson (By (photographer)); Zadie Smith; Arthur Jafa (Interviewer); Deana Lawson Deana Lawson is one of the most compelling photographers of her generation. Over the last ten years, she has created a visionary language to describe identities through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals.

Muse: Mickalene Thomas - Photographs by Mickalene Thomas Mickalene Thomas, known for her large-scale, multitextured and rhinestone-encrusted paintings of domestic interiors and portraits, identifies the photographic image as a defining touchstone for her practice. Thomas began to photograph herself and her mother as a student at Yale, studying under David Hilliard—a pivotal experience for her as an artist. This volume is the first to gather together her various approaches to photography, including portraits, collages, Polaroids and other processes. The work is a personal act of deconstruction and reappropriation.

Glenn Ligon by Glenn Ligon

Whitfield Lovell: All Things in All Time by Bartholomew F. Bland; Lowery Stokes Sims (Introduction by) 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.

Dawoud Bey: The Chicago Project by Dawoud Bey; Dan Collison; Elizabeth Meister; Stephanie Smith; Jacqueline Terrassa Accompanies the exhibition, "Dawoud Bey": The Chicago Project, in collaboration with Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister, "presented at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Apr.24- Jun.22, 2003. It is the project of Bey's residency program at the museum. For each of 12 teenage participants, it contains Bey's portrait, each student's self-chosen photograph and written text, as well as transcripts of their audio portraits.

The Notion of Family by LaToya Ruby Frazier; Dennis C. Dickerson The Notion of Family, offers an incisive exploration of the legacy of racism and economic decline in America's small towns, as embodied by her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. The work also considers the impact of that decline on the community and on her family, creating a statement both personal and truly political-- an intervention in the histories and narratives of the region.

Wangechi Mutu: a Fantastic Journey by Trevor Schoonmaker 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 by Agustin Perez Rubio (Text by); Marcus Steinweg (Text by); Cay Sophie Rabinowitz (Text by) 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.

20 x 24: Recent Portraits by Lyle Ashton Harris Exhibition catalog from the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art (Ridgefield, Conn.)

Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1960-1988: the Explosive Force of the Streets by Emmerling Leonhard 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.

Nick Cave: Until by Nick Cave; Denise Markonish 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.