Art & Culture
- Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook
Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook
by Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall
$22.95*ships in 7 - 10 business days*
A guidebook to the institutional transformation of design theory and practice by restoring the long-excluded cultures of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities.
From the excesses of world expositions to myths of better living through technology, modernist design, in its European-based guises, has excluded and oppressed the very people whose lands and lives it reshaped. Decolonizing Design first asks how modernist design has encompassed and advanced the harmful project of colonization—then shows how design might address these harms by recentering its theory and practice in global Indigenous cultures and histories.
A leading figure in the movement to decolonize design, Dori Tunstall uses hard-hitting real-life examples and case studies drawn from over fifteen years of working to transform institutions to better reflect the lived experiences of Indigenous, Black, and People of Color communities. Her book is at once enlightening, inspiring, and practical, interweaving her lived experiences with extensive research to show what decolonizing design means, how it heals, and how to practice it in our institutions today.
For leaders and practitioners in design institutions and communities, Tunstall’s work demonstrates how we can transform the way we imagine and remake the world, replacing pain and repression with equity, inclusion, and diversity—in short, she shows us how to realize the infinite possibilities that decolonized design represents. - Barkley L. Hendricks: Basketball: Basketball Paintings (Vol. 3)
Barkley L. Hendricks: Basketball: Basketball Paintings (Vol. 3)
by Jack Shainman Gallery
$25.00The court, the ball and the hoop: Barkley Hendricks paints basketball
The third book of the five-volume publication project on Hendricks, famed for his postmodern portraiture of Black Americans.
The third book of the five-volume publication project presents the artist's basketball paintings. The publication highlights how basketball was a vital inspiration for Hendricks' art, as well as a way to experiment with the different shapes and forms of the playing court. For the first time, they are grouped together in a dedicated volume.
Skira and Jack Shainman Gallery have partnered to realize an unprecedented book project dedicated to the artist Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017). The project consists of 4 booklets, each of which provides an in-depth exploration of a body of work integral to the artist's output (Works on Paper, Landscape Paintings, Basketball Paintings, Photography), in addition to a comprehensive 300-page monograph which traces the artist's evolution for the entirety of his career.
The project is tied to an extensive and never-accomplished-before recovery of the artist's archive. Each book will contain essays by different scholars that are leading international players. Each booklet allows for a detailed, oriented study of key bodies of works - The Catch Me If You Can: One Woman's Journey to Every Country in the World by Jessica Nabongo
The Catch Me If You Can: One Woman's Journey to Every Country in the World by Jessica Nabongo
$35.00In this inspiring travelogue, celebrated traveler and photographer Jessica Nabongo—the first Black woman on record to visit all 195 countries in the world—shares her journey around the globe with fascinating stories of adventure, culture, travel musts, and human connections.
It was a daunting task, but Jessica Nabongo, the beloved voice behind the popular website The Catch Me if You Can, made it happen, completing her journey to all 195 UN-recognized countries in the world in October 2019. Now, in this one-of-a-kind memoir, she reveals her top 100 destinations from her global adventure.
Beautifully illustrated with many of Nabongo's own photographs, the book documents her remarkable experiences in each country, including:- A harrowing scooter accident in Nauru, the world’s least visited country,
- Seeing the life and community swarming around the Hazrat Ali Mazar mosque in Afghanistan,
- Horseback riding and learning to lasso with Black cowboys in Oklahoma,
- Playing dominoes with men on the streets of Havana,
- Learning to make traditional takoyaki (octopus balls) from locals in Japan,
- Dog sledding in Norway and swimming with humpback whales in Tonga,
- A late night adventure with strangers to cross a border in Guinea Bissau,
- And sunbathing on the sandy shores of Los Roques in Venezuela.
- The Motherlode: 100+ Women Who Made Hip-Hop
The Motherlode: 100+ Women Who Made Hip-Hop
by Clover Hope
$24.99*Ships in 7-10 business days*
An illustrated highlight reel of more than 100 women in rap who have helped shape the genre and eschewed gender norms in the process
The Motherlode highlights more than 100 women who have shaped the power, scope, and reach of rap music, including pioneers like Roxanne Shanté, game changers like Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliott, and current reigning queens like Nicki Minaj, Cardi B, and Lizzo—as well as everyone who came before, after, and in between. Some of these women were respected but not widely celebrated. Some are impossible not to know. Some of these women have stood on their own; others were forced into templates, compelled to stand beside men in big rap crews. Some have been trapped in a strange critical space between respected MC and object. They are characters, caricatures, lyricists, at times both feminine and explicit. This book profiles each of these women, their musical and career breakthroughs, and the ways in which they each helped change the culture of rap. - Dead and Alive: Essays
Dead and Alive: Essays
Zadie Smith
from $20.00*Paperback Release Date - 10/27/26*
A profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays
In the past two decades, few writers have mastered the craft and art of the essay in the way that Zadie Smith has. Her writing, at once an occasion for personal reckoning and communal reflection, studies the fault lines that divide us and consistently finds grounds for solidarity and compassion.
This eagerly awaited new collection brings Smith’s dexterity as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years. Organized in five thematic sections—eyeballing, considering, reconsidering, mourning, and confessing—she unspools intimate dialogues with various sources of inspiration. She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kara Walker. She invites us along to the movies in her review of Tár, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and to her desk while researching the Tichborne trial and writing her New York Times bestselling novel The Fraud. She asks us to take another look at Flannery O'Connor and to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison. And she shows us once again in Dead and Alive her unrivaled ability to think through, critically and humanely, some of the most urgent preoccupations of our troubled times.
With an eye toward the past and the present, Smith examines what it means to identify with our contemporary world and the history that frames it.
- Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
Kerry James Marshall
Sold outAccompanying the largest UK survey to date of work by the legendary Chicago-based figurative painter
This volume is the most extensive publication on Kerry James Marshall to date, celebrating half a century of his work. It reveals the complex ways in which Marshall has transformed histories of Western painting, centering Black bodies in ambitious compositions set in barber shops, public housing projects, parks and beauty salons. It charts his use of portraiture to memorialize individuals such as Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman and Olaudah Equiano. A new series, illustrated here for the first time, looks at under-acknowledged aspects of the history of Africa. With lavish illustrations of all the works in the accompanying exhibition, the book also includes chapters on Marshall's Rythm Mastr project and his various public commissions, including his stained-glass windows for the cathedral in Washington, DC. A survey by Mark Godfrey is accompanied by shorter essays by Aria Dean, Darby English and others, plus an interview between Kerry James Marshall and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh.
Kerry James Marshall was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955, and later moved to Los Angeles. He taught painting for many years at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2013, he was named for the Committee on the Arts and the Humanities by President Barack Obama. In 2017, Marshall was included in the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. The National Cathedral in Washington, DC, is currently working with Marshall to create two new stained-glass windows. Marshall lives and works in Chicago. - Empire Roller Disco: Photographs by Patrick D. Pagnano
Empire Roller Disco: Photographs by Patrick D. Pagnano
Patrick D. Pagnano
$32.00A photographic look at Brooklyn's iconic Empire Roller Disco by photographer Patrick D. Pagnano.
Brooklyn’s Empire Rollerdrome opened its doors in 1941 and soon became the borough’s premier destination for recreational and competitive roller skating. But it wasn’t until the late 1970s that the celebrated rink reached iconic status by replacing its organist with a live DJ, installing a state of the art sound and light system, and renaming itself after the nationwide dance craze it had helped to originate: the Empire Roller Disco was born. In 1980, the acclaimed street photographer Patrick D. Pagnano went on assignment to document the Empire and its legendary cast of partygoers. The resulting photographs, gathered in Empire Roller Disco for the first time, capture the vibrant spirits, extraordinary styles, and sheer joys of Brooklyn roller disco at its dizzying peak.
- Nina Chanel Abney
Nina Chanel Abney
Richard J. Powell
$69.95The highly anticipated debut monograph from trailblazing artist Nina Chanel Abney
Combining representation and abstraction, Nina Chanel Abney’s paintings capture the frenetic pace of contemporary culture. Broaching subjects as diverse as race, celebrity, religion, politics, sex, and art history, her works eschew linear storytelling in lieu of disjointed narratives. Through a bracing use of color and unapologetic scale, Abney’s canvases propose a new type of history painting.
The first definitive monograph on this contemporary American artist presents a collection of more than 300 works, including large-scale paintings, works on paper, sculptures, installations, murals, and commercial collaborations, along with a behind-the-scenes look at the artist’s process. Insightful texts from influential art-world figures and writers underscore Abney’s artistic impact.
Strikingly designed, with an eye-catching acetate jacket, vibrant pages, double gatefolds, and curated inserts, Nina Chanel Abney is a celebration of the artist’s distinctively bold style and innovative approach.
- Derrick Adams
Derrick Adams
Sandra Jackson-Dumont
Sold outThe highly anticipated first monograph on one of the most celebrated American contemporary artists
Through portraits, social scenes, photographs, sculptures, and immersive installations, Derrick Adams has developed an artistic practice that jocundly visualizes modern Black American life.
Equally informed by popular culture as he is by the history of modern art, Adams’s work brings the everyday experiences of Black Americans to the forefront, capturing fashionable moments of joy, resilience, and celebration. His artworks are filled with color, energy, and complexity, whether they depict intimate, everyday moments or grand, sweeping statements.
Adams’s first-ever monograph includes 150 of the most significant works from his thirty-year career, along with four newly commissioned texts from cultural luminaries. Filled with beautifully reproduced images and presented in a cloth case with a painting tipped onto the front cover, this stunning book establishes Derrick Adams as one of the most important figurative artists working today.
- Edges of Ailey
Edges of Ailey
by Adrienne Edwards and others
$65.00A revelatory look at the life, work, and legacy of the legendary choreographer Alvin Ailey
Alvin Ailey is one of the most celebrated choreographers of the twentieth century. The creator of iconic works such as Blues Suite, Revelations, and Cry, he is widely recognized for the dance company he founded in 1958 when he was just twenty-seven years old. Ailey imagined and cultivated a platform for modern dance through his innovative repertoire, interdisciplinary sensibility, and support of dancers and choreographers. This expansive volume situates Ailey within a broader social, creative, and cultural context, looking at the artists who influenced and collaborated with him, the spaces and scenes he frequented, the dynamic themes within his dances, and how his vision and work changed contemporary dance.
Essays by artists, scholars, and critics cover topics ranging from the Black church, the South, and the Great Migration to nightclubs, musical influences, and queerness. With more than four hundred images including photographs of works Ailey choreographed, archival materials such as notebooks, sketches, letters, and never-before-published behind-the-scenes photos, and conversations about the legacy of the company with Sylvia Waters, Judith Jamison, and Masazumi Chaya as well as several contemporary dancers and scholars, this study offers an unprecedented full picture of one of the twentieth century’s leading artists and the way his work continues to inspire today’s generation of dancers.
Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American Art
Exhibition Schedule:
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
(September 25, 2024–February 9, 2025) - Amoako Boafo
Amoako Boafo
$55.00*ships in 7-10 business days
The first monograph on the sinuous, exhilaratingly colorful and pattern-filled portraiture of Amoako Boafo
Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo has built a practice synthesizing the ways that art both reflects and perpetuates the power of representation. Amoako Boafo is the first monograph to comprehensively examine the artist's career to date. Heavily illustrated and featuring original contributions by Osei Bonsu, Rachel Cargle, Mutombo Da Poet and Aja Monet, the book also presents an insightful and expansive conversation with the artist by Paul Schimmel.
Exclusively portraying individuals from the diaspora and beyond, Boafo invites a reflection on Black subjectivity, diversity and complexity. His portraits, notable for their bold colors and patterns, celebrate his subjects as a means to challenge portrayals that objectify and dehumanize Blackness. As Boafo has stated, “the primary idea of my practice is representation, documenting, celebrating and showing new ways to approach Blackness.”
Amoako Boafo (born 1984) studied at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design in Accra, Ghana, in 2007, before attending the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, for his MFA. His first solo exhibition in the US, entitled I See Me, opened at Roberts Projects in 2019. That same year, Boafo was the first artist-in-residence at the new Rubell Museum in Miami, Florida. In 2020, he collaborated with Kim Jones, Dior Men’s creative director, for Dior’s Spring/Summer 2021 Men’s Collection. In 2021, Boafo was selected by the Uplift Art Program to create the inaugural “Suborbital Triptych” on the exterior panels of a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket, launched August 2021. - The Amen Corner
The Amen Corner
by James Balwin
$13.95*Ship in 7-10 Business Days*
A scalding, uplifting, sorrowful, and exultant masterpiece of the modern American theater, The Amen Corner is a play about faith and family, about the gulf between black men and black women and black fathers and black sons.
In his first work for the theater, James Baldwin brought all the fervor and majestic rhetoric of the storefront churches of his childhood along with an unwavering awareness of the price those churches exacted from their worshipers.
For years Sister Margaret Alexander has moved her Harlem congregation with a mixture of personal charisma and ferocious piety. But when Margaret's estranged husband, a scapegrace jazz musician, comes home to die, she is in danger of losing both her standing in the church and the son she has tried to keep on the godly path. - Frida Kahlo: Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair: Expanded Edition
Frida Kahlo: Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair: Expanded Edition
Sold outA gift-worthy hardcover edition reexamining Kahlo's most subversive yet heart-wrenching self-portrait
In 1940, in the wake of a divorce from her husband Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo (1907–54) turned to self-portraiture to express her deepest emotional and psychological impulses, and completed a painting inscribed with the lyrics of a popular folk song, "La Pelona": "Look, if I loved you it was for your hair. Now that you're without it, I no longer love you." In Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, Kahlo's usual lively and saturated palette is supplanted by neutral hues, her Tehuana dress by a man's suit and her plaited hair by shorn locks that appear to wriggle up from the floor and around her chair, strangely alive. Nevertheless, the painting remains unmistakably Kahlo's, intensely felt, dreamlike and displaying references that encompass both popular culture and details from the artist's private life. In this richly illustrated volume, which includes the artist's most celebrated self-portraits and other related images, art historian Jodi Roberts situates the painting in the context of the Mexican Revolution, the Surrealist tradition and Kahlo's own changing of her artistic identity. This expanded hardcover edition includes additional illustrations and photographs, and features a die-cut on the front cover.
- Hew Locke: Passages
Hew Locke: Passages
$75.00An in-depth look at the innovative career of an artist renowned for his multimedia explorations of colonial and postcolonial power
For the past thirty years, Guyanese British artist Hew Locke (b. 1959) has used strategies of appropriation to reveal and upend the visual codes of imperialism. Incorporating sculpture, photography, drawing, and found objects, Locke’s oeuvre has been described as a “postcolonial baroque” that deconstructs and reimagines deeply entrenched iconographies of British sovereignty. This richly illustrated catalogue showcases the full spectrum of Locke’s practice, bringing together distinct bodies of work that scrutinize the visual language of empire and colonialism’s present-day legacies of global market capitalism, migration, and diaspora. Essays from leading curators, critics, and scholars of contemporary art situate Locke’s work within the context of colonial and postcolonial history and theory, reveal how his use of nontraditional materials―including cardboard, fabric, beads, sequins, and readymade toys―enables the artist to reflect on his Guyanese-British heritage, and consider how the artist’s dense, highly textured, and multilayered works fuse vernacular and formal traditions.
Published by the Yale Center for British Art/Distributed by Yale University Press
Exhibition Schedule:
Yale Center for British Art
(October 2, 2025–January 11, 2026)
Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH
(February 13–May 24, 2026)
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
(June 21–September 13, 2026) - Analogue Africa: Notes on the Anti-Colonial Imagination
Analogue Africa: Notes on the Anti-Colonial Imagination
$26.95A COLLECTION OF INCISIVE ESSAYS ABOUT AFRICAN ART, CULTURE AND THE CONTINENT’S STRUGGLE TO SHAKE OFF EUROPEAN RULE
Too many of our convictions about the fifty-four nations of Africa come from non-African sources. Western media often treat the continent as a simulacrum of Western anxieties. In contrast, Jeremy Harding focuses on specific historical episodes and cultural practices – cinema, art, ethnography and journalism – to steer us away from treacherous generalisations.
Analogue Africa celebrates the ingenuity with which African artists – and a handful of Europeans – have reimagined the colonial encounter and voiced their impatience with white minority rule. Among his illustrious cast of filmmakers, photographers, writers and painters are Seydou Keïta, Sanlé Sory, Ernest Cole, Sarah Maldoror, John Akomfrah, William Kentridge and Binyavanga Wainaina. Harding argues that Western museums with priceless African holdings – the British Museum, the Musée du Quai Branly, the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Belgium – are now the sites of a struggle over the colonial past, adding the latest chapter to an unfinished history.
- Making Art
Making Art
Diana Ejaita
Sold outA celebration of the many ways we make art, spanning mediums, geography, and resources from author-artist Diana Ejaita.
Art is for everyone! From found objects to sidewalk chalk, from homemade instruments to breakdancing, from building with blocks to molding clay, art is natural and healing. Readers will be encouraged by the invitation to create anything, anywhere, with any materials. Inclusive and expansive, Ejaita portrays a wide cast of characters exploring their own feelings and ideas, accompanied by a poignant, yet easily understood, text. This deceptively simple and stunningly composed picture book offers children a sense of what art can be, and the ways in which it adds beauty to our lives.
- Prospect Park: Photographs of a Brooklyn Oasis, 1980 to 2025
Prospect Park: Photographs of a Brooklyn Oasis, 1980 to 2025
Jamel Shabazz, Laylah Amatullah Barray, Richard E. Green
$45.00Spanning 45 years of Jamel Shabazz’s photography in Prospect Park, this gorgeous and meditative volume captures the heart and soul of Brooklyn through one of its most cherished spaces.
Known for his iconic NYC street photography documenting the city’s African American community, Jamel Shabazz first gained widespread acclaim with his books Back in the Days and A Time Before Crack, renowned for their vivid portrayal of 1980s style and culture.
However, long before his fame as a photographer, Shabazz served in the military and as a corrections officer for twenty years. After long days at work, he often sought refuge in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, describing it as a place to find inner peace—and, since 1980, he has continued capturing its vibrant spirit.
This collection features his signature portraits of locals, from Afro-Caribbean percussionists at Drummer’s Grove to multicultural families enjoying moments of quiet reflection. Complementing these human-centered images are lesser-seen landscapes revealing the serene beauty of the park.
Together, these photographs underscore its dual role as a bustling cultural hub and a tranquil refuge. Perfect for anyone who cherishes Brooklyn’s cultural history, this volume reveals a new and deeply personal side of Shabazz's work, offering a compelling portrait of community, resilience, and connection within an urban sanctuary.
- Queer Histories
Queer Histories
Adriano Pedrosa
$75.00A chromatic celebration of LGBTQIA+ artists, queer and trans activisms and the "queering" of history, with works by Andrea Geyer, Claude Cahun, Félix González-Torres, Martin Wong, Peter Hujar, Roberto Burle Marx and many more
Since 2016, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) has centered its exhibition program on exploring different histories, with each year featuring a large-scale, international and transhistorical group exhibition, paired with an exquisitely produced catalog. Following the bestselling titles Afro-Atlantic Histories and Indigenous Histories, Queer Histories is the next chapter in this cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary survey series exploring underrepresented or marginalized narratives.
Gathering more than 200 artworks from public and private collections in Brazil and abroad, Queer Histories is organized into seven sections: "Love, family and communities," "The sacred and the profane," "Signs and spaces," "Activism and archives," "Survival," "Queer Abstraction" and "Visibility." While many of the artists featured in Queer Histories are working in the wake of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and its profound impact on queer and trans communities, the exhibition goes beyond artists who identify as LGBTQIA+, approaching queerness as a lens through which to reinterpret the world, to queer history and to reclaim erased narratives. This compendium is a critical resource for understanding how art and history continue to function as sites of resistance and transformation in LGBTQIA+ lives.
Artists include: Andrea Geyer, Andy Warhol, Beverly Buchanan, Catherine Opie, Claude Cahun, David Wojnarowicz, Etel Adnan, Félix González-Torres, Glenn Ligon, Kia LaBeija, Leonilson, Martin Wong, Miguel Ángel Rojas, Peter Hujar, Roberto Burle Marx, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Salman Toor, Tseng Kwong Chi, Tuesday Smillie, Yuki Kihara, Zanele Muholi. - Arthur Jafa. Live Evil (English): LUMA
Arthur Jafa. Live Evil (English): LUMA
Flora Katz
Sold outRichly illustrated catalogue of the works of one of the most significant contemporary artists practicing today. In his both powerful and lyrical works, Jafa consistently reflects on the ontology of race and of blackness. Over several decades, Arthur Jafa has constructed a compelling body of work that defies categorization. Both powerful and lyrical, his practice combines a profoundly unsettling blend of images and histories. Bringing together affective memories that touch on the history of the United States of America, violence, repression, modalities of survival, and how these exist in the production and dissemination of images, music, sound, and time-based media, Jafa reflects on the ontology of race and of blackness. The catalogue explores the philosophical, historical, and artistic implications of Jafa’s work, featuring essays and a series of conversations between Jafa and key practitioners working in the fields of cinema, arts, and theory. Text: Norman Ajari, Tina M. Campt, Liam Gillick, Ernest Hardy, Saidiya Hartman, R.A. Judy, Nathaniel Mackey, Fred Moten, Julian Myers, Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Peter Saville, James A. Snead, Greg Tate, and Peter Watts.
- Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940
Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940
Maria Elna Ortiz
Sold outHow modern and contemporary artists across the African and Caribbean diasporas transformed European Surrealism into a tool for Black expression
On the centennial anniversary of André Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto, Surrealism and Us shines new light on how Surrealism was consumed and transformed in the Caribbean and the United States. It brings together more than 50 works from the 1940s to the present that convey how Caribbean and African diasporic artists reclaimed a European avant-garde for their own purposes.
Since its inception, the Surrealist movement―and many other European art movements of the early 20th century―embraced and transformed African art, poetry and music traditions. Concurrently, artists in the Americas proposed subsets of Surrealism more closely tied to African diasporic culture. In Martinique, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire proposed a Caribbean Surrealism that challenged principles of order and reason and embraced African spiritualities. Meanwhile, artists in the United States such as Romare Bearden and Ted Joans engaged deeply with Surrealist ideas. These trends lasted far beyond those of their European counterparts. Indeed, the term “Afro-surrealism” was created by poet Amiri Baraka in 1974; today the movement still flourishes in tandem with Afrofuturism. The Surrealism and Us catalog is divided into three themes: “To Dare,” “Invisibility” and “Super/Reality”. These sections, galvanized by scholarly essays, create transnational and multi-generational connections between Black life and artistic practice over the past 100 years.
Artists include: Firelei Báez, Agustin Cárdenas, Myrlande Constant, Rafael Ferrer, Ja’Tovia Gary, Hector Hyppolite, Ted Joans, Wifredo Lam, Simone Leigh, Kerry James Marshall. - The Nameplate: Jewelry, Culture, and Identity
The Nameplate: Jewelry, Culture, and Identity
by Marcel Rosa-Salas & Isabel Attyah Flower
$30.00*Ships in 7-10 business days*
The Nameplate is a vibrant photographic celebration of nameplate jewelry featuring deeply personal stories and rich cultural contexts, collected by the creators of the Documenting the Nameplate project.
Nameplate jewelry comes in many shapes, styles, and sizes—from simple scripted pendants to bejeweled rings, belts, and bracelets with a first, last, and/or nickname. Like so many individuals who proudly wear nameplates, Marcel Rosa-Salas and Isabel Attyah Flower were first introduced to this storied jewelry during childhood. Their love of the style gradually blossomed into a wide-reaching research project, Documenting the Nameplate, through which they've spent years collecting photographs and testimonials from nameplate-wearers across the country and world.
Featuring essays and interviews from scholars and cultural figures, portraits by contemporary photographers, archival imagery, and a historical exploration into the multifaceted and often overlooked significance of nameplate jewelry, The Nameplate is a tribute to the people who make, wear, and cherish it. - Pieces Of A Man
Pieces Of A Man
by Jamel Shabazz
$60.00*ships in 7 - 10 business days*
‘Pieces of a Man’ brings together 25 years of street photographs by noted American photographer Jamel Shabazz.“Beginning in Brooklyn’s tight-knit neighborhoods, including his own, Jamel Shabazz captured a true reflection of people of color now revered as a form of social commentary.
His work resonates around the world because it is authentic. He has the authority to speak for us and yet he maintains genuine humility and respect for his people. From the streets of Brooklyn to Europe to Africa, Jamel’s work is inclusive and compassionate without imposing his views on how people should represent themselves. He gives his subjects control over their own image, and in that you see the dignity that he sees in them; turning everyday people into icons. While some celebrate an era or style, Jamel reminds us to celebrate the people, not just the image.”
- When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting
When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting
edited by Koyo Kouoh
Sold out*ships in 7-10 business days
This landmark publication accompanies an international touring exhibition devoted to Black figuration in painting from the 1920s to now, featuring artists from Africa and the African diaspora.
Published to accompany a major exhibition at Zeitz MOCAA, CapeTown, When We See Us presents a comprehensive exploration of Black representation through portraiture and figuration, celebrating Black subjectivity and Black consciousness from Pan-African and Pan-Diasporic perspectives.
In the past decade, figurative painting by Black artists has risento a new prominence in the field of contemporary art. This timely and revelatory book highlights the many ways in which artists critically engage with notions of blackness, contributing to the critical discourse on topics such as Pan-Africanism, the Civil Rights Movement, African Liberation and Independence movements, the Anti-Apartheid and Black Consciousness mobilizations, Decoloniality, and Black Lives Matter.
With a primary focus on figurative painting, When We See Us explores how Black artists have imagined, positioned, memorialized, and asserted African and African diasporic experiences from the early 20th century to the present day. Featuring more than 200 works of art—and contributions from well-known writers such as Ken Bugul, Maaza Mengiste, Robin Coste Lewis, and Bill Kouelany—When We See Us is a major contribution to our understanding of Black art that will appeal to anyone interested in modern and contemporary figurative art and Black cultural history.
- What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation by Tom Finkelpearl
What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation by Tom Finkelpearl
$39.95What We Made presents a series of fifteen conversations in which contemporary artists who create activist, participatory work discuss the cooperative process. Colleagues from fields including architecture, art history, urban planning, and new media join the conversations.
In What We Made, Tom Finkelpearl examines the activist, participatory, coauthored aesthetic experiences being created in contemporary art. He suggests social cooperation as a meaningful way to think about this work and provides a framework for understanding its emergence and acceptance. In a series of fifteen conversations, artists comment on their experiences working cooperatively, joined at times by colleagues from related fields, including social policy, architecture, art history, urban planning, and new media. Issues discussed include the experiences of working in public and of working with museums and libraries, opportunities for social change, the lines between education and art, spirituality, collaborative opportunities made available by new media, and the elusive criteria for evaluating cooperative art. Finkelpearl engages the art historians Grant Kester and Claire Bishop in conversation on the challenges of writing critically about this work and the aesthetic status of the dialogical encounter. He also interviews the often overlooked co-creators of cooperative art, "expert participants" who have worked with artists. In his conclusion, Finkelpearl argues that pragmatism offers a useful critical platform for understanding the experiential nature of social cooperation, and he brings pragmatism to bear in a discussion of Houston's Project Row Houses. - Wild Creations: Inspiring Projects to Create plus Plant Care Tips & Styling Ideas for Your Own Wild Interior illustrated by Hilton Carter
Wild Creations: Inspiring Projects to Create plus Plant Care Tips & Styling Ideas for Your Own Wild Interior illustrated by Hilton Carter
$24.99*ships in 7-10 business days*
Dubbed the "LeBron James of plant styling..." by "Good Morning America," Hilton Carter now shows how you can make, style, decorate, and care for your own stunning plant-inspired interior with his 25 step-by-step DIY projects and plant hacks.
In plant and interior stylist Hilton Carter’s previous books he has given us glimpses into stunning plant-filled homes where ivy and creeping figs hang miraculously from ceilings, mosses grow effortlessly to create living walls, and succulents flourish planted in terrariums. Now in Wild Creations, Hilton will show you how you can actually create these amazing fixtures for your own home. There are step-by-step instructions for Wild Ideas—making projects such as a wall mounted plant and a leather hanging plant stand, genius Wild Hacks for all of your plant worries from how to water your plants while you are away to repelling bugs, thought-provoking Wild Rants looking at the transformative power of plants, and finally a detailed look at ten key Wild Plants and how to care for them. Design and learn about your very own wild interior, get creative, and get WILD! - Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights (International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art) by Derek Conrad Murray
Queering Post-Black Art: Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights (International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art) by Derek Conrad Murray
Sold outWhat impact do sexual politics and queer identities have on the understanding of 'blackness' as a set of visual, cultural and intellectual concerns? In Queering Post-Black Art, Derek Conrad 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. In their own unique, often satirical way, a new generation of contemporary African American artists represent the ever-evolving sexual and gender politics that have come to define the highly controversial notion of 'post-black' art. First coined in 2001, the term 'post-black' resonated because it articulated the frustrations of young African-American artists around notions of identity and belonging that they perceived to be stifling, reductive and exclusionary. Since then, these artists have begun to conceive an idea of blackness that is beyond marginalization and sexual discrimination. - Black Interior: Essays
Black Interior: Essays
by Elizabeth Alexander
$15.00*Ships in 7-10 business days*
With a poet's precision and an intellectually adventurous spirit, Elizabeth Alexander explores a wide spectrum of contemporary African American artistic life through literature, paintings, popular media, and films, and discusses its place in current culture. In The Black Interior, she examines the vital roles of such heavyweight literary figures as Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Rita Dove, as well as lesser known, yet vibrant, new creative voices. She offers a reconsideration of "afro-outré" painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, the concept of "race-pride" in Jet magazine, and her take on Denzel Washington's career as a complex black male icon in a post-affirmative action era. Also available is Alexander's much heralded essay on Rodney King, Emmett Till, and the collective memory of racial violence.
Alexander, who has been a professor at the University of Chicago and Smith College, and recently at Yale University, has taught and lectured on African American art and culture across the country and abroad for nearly two decades. In The Black Interior, she directs her scrupulous poet's eye to the urgent cultural issues of the day. This lively collection is a crucial volume for understanding current thinking on race, art, and culture in America. - Soul of A Nation
Soul of A Nation
by Edmund Gaither
$39.95*ships in 7 - 10 business days*
African American art in the era of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers
In the period of radical change that was 1963–83, young black artists at the beginning of their careers confronted difficult questions about art, politics and racial identity. How to 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?
Soul of a Nation surveys this crucial period in American art history, bringing to light previously neglected histories of 20th-century black artists, including Sam Gilliam, Melvin Edwards, Jack Whitten, William T. Williams, Howardina Pindell, Romare Bearden, David Hammons, Barkley L. Hendricks, Senga Nengudi, Noah Purifoy, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Charles White and Frank Bowling.
The book features substantial essays from Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley, writing on abstraction and figuration, respectively. It also explores the art-historical and social contexts with subjects ranging from black feminism, AfriCOBRA and other artist-run groups to the role of museums in the debates of the period and visual art’s relation to the Black Arts Movement. Over 170 artworks by these and many other artists of the era are illustrated in full color.
2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the first use of the term “black power” by student activist Stokely Carmichael; it will also be 50 years since the US Supreme Court overturned the prohibition of interracial marriage. At this turning point in the reassessment of African American art history, Soul of a Nation is a vital contribution to this timely subject.
- Black Photojournalism
Black Photojournalism
Charlene Foggie-Barnett
$65.00A landmark survey of Black American photojournalism spanning 1945 to 1984, chronicling a critical period in the civil rights movements in the United States
This volume presents work by 57 Black photographers and contributions from scholars such as Joy Bivins, Tina M. Campt and Gerald Horne, chronicling historic events and daily life in the United States from the conclusion of World War II in 1945 to the presidential campaigns of 1984, including the civil rights movements through the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Drawn from archives and collections in the care of journalists, libraries, museums, newspapers, photographers and universities, the photographs in the catalog were circulated and reviewed in publishing offices across the country.
Responding to a dearth of stories about Black lives told from the perspectives of Black people, Black publishers and their staff created groundbreaking editorial and photojournalistic methods and news networks. During a period of urgent social change and civil rights advocacy, newspapers and magazines, including the Afro American News, Atlanta Daily World, Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender and Ebony, transformed how people were able to access seeing themselves and their communities. Their impact on the media landscape continues into the digital present.
The catalog is published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at Carnegie Museum of Art. The exhibition and catalog are both designed by artist David Hartt, and organized and edited by Charlene Foggie-Barnett, Charles ""Teenie"" Harris, community archivist, and Dan Leers, curator of photography, in dialogue with an expanded network of archivists, curators, historians and scholars.
Photographers include: Harry Adams, Anthony Barboza, Kwame Brathwaite, Don Hogan Charles, Adger Cowans, Guy Crowder, Roy DeCarava, Doris Derby, Bob Douglas, Louis Draper, Theodore Gaffney, Charles "Teenie" Harris, Chester Higgins, Kojo Kamau, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Marilyn Nance, Gordon Parks, Ming Smith, Bruce Talamon, Deborah Willis-Ryan. - Bisa Butler: Portraits
Bisa Butler: Portraits
$35.00A beautifully illustrated look at the work of one of today’s most exciting artists
Bisa Butler (b. 1973) is an American artist who creates arresting and psychologically nuanced portraits composed entirely of vibrantly colored and patterned fabrics that she cuts, layers, and stitches together. Often depicting scenes from African American life and history, Butler invites viewers to invest in the lives of the people she represents while simultaneously expanding art-historical narratives about American quiltmaking. Situating her interdisciplinary work within the broader history of textiles, photography, and contemporary art, contributions by a group of scholars—and entries by the artist herself—illuminate Butler’s approach to color, use of African-print fabrics, and wide-ranging sources of inspiration. Offering an in-depth exploration of one of America’s most innovative contemporary artists, this volume will serve as a primary resource that both introduces Butler’s work and establishes a scholarly foundation for future research.
Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago
Exhibition Schedule:
Katonah Museum of Art, New York
(March 15–October 4, 2020)
Art Institute of Chicago
(November 14, 2020–September 6, 2021) - The Harlem Book of the Dead
The Harlem Book of the Dead
Sold outAvailable for the first time since 1978, The Harlem Book of the Dead showcases James Van Der Zee's unflinching creative vision
Originally published in 1978, The Harlem Book of the Dead is a haunting and beautiful document of Black funerary traditions in Harlem, capturing the community's mourning rituals through the lens of one of the Harlem Renaissance's most celebrated photographers. The publication is the most complete record of Van Der Zee's funerary photographs, featuring over three dozen portraits by the artist, who meticulously composed the setting and the subjects before using his renowned darkroom and retouching skills to superimpose celestial figures, poetry, biblical scenes or portraits onto the images to compensate for lack of adornments, such as flowers, or to fulfill the requests of his subjects or their families.
These portraits are complemented and captioned by poems from Owen Dodson and a wide-ranging interview with Van Der Zee by the sculptor and filmmaker Camille Billops, who conceptualized and edited the publication. This facsimile edition reproduces the printing and specifications of the 1978 publication. The original foreword by Toni Morrison is included, and accompanied by a newly commissioned afterword by Karla FC Holloway, author of the canonical Passed On (2001).
James Van Der Zee (1886–1983) began working as a photographer in 1915, and by the following year had opened his photography studio on West 135th Street in Harlem. His images of Black New Yorkers, together with celebrities such as Langston Hughes, Joe Louis and Marcus Garvey, form an indelible corpus of images of the Harlem Renaissance. - Ethiopian Devotions: Paintings, Illuminated Manuscripts, and Processional Crosses from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Centuries
Ethiopian Devotions: Paintings, Illuminated Manuscripts, and Processional Crosses from the Fourteenth to the Twentieth Centuries
Marilyn E. Heldman
$40.00Admire stunning Christian imagery of Ethiopian Orthodox Church art in this lavishly illustrated volume with informative essays and more than 100 images
Ethiopia is one of the world’s oldest Christian civilizations, and its rich artistic history often centers on religious themes and practices. Ranging from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries, Ethiopian Devotions celebrates an incredible collection of work, from a free-standing basilica carved from living rock, to the tradition of Ethiopic hagiography describing the lives of saints, to diptych and triptych icons of veneration — miniature paintings distinctive for their vibrant colors and soulful eyes.
Insightful essays present Ethiopia’s devotional arts, and place in context the images of illustrated manuscripts, panel paintings, inscribed portraits, murals, crosses, garments, devotional images, prayer staffs, church and monastery architecture, and more, while exploring their connection to liturgical music and literature.
Written by distinguished scholars in the field, the book’s exploration of Ethiopia’s cultural, artistic, and religious traditions is authoritative, and its more than 100 images reveal the depth, beauty and detail embodied in the artwork. Ethiopian Devotions offers readers the opportunity to understand and admire radiant art and learn about its long and remarkable history.
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