Through paintings, sculptures, drawings and more, John Wilson's work foregrounds the human experience and refuses invisibility

American artist John Wilson was not only a master draftsman, printmaker, painter and sculptor active for over seven decades, but he was also a keen observer and social activist. In his representations of Black Americans in particular, he sought to pay homage to the beauty and truths of ordinary Black people in such a way that all viewers, across race and culture, might see themselves reflected. His multidisciplinary works include unflinching representations of racial violence and war, tender family portraits, monumental bronze heads and landmark commissions such as the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., which stands in the United States Capitol.
The first major retrospective of the artist’s work, Witnessing Humanity sheds light on Wilson’s life and artistic evolution. Reproductions of artworks and photographs accompany critical essays and personal reflections, including analyses by art historians, interviews with Wilson’s peers, remembrances from fellow Black creatives and a full chronology by the late artist’s gallerist. The varied voices which resonate through this catalog illustrate that it is long past time to recognize Wilson’s art―to celebrate his lifelong dedication to depicting what he described as the "reality of being Black in this impossible world."
John Woodrow Wilson (1922–2015) was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University. He lived in Mexico for five years and became a friend and colleague of artist Elizabeth Catlett. Wilson taught fine art at Boston University from 1964 until 1986.

Considered the foremost exponent of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra mastered a wide array of styles that spanned jazz, R&B, experimental, and chamber works. In his 45-year recording career, he issued an epic number of albums and was one of the first Black musicians to own an independent label, which he named Saturn, after the planet on which he claimed to have been born. The covers of Saturn LPs, issued from 1957 to 1988, are iconic―some rolled off commercial printing presses but many were hand-crafted and were sold at concerts, club dates, and by mail order. As collectibles, original handmade Saturn covers sell for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars. More than just packaging for a slab of vinyl, they are works of art in their own right. Sun Ra: Art on Saturn is the first comprehensive collection of all Saturn printed covers, along with hundreds of the best hand-designed, one-of-a-kind sleeves and disc labels, decorated by Ra himself and members of his Arkestra. Essays by Ra preservationist Irwin Chusid, noted Ra scholar John Corbett, and Glenn Jones, who signed Ra to a distribution deal that put countless homemade covers into circulation, add insights into the interplanetary life and work of Sun Ra and his Saturn partner Alton Abraham.

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A multidisciplinary look at the foremost archive of Black American visual culture, as recast by Theaster Gates

This book features essays and other reflections commissioned in response to the Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories, a monumental participatory work by Theaster Gates (born 1973). The Cabinet includes nearly 3,000 framed images of women from the Johnson Publishing Company archive, and highlights from the collection appear in this edited volume.
Founded in 1942, Chicago-based Johnson Publishing chronicled the lives of Black Americans for more than seven decades through the magazines Ebony and Jet. Composed from arguably the most important archive of American Black visual culture in the 20th century, Gates’ work centers the essential and too often unsung role of women in this history.
When the Cabinet was exhibited at the Colby College Museum of Art, 12 women from a wide range of disciplines (including archivists, legal scholars, anthropologists and librarians, as well as curators, visual artists, filmmakers, writers and art historians) were invited to reflect on a work that brings a sisterhood of images to light.

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An artist’s odyssey from Jim Crow–era Georgia to the Yale Art Gallery—a stunningly vivid, full-color memoir in prose and painted leather, with a foreword by Bryan Stevenson.

Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, later survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent the next seven years on chain gangs.

During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of 51 and with Patsy’s encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather tooling skills he learned in prison.

Chasing Me to My Grave presents Rembert’s breathtaking body of work alongside his story, as told to Tufts Philosopher Erin I. Kelly. Rembert calls forth vibrant scenes of Black life on Cuthbert, Georgia’s Hamilton Avenue, where he first glimpsed the possibility of a life outside the cotton field. As he pays tribute, exuberant and heartfelt, to Cuthbert’s Black community and the people, including his wife, Patsy, who helped him to find the courage to revisit a traumatic past, Rembert brings to life the promise and the danger of Civil Rights protest, the brutalities of incarceration, his search for his mother’s love, and the epic bond he found with Patsy.

Vivid, confrontational, revelatory, and complex, Chasing Me to My Grave is a searing memoir in prose and paintings that celebrates Black life and summons readers to confront painful and urgent realities at the heart of American history and society

A richly illustrated account tracing the full arc of contemporary painter Suzanne Jackson’s life and multifaceted artistic vision

First and foremost a painter, Suzanne Jackson has worked for six decades in a dizzying array of genres, including drawing, printmaking, poetry, dance, and theater design. Suzanne Jackson: What Is Love reveals Jackson’s achievements as a leading and influential artist who has been in dialogue with her contemporaries, from Betye Saar and Emory Douglas to Senga Nengudi and Mary Lovelace O’Neal.

This wide-ranging book illuminates Jackson’s work and its connections to nature, environmentalism, performance, feminism, and Black and Native traditions. It explores the way her innovative hanging acrylic works break the canvas; the role of dance and set design in Jackson’s practice; and her trailblazing Los Angeles art space Gallery 32, which she ran from 1968 to 1970, and which became a focus for a circle of fellow emerging artists. The book also features artist dialogues between Jackson and Nengudi, Saar, Fred Eversley, and Richard Mayhew, as well as a conversation between Jackson and SFMOMA painting conservator Jennifer Hickey.

Exhibition Schedule
SFMOMA, San Francisco
September 27, 2025–March 1, 2026

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis
May 14, 2026–August 23, 2026

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
September 26, 2026–February 7, 2027

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Rap Year Book and Basketball (and Other Things), a clever and inventive examination of some of basketball's most iconic players, moments, games, and more.

Everything in basketball is measured. Everything in basketball is counted, and quantified, and computed. And yet, no matter how expansive the list of various pinpoint-specific statistical categories gets, some basketball things remain uncountable, and unquantifiable.

Some moments are more poetry than calculation; more art than numerical value; more feeling than data processing. And thus: Expensive Basketball.

From the final 196 seconds of Kobe Bryant’s playing career to the Sue Bird backpedal, from the erosive terror of Tim Duncan to the Larry Bird memory carousel, Expensive Basketball is an affirmation of feelings.

It’s an affirmation of basketball as virtuosity. 

It’s an affirmation of how sometimes you watch a person perform on the basketball court and it feels the same way it does when you lie in the grass at night and stare up at the moon for long enough that you start to think about how incredible it is that you really, truly, honestly, actually exist.

PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: March 24, 2026

The award-winning co-anchor of PBS NewsHour presents a sweeping and insightful retrospective on the history of Black comedy in America.

Black comedians have long played a pivotal role in shaping the American sense of humor. The 1990s showcased a golden era for Black comedy, highlighted by the surge of iconic sitcoms that redefined television and left a lasting cultural imprint. Shows like In Living Color, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Living Single, Martin, and A Different World stood on the shoulders of decades of groundbreaking work by Black comedians, both on-screen and on-stage, to deliver nuanced portrayals of life, family, and culture. Yet, just decades earlier, the idea of Black artists dominating American airwaves with characters that were both hilarious and heartfelt would have been unimaginable. How did it come to be?

The journey begins with 19th-century minstrel shows – offensive by today’s standards but the first stage for Black performers to reach mainstream audiences. Over time, comedians challenged racial stereotypes, exploring race and identity through humor. Icons like Jackie “Moms” Mabley, Redd Foxx, Dick Gregory, Flip Wilson, Richard Pryor, Whoopi Goldberg, and Eddie Murphy shifted perceptions and changed how the nation understood itself. In this incisive history, Geoff Bennett tells the story of how they did it.

In Black Out Loud, Bennett chronicles the transformative history of Black comedy in America, drawing on research and interviews with the actors and executives behind some of the most impactful shows. This brilliant exploration traces the evolution of Black comics and provocateurs who reshaped the culture and ultimately became powerful agents of social change -- transforming the way America laughed along the way.

Includes interviews and insights from: Martin Lawrence, Robert Townsend, Debbie Allen, Tisha Campbell, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Quinta Brunson, Arsenio Hall, and many more!

What began as an effort to prevent the neglect and potential loss of hundreds of African objects at the University of Texas at Austin has evolved into one of the most significant collections on campus. The art collections at Black Studies were born from the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies’ Art and Archive Initiative, under the leadership of Cherise Smith, Omi L. Jones, and Edmund T. Gordon.

Today Black Studies at the University of Texas boasts approximately 900 objects from sub-Saharan Africa, over 200 contemporary works from African American and Afro-Caribbean artists, and more than 100 pieces jointly held with other collecting entities on campus, adding a diverse richness to the overall collections. Collecting Black Studies gathers and presents these holdings—including costumes, jewelry, paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and photography—and prominently features five Black artists whose work is particularly significant. Scholars and curators examine how John Biggers, Michael Ray Charles, Christina Coleman, Angelbert Metoyer, and Deborah Roberts—artists with deep relationships to Texas—contributed to the Black Studies collections, to art history, and to the culture of our state and beyond.

The iconic comic created by contemporary African American artist Kerry James Marshall.

Marshall, widely considered one of America’s greatest living painters and inspired chronicler of the African American experience, has sought to diversify the art historical canon. In the late 1990s, he began working on a series of comics in response to the absence of authentic black characters and authors in the mainstream.

Marshall’s comic offers an alternative reality focused on the main character, Rythm Mastr, and his young protégé, Farell, superheroes whose powers derive from the seven gods of the Yoruba pantheon. Marshall’s characters debate history, philosophy, and politics in vernacular black English using the graphic novel medium to create an empowering, utopian blend of science fiction and Afrofuturism.

Initially serialized in a daily newspaper and presented as a Carnegie International installation, it has appeared in various incarnations over the past two decades, including light boxes, paintings, graphic prints, and drawings. This volume is the most comprehensive look at the character, its genesis, and its evolution.

PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: September 1, 2026

The definitive photographic celebration of John Coltrane's life and music, featuring exclusive contributions written by Ravi Coltrane, Wayne Coyne, Dev Hynes, Phil Lesh, Julie Mehretu, Carlos Santana, and Patti Smith.

John Coltrane's impact on music and culture endures far beyond his prolific career and untimely death in 1967 at age forty. His masterful saxophone style and groundbreaking jazz compositions had a profound effect on the evolution of music through the decades, and it continues to resonate across styles and genres to this day.

This beautiful photography book offers an intimate and in-depth look at his life with over one hundred expertly curated images taken by renowned photographers such as Francis Wolff and Chuck Stewart. The selection includes outtakes from the album cover photoshoot for Ascension, in-studio candid shots taken during the recording of Blue Train, a glimpse backstage with Alice Coltrane before their first performance together, and more. Coltrane is a visual celebration of John Coltrane's musical legacy, complete with an introduction by his son and fellow musician Ravi Coltrane, along with personal stories from other musicians, artists, and writers who have been moved by his work.

PRE-ORDER.  WILL SHIP ON November 4, 2025

Admire 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.

PRE-ORDER.  WILL SHIP ON November 18, 2025

A 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.

PRE-ORDER.  WILL SHIP ON October 28, 2025

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.

PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: November 4, 2025

TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

The acclaimed collection of Black photography, now featuring more than one hundred photographs from twenty-first-century artists, fundamentally redefines our understanding of American history.

“If a picture truly is worth a thousand words, then Deborah Willis has given us nothing less than an epic history of Homeric proportions. Taken together, Willis’s magnificent gathering of images accompanied by her powerful narrative overturns many common ideas about black life during the last century and a half, and in so doing rewrites American history.”―Robin D. G. Kelley, from the Foreword

Originally published in 2000, Reflections in Black was the first single-volume work to collect the images of leading African American photographers―from the daguerreotype to the digital age. Through its sheer power and inherent beauty, Deborah Willis’s groundbreaking assemblage of photographs of African American life from 1840 to the present triumphantly celebrated family, endurance, and spirituality over the last two centuries as it upended stereotypes and rewrote American history. Aware that so much has changed since 2000, Willis―a world-renowned photographer, curator, and author―has now created a breathtaking twenty-fifth anniversary edition, juxtaposing hundreds of images that appeared in the original edition with 130 new ones.

As the photographic panorama unfolds, we are immersed in hugely moving glimpses of African American life, from the last generation of enslaved people to the urban pioneers of the great migrations of the 1920s, from the rare antebellum daguerreotypes of freemen to the courtly celebrants of the Harlem Renaissance, and from civil rights activists to the postmodern photographic artists of the digital age. Each photograph suggests an astonishing, often spellbinding story. Augustus Washington’s mid-nineteenth-century portraits of key abolitionist figures, for example, offer a seemingly calm window into an era known for its violence. A startling suite of J. P. Ball photographs depicts the life, death, and burial of a Black man hanged for murder in the Montana Territory. Documenting a vibrant family life and a nascent Black middle class as well as Black tenant farmers and educators, the book features James VanDerZee’s famous shot of Marcus Garvey in a Universal Negro Improvement Association parade; Addison N. Scurlock’s dignified portraits of Black intellectuals, artists, and musicians; and John W. Mosley’s World War II–era image of a young drum majorette in an Elks parade in Philadelphia. Reflections in Black also includes a stunning array of celebrity images, among them Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Gladys Bentley, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, and a veiled Coretta Scott King, now accompanied in this edition by Michelle Obama, the Roots, and Angela Davis.

This enhanced volume, with a new foreword from Robin D. G. Kelley and a coda from Kalia Brooks, once again affirms the power of photography to reconfigure our conception of Black life in the African diaspora and American history. Featuring the works of photographers such as Albert Chong, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lorna Simpson, Allison Janae Hamilton, Renee Cox, Carrie Mae Weems, Andre D. Wagner, and Hank Willis Thomas, this new edition is dedicated to the artists who stretch the definition of photography, creating pieces more akin to multimedia and conceptual art. Written and curated during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the aftermath of the brutal killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade, the images that follow serve as a visual response to these unthinkable experiences as well as to the beauty of life.

Exceptionally handsome and historically consequential, Reflections in Black is not only the rare volume that can be given as a gift on any occasion but a work so significant that it has the power to reconfigure the imagination. This anniversary edition demands to be included in every American’s library as an essential part of our country’s heritage.

544 photographs

PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: October 28, 2025

This third and final volume in the Black Artists in America series features work from the transitional moment of the late 1970s to the dawn of the twenty-first century
 
In the 1980s and 1990s, Black artists in the United States who came of age during the civil rights activity of the preceding decades began experimenting with new media and innovative approaches to artmaking, often as a way of questioning long-held inequities in the art world and in American society. Artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Sam Gilliam, Glenn Ligon, Faith Ringgold, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, and many others created works that celebrated their racial identity and fought exclusion and prejudices in the establishment. This book considers the ways that the artists of this generation challenged cultural, environmental, political, racial, and social issues of the last decades of the twentieth century.
 
Black Artists in America: From the Bicentennial to September 11 is the final volume in the three-volume series that traces how Black artists have responded to the social issues of their time. Beautifully illustrated with 150 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, this volume completes the story of a century of artmaking.
 
Published in association with the Dixon Gallery and Gardens
 
Exhibition Schedule:
 
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA
(October 5, 2025–January 11, 2026)
 
Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, TN
(January 25–March 29, 2026)

The Romare Bearden Reader brings together a collection of new essays and canonical writings by novelists, poets, historians, critics, and playwrights. The contributors, who include Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, August Wilson, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Kobena Mercer, contextualize Bearden's life and career within the history of modern art, examine the influence of jazz and literature on his work, trace his impact on twentieth-century African American culture, and outline his art's political dimensions. Others focus on specific pieces, such as A Black Odyssey, or the ways in which Bearden used collage to understand African American identity. The Reader also includes Bearden's most important writings, which grant readers insight into his aesthetic values and practices and share his desire to tell what it means to be black in America. Put simply, The Romare Bearden Reader is an indispensable volume on one of the giants of twentieth-century American art.

Contributors. Elizabeth Alexander, Romare Bearden, Mary Lee Corlett, Rachel DeLue, David C. Driskell, Brent Hayes Edwards, Ralph Ellison, Henri Ghent, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harry Henderson, Kobena Mercer, Toni Morrison, Albert Murray, Robert G. O’Meally, Richard Powell, Richard Price, Sally Price, Myron Schwartzman, Robert Burns Stepto, Calvin Tomkins, John Edgar Wideman, August Wilson

Focusing on Black Americans' participation in world’s fairs, Emancipation expositions, and early Black grassroots museums, Negro Building traces the evolution of Black public history from the Civil War through the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Mabel O. Wilson gives voice to the figures who conceived the curatorial content: Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Horace Cayton, and Margaret Burroughs. Originally published in 2012, the book reveals why the Black cities of Chicago and Detroit became the sites of major Black historical museums rather than the nation's capital, which would eventually become home for the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016.

Porter's work analyzes the important developments and individuals in African American painting and sculpture from the pre-Civil War period to World War II. "James A. Porter was an art historian, educator, curator, and visual artist. He is first remembered by academics as an art historian who taught some of the best minds and visual artists who studied at Howard University during the span of his teaching career. "A pioneer in establishing the field of African American art history," writes Jeffreen M. Hayes, who rightly declares that:

James A. Porter was instrumental as the first scholar to provide a systematic, critical analysis of African American artists and their works of art. An artist himself, he provided a unique and critical approach to the analysis of the work. Dedicated to educating and writing about African American artists, Porter set the foundation for artists and art historians to probe and unearth the necessary skills essential to their artistic and scholarly endeavors. The canon is borne from Porter's determination to document and view African American art in the context of American art."

This landmark book shows how five African civilizations—Yoruba, Kongo, Ejagham, Mande and Cross River—have informed and are reflected in the aesthetic, social and metaphysical traditions (music, sculpture, textiles, architecture, religion, idiogrammatic writing) of black people in the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, Mexico, Brazil and other places in the New World.

PRE-ORDER.  WILL SHIP ON January 27, 2026.

THE CURATORS OF CULTURE: Celebrate Black digital art in this essay collection revealing how Black artists have shaped everything from TikTok dances to viral memes

Steven Underwood digs into the current Black digital arts movement that has shaped popular culture for the last decade. He connects this current space to historical influences, speaking to a “legacy of audacity and daring that presented us with the opportunity to redirect the conversations on Blackness back on its center. Back to Black people.” Written as a collection of thought-provoking essays pulling in social commentary, interviews, popular culture, and deep research, Underwood taps into a topic that is incredibly relevant but often unknown.

The nature of the internet is so ephemeral that sometimes we forget when we do something worth celebrating. For Black people particularly, that’s unforgiveable. Digital Black art has become increasingly more outspoken, introspective, and genre-defining. But it’s also vulnerable. Original phrases, tweets, dances, songs, and other content are often taken from a Black artist and attributed to a white influencer. And Black creators are paid less for their work, though their engagement is often higher than that of their white peers. There is also the added risk of backlash and hate that comes with publicly existing online. As an award-winning writer with a popular online presence, Underwood is no stranger to the experiences of Black digital artists. Using his own personal stories, he highlights the beauty, vulnerability, and innovation of the Black digital arts movement.

Shining a light on the curators of our culture, Forever for the Culture narratively follows the construction of a new Black art movement and how creators have defined a community when that community does not have a physical space.

PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: November 18, 2025

A 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.

In 1953, Gordon Parks returned to Chicago on assignment for Life magazine to photograph the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church for a series on American religious life. After the success of his recent work for Life, Parks approached the Near West Side church with a decisive eye toward composing compelling images that conveyed simultaneously the universal humanity and local specificity of the religious community. This would be the first assignment for which he was both writer as well as photographer. His photographs and essay were never published by Life, yet as this book demonstrates, Parks’ visual and textual representation of Black religious life powerfully documents the dynamism of a community shaped by the Great Migration and Chicago’s industrial landscape. Parks embarked on a significant chapter of his aesthetic and conceptual development through his engagement with the pastor, the Reverend Ernest F. Ledbetter, Sr., and the members of his church. This publication features more than 65 previously unpublished photographs and contact sheets, complemented by Parks’ unseen manuscript and ephemeral material from the private collection of the Ledbetter family. A range of scholarly essays provides further insight and contextual analysis in art history, cultural geography, Black religious studies, and creative writing. Co-published with The Gordon Parks Foundation and Howard University, Washington DC

Using traditional techniques such as direct carving and lost-wax casting, Mosley's early works in wood and later works in bronze enter into a dance between the organic and manmade

Born in 1926 in New Castle, Pennsylvania, Thaddeus Mosley has made sculptures from wood for over six and a half decades from his home in Pittsburgh. Using only a chisel and gauge to maintain the integrity of the original log, Mosley reworks salvaged timber into monumental abstractions. Through a process of direct carving, the artist's marks respond to and rearticulate the natural gradations of the material's surface. With influences ranging from Isamu Noguchi to Constantin Brâncusi, from Scandinavian design to West African sculpture--Mosley's "sculptural improvisations," as he calls them, also take cues from the modernist traditions of jazz. Weight in Space is the most comprehensive monograph on the artist's oeuvre to date. In addition to a detailed chronology, this volume features new scholarship by Fred Moten and Catharina Manchanda, a conversation between Mosley and Hans Ulrich Obrist, and excerpts from an extensive oral history interview conducted by Bridget R. Cooks and Amanda Tewes.

PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: November 18, 2025

Redressing the woeful under-recognition of a pioneering Black queer architect and artist

This is an experimental illustrated reader exploring the work and legacy of American architect, educator and artist Amaza Lee Meredith (1895–1984), a trailblazer who was the first known Black queer woman to practice as an architect in the United States.
This book takes Meredith's expansive letter-writing practice as a conceptual framework for epistolary responses in the present, plotting Meredith's life and work within themes of placemaking, gender, sexuality and Black love, with a focus on how she built sanctuaries (homes, institutions and communities) for herself and other people of color to foster rigorous artistic pursuit, free of persecution.
The book features previously unpublished photos, blueprints, letters and scrapbooks from Meredith's archives and an annotated timeline of her life and work. Essays from architectural scholars and oral histories with former students, colleagues and friends explore her legacy in public education, the arts, modernist architecture and the built environment in the context of school desegregation, civil rights, and land and property rights. A diverse group of contemporary artists also respond to Meredith's legacy.

This book was published in conjunction with Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.

PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: November 25, 2025

Accompanying 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.

Dedicated to Gilliam's late-career sewn and collaged fabric works, this colorful catalog embraces the artist's restless creativity and visionary approach to abstraction

A pioneering artist who redefined the boundaries of painting, Sam Gilliam (1933–2022) transformed the medium with his radical approach to color, material and space. Sewing Fields focuses on a lesser-known yet crucial period in Gilliam's later career: that of his sewn and collaged works. His residency at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in 1993 reshaped his artistic practice. Far from his Washington, DC, studio, Gilliam embraced new materials, working with pre-stained fabrics that he shipped to Ireland, cutting and layering them into sculptural compositions. A collaboration with a local dressmaker further expanded his process, reinforcing his innovative fusion of painting and textile techniques. Sewing Fields brings these groundbreaking works back to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, nearly 50 years after Gilliam's first Dublin exhibition, positioning him within a broader transatlantic dialogue on abstraction.

PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: January 20, 2026

A gorgeous illustrated meditation on the homes of iconic Southern women, from Nina Simone to Carson McCullers

In These Long Shadows, writer Monica Nelson excavates the domestic narratives and mythologies contained within the publicly preserved homes of some of the American South's leading cultural figures.
In Virginia, readers are drawn into the garden and home of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer and encounter modernist architect Amaza Lee Meredith's International Style residence, Azurest South. Journeying south, they encounter the North Carolinian childhood homes of both influential civil rights activist Anna "Pauli" Murray, and revolutionary singer-songwriter Nina Simone. In Atlanta, readers wander into the apartment of incendiary Southern author Margaret Mitchell. In Louisiana, they gaze upon the quietly profound folk art paintings of Clementine Hunter at Melrose Plantation, and take a pilgrimage to writers' homes from the Southern Renaissance, including Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston and Carson McCullers.
These Long Shadows assembles a constellation of new visions, narratives and readings with which to examine the nation's ever-metamorphosing historical landscape. Nelson's book constitutes the third volume of The Illustrated America, Atelier Editions' ongoing anthropological survey of eclectic chapters drawn from 20th-century America's cultural past.
Monica Nelson is a writer and graphic designer based in New York and Savannah. She has developed strategic visual narratives for publications, cultural institutions and brands, working with over 100 photographers. She was the founding creative and photo director of Wilder Quarterly, which fostered a floral-drenched view of the natural world, and the author of Edible Flowers (Monacelli Press, 2021).

PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: December 23, 2025

A rich examination of the role of portrait photography in the construction of Africa as a political idea

At a moment of profound change marked by decolonization and the civil rights period of the mid-20th century, photographers across Africa and the African diaspora used the photographic portrait in order to fuel incipient ideas of Africa. Published in conjunction with a groundbreaking exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination charts international histories of resistance and liberation up to the present day in order to contend with the construction of Africa as a political idea, and the tools that artists used to forge it.
Featuring more than 100 photographs by renowned artists of the time, such as Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and Jean Depara, and by contemporary artists of African descent, such as Samuel Fosso, Silvia Rosi and Njideka Akunyili-Crosby, this richly illustrated publication explores modes of Pan-African possibility in powerful images of everyday people, where the personal was undeniably political. With an introduction by curator Oluremi C. Onabanjo, excerpts from landmark texts by V.Y. Mudimbe and Brent Hayes Edwards, and a conversation between Yasmina Price and Momtaza Mehri, Ideas of Africa highlights the potential of the photographic portrait as both a creative endeavor and political mechanism.

PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: October 21, 2025

A 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.

Drawing on new research, centring Black voices and perspectives, and celebrating Black Cambridge history, Rise Up focuses on the period from 1750 to 1850, when Britain became the world's first industrialised nation and one of history's largest empires. At the same time, Britain played a central role in the Atlantic slave trade, trafficking more captive African people than any other European power. Millions were forcibly abducted and transported to work on British-owned plantations in the Caribbean and Americas.

In Britain, Black and white anti-slaverygroups and individuals campaigned for abolition. Despite opposition, laws were gradually enacted to abolish the slave trade in 1807, and enslavement in 1833. However, other exploitative systems including apprenticeship and indentured labour took their place. Financial compensation was awarded to former enslavers while the formerly enslaved received nothing.

This is the story of the fight to end Atlantic slavery, its aftermath and ongoing legacies. It is told through the stories of individuals from across the Black Atlantic - many silenced or pushed to the margins. It interrogates historic objects and artworks from collections across the University of Cambridge and beyond, in conversation with responses from contemporary artists. Despite the passing of almost two centuries since Britain outlawed slavery, the struggles for autonomy, equality and social justice continue today.

PRE-ORDER: ON SALE DATE: October 21, 2025

Framing Fatherhood is a stunning and moving photographic celebration of culture, fatherhood, masculinity, and blackness from 30 of today’s prominent Black male photographers.

In Framing Fatherhood, acclaimed curator and producer Dr. Imani Cheers brings together the vision of 30 prominent and well-respected Black photographers to capture and share the beauty of Black fatherhood.
 
With photography from prolific visual storytellers devoted to capturing varying expressions of the Black experience, like Reginald Cunningham, Anthony Geathers, Steven John Irby, and Michael A. McCoy, Dr. Cheers has gathered together an inspiring group of men to share the often overlooked beauty found within seeing Black men as individuals, fathers, role models, and community members. Split into four themes of family, faith, friendship, and fatherhood, each artist uses their photography to answer the central prompt: “What does Black fatherhood mean to you?”.
 
A celebratory and thought-provoking collection, Framing Fatherhood is a must-have for lovers of art, photography, and the inherent goodness of the human spirit.

In Unfurled: Designing a Living Home, acclaimed plant stylist Hilton Carter invites readers into the heart of his home―a personal sanctuary that has evolved, layer by layer, to reflect his style, creativity, and love for plants.

Hilton takes readers on a behind-the-scenes journey through every room, from the tranquil primary bedroom to the plant-filled sunroom, the vibrant studio to the inviting guest room, and beyond. With his eye for design, he shares the inspiration that lies behind each space, talking the reader through the mood boards he creates when embarking on a room renovation and explaining the thoughts behind a design, both functional and decorative. Hilton shares how each room has ‘unfurled’ beautifully over time, discussing how to choose colour and texture, offering expert advice on room layout, and showing how to use plants to breathe life into the home. Alongside personal stories and design insights, Unfurled is filled with practical tips and ideas for ways to recreate these looks in your own home, whether you’re working with a spare bedroom or a compact shower room. With Hilton’s guidance, you’ll learn how to incorporate thoughtful styling, select the right plants for your rooms and cultivate a home that's nurturing, dynamic and alive.