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  • Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph

    by Deana Lawson

    $85.00

    *ships in 7-10 business days

    Deana Lawson is one of the most powerful photographers of her generation. Her subject is black expressive culture and her canvas is the African Diaspora. Over the last ten years, she has created a visionary language to describe black identities, through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals.Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty beautifully reproduced photographs, an essay by the acclaimed writer Zadie Smith, and an extensive interview with the filmmaker Arthur Jafa.

    Deana Lawson is one of the most intriguing photographers of her generation. Over the last ten years, she has created a visionary language to describe identities through intimate portraiture and striking accounts of ceremonies and rituals. Using medium- and large-format cameras, Lawson works with models she meets in the United States and on travels in the Caribbean and Africa to construct arresting, highly structured, and deliberately theatrical scenes animated by an exquisite range of color and attention to surprising details: bedding and furniture in domestic interiors or lush plants in Edenic gardens. The body—often nude—is central. Throughout her work, which invites comparison to the photography of Diane Arbus, Jeff Wall, and Carrie Mae Weems, Lawson seeks to portray the personal and the powerful in black life. Deana Lawson: An Aperture Monograph features forty beautifully reproduced photographs, an essay by the acclaimed writer Zadie Smith, and an expansive conversation with the filmmaker Arthur Jafa.

  • The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s

    by Emily J. Lordi

    Sold out
    Examining the work of Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Solange Knowles, Flying Lotus, and others, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of soul, showing how it came to signify a belief in black resilience enacted through musical practices.

    In The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi proposes a new understanding of this famously elusive concept. In the 1960s, Lordi argues, soul came to signify a cultural belief in black resilience, which was enacted through musical practices—inventive cover versions, falsetto vocals, ad-libs, and false endings. Through these soul techniques, artists such as Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Isaac Hayes, and Minnie Riperton performed virtuosic survivorship and thus helped to galvanize black communities in an era of peril and promise. Their soul legacies were later reanimated by such stars as Prince, Solange Knowles, and Flying Lotus. Breaking with prior understandings of soul as a vague masculinist political formation tethered to the Black Power movement, Lordi offers a vision of soul that foregrounds the intricacies of musical craft, the complex personal and social meanings of the music, the dynamic movement of soul across time, and the leading role played by black women in this musical-intellectual tradition.
  • Eric Hart Jr.: When I Think about Power

    by Eric Hart Jr

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    Sumptuous and tender portraits of an empowered Black queer experience

    Eric Hart Jr.’s black-and-white photo series presents more than 70 portraits focusing on the notion of power as it relates to the Black queer experience. Begun in 2019, When I Think About Power investigates and expands the contemporary reimagining of men through themed chapters. “I'm fascinated with the intersectionality and the layers of what it means to be Black in the modern day,” he has said. “From masculinity, queerness, to dress, I strive to utilize image-making in a way that displays people like myself in all of their power and all of their beauty.” Hart's approach stems from his own journey toward self-acceptance growing up in Macon, Georgia. By visually exploring the differences and similarities between himself and the men who surround him, studying the words of Black queer icons and researching the visibility of power in eras such as the Ming dynasty or ancient Egypt, Hart has created an iconography of a power that so many queer individuals seek.
    The work of Brooklyn-based photographer Eric Hart Jr. (born 1999) has been published in Rolling Stone, the Washington Post, the New York Times and i-D magazine, and has been praised by artists such as Beyoncé and Spike Lee. Hart is a two-time Gordon Parks scholar, a 2022 Forbes 30 under 30 Art & Style choice, and in 2020 was named one of Men's Health magazine's “20-year-old mavericks changing America.”

  • To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness by Robin Coste Lewis
    $35.00

    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    A genre-bending exploration of poetry, photography, and human migration—another revelatory visual expedition from the National Book Award–winning poet who changed the way we see art, the museum, and the Black female figure. • Winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry

    “Lewis pushes the limits of language and image, composing lines alongside a cache of hundreds of photographs found under her late grandmother’s bed only days before the house was slated to be razed.” —Kevin Young, The New Yorker

    Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal grandmother’s death, Robin Coste Lewis discovered a stunning collection of photographs in an old suitcase under her bed, filled with everything from sepia tintypes to Technicolor Polaroids. Lewis’s family had survived one of the largest migrations in human history, when six million Americans fled the South, attempting to escape from white supremacy and white terrorism. But these photographs of daily twentieth-century Black life revealed a concealed, interior history. The poetry Lewis joins to these vivid images stands forth as an inspiring alternative to the usual ways we frame the old stories of “race” and “migration,” placing them within a much vaster span of time and history.

    In what she calls “a film for the hands” and “an origin myth for the future,” Lewis reverses our expectations of both poetry and photography: “Black pages, black space, black time––the Big Black Bang.” From glamorous outings to graduations, birth announcements, baseball leagues, and back-porch delight, Lewis creates a lyrical documentary about Black intimacy. Instead of colonial nostalgia, she offers us “an exalted Black privacy.” What emerges is a dynamic reframing of what it means to be human and alive, with Blackness at its center. “I am trying / to make the gods / happy,” she writes amid these portraits of her ancestors. “I am trying to make the dead / clap and shout.”
  • Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice

    by Accra Shepp

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    *Ships in 7-10 Business Days*

    Radical Justice brings together two bodies of socially-engaged photographic portraiture by Accra Shepp, who has documented New York City’s Occupy Wall Street movement starting in 2011 and its racial justice/BLM protests since 2020.  

    Working in the style of August Sander with a large format camera and black and white film, Shepp pictures fellow New Yorkers on their city’s streets in acts of sit-ins and active protest, both unplanned and highly organized, both independent and unified, to address notions of the 99% and 1%, which have become part of the American political vernacular.  Bearing witness to defining events of the last decade that echo the United States’ longer historical arch, Shepp’s empathetic depictions of fellow citizens standing up for the fair protection of the Constitution provide a prophetic mirror of current events, which reflects back centuries to where the American experiment began, to suggest where we’ll find ourselves in the years to come.

  • Feminism

    by Bernardine Evaristo

    $15.00

    Ships in 7-10 business days

    Feminism is a powerful new interpretation of British art from an intersectional feminist perspective, penned by one of Britain’s greatest writers

    “Art museums have long drawn me into their spaces. The infinite possibilities of the language of art opens me up to methods of communication quite unlike my own. I am fascinated by the most interesting and adventurous artists, who are surely among the most innovative thinkers on the planet. I am in awe of their talent and endless inventiveness, and my imagination is nourished by theirs. I am challenged to think differently about how we might understand, recreate, reshape, reimagine life itself—animate, inanimate, spirit. My senses are stimulated, my emotions stirred, my brain whirs away in the background and I feel very much alive. When I was invited to write this book, my first time writing about art, I immediately knew that I would turn my attention on women and womxn (to include non-binary people) of color in British art because, similar to the story throughout the arts, either as creator or curator, we haven’t been very visible. This book is personal—about the art I’ve seen, and the art I’ve loved—and my interpretation of the art in the national collection and beyond, from an intersectional feminist perspective.”

  • Living While Black: Portraits of Everyday Resistance

    by Ajuan Mance

    $22.95
    In homage to the radical power of art, Living While Black celebrates the small acts of resistance that comprise the daily lives of Black folks by presenting them in a series of vivid illustrations.

    Laughing. Grieving. Being a kid. Even the purest expression of pleasure, the most human display of sorrow, or the simplest delight of childhood is an act of resistance if you happen to be Black. This immersive hardcover book features forty defiantly joyful illustrations by artist and educator Ajuan Mance, each artwork depicting a person of African descent going about their everyday business. Begun as Mance's personal response to the groundswell of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Living While Black denounces the excessive surveillance, harassment, and violence aimed at Black folks engaged in the activities of everyday life—and celebrates the courage and resilience of the Black community. Fittingly, the book also features a foreword from Alicia Garza, BLM founder and principal at the Black Futures Lab. Mance's thoughtful meditation on what it's like to be Black in America makes a wonderful tool for teachers, students, activists, and parents navigating conversations about racism and resistance.

    POWERFUL MESSAGE: In the contrast between the colorful illustrations and the weighty subject matter, a powerful message emerges: No matter how strong the forces of oppression, Black people will persist in striving for justice, equality, and joy. The book itself is also a reminder that there are many ways to be an activist—from marching for what you believe in, to spreading a message with your art.

    VIBRANT ARTWORK: Bright colors, bold shapes, vivid patterns—Ajuan Mance's artwork speaks to the enduring power and importance of joy.

    EXCEPTIONAL TEACHING TOOL: To provide context for the artwork, Mance has compiled a timeline of recent events that lend urgency to the fight for Black lives—she highlights the ways that the conversation has shifted since cell phones allowed bystanders to document instances of racial injustice and violence and offers an entry point for anyone who wants to learn about the roots of contemporary racial justice movements.

    Perfect for:
    • Activists and agitators
    • Art book lovers
    • Students of Black history
    • Teachers and parents looking for colorful ways to talk to young people about activism and resistance
  • Lauren Halsey: The Roof Garden Commission cover image

    Abraham Thomas

    Sold out

    A primer on contemporary artist Lauren Halsey’s latest site-specific installation, outlining her process, past work, and influences drawn from Afrofuturism, ancient Egyptian iconography, and Los Angeles
     
    Lauren Halsey is known for her sculptures, mixed media works, and site-specific installations that remix (or, as Halsey says, “funkify”) history by combining signs, symbols, and architecture from the past, present, and future. In her new installation for The Met’s Roof Garden Commission series, she brings together ancient Egyptian–inspired iconography and sculpture with signage and texts drawn from the artist’s local community in South Central Los Angeles. Accompanied by new photography and unpublished sketches from Halsey’s studio, this compact volume contains an insightful essay by curator Abraham Thomas that examines Halsey’s artistic process and considers this installation in the context of her past work. In a revealing interview with poet Douglas Kearney, the artist discusses her diverse influences—which include ancient Egyptian relief carving, funk music, Afrofuturism, and the architecture of L.A.— and elaborates on the importance of community building and engagement in the spaces she creates.

    Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press  

    Exhibition Schedule:

    The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
    (April 18–October 22, 2023)

  • PRE-ORDER: Kandis Williams

    by Kandis Wiliams

    $35.00

    Pre-order: on Sale September 27, 2022

    The inaugural volume in a new series of books, Kandis Williams documents the Los Angeles–based artist’s exhibition A Line. Interrogating issues of race, nationalism, authority, and eroticism, her topical work is made across collage, sculpture, and video.

    Williams draws on her background in dramaturgy to envision a space that accommodates the biopolitical economies that inform how movement might be read. Looking at the interconnections between popular culture and myth, she relates in her work anatomy, regions of Black diaspora, and communication and obfuscation. Williams’s body of work shapes an alternative language that examines how Black moving bodies are regarded. Williams continues to make visible the inexpressible violence Black bodies have been subjected to in dance and beyond.

    Featuring contributions by the curator of 52 Walker—a David Zwirner gallery space—Ebony L. Haynes and the artist and writer Hannah Black, and a stirring conversation between Williams and the choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili, the book serves as an extension of the exhibition. Included are high-quality illustrations of the artworks alongside rich archival materials.

    Kandis Williams (b. 1985) was born in Baltimore and received her BFA from Cooper Union in New York in 2009. She is the founder of the publishing and educational platform Cassandra Press. In addition to her visual arts practice, for which she has been exhibited internationally, Williams’s performances have been mounted in institutions across the world. She is the recipient of the 2021 Grants to Artists award, presented by the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York, and the 2020 Mohn Award for artistic excellence, presented by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Williams is represented by Night Gallery and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

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