• 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

The long-awaited first major monograph on the iconic portraitist of Black Americans

This is the first comprehensive monograph on acclaimed painter Amy Sherald, whose distinctive style of simplified realist portraiture features African American subjects rendered against colorful monochrome backdrops or in everyday settings. Sherald rose to fame after being chosen by former first lady Michelle Obama to paint her official portrait for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, in 2018, becoming the first African American woman to receive this honor. In addition to reproductions of Sherald’s recent works, the book—published to accompany her solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London in fall 2022—includes illustrations of earlier paintings, as well as an intimate glimpse into Sherald’s process and practice through a series of in-studio photographs. Newly commissioned texts include an art historical analysis of the artist’s work by Jenni Sorkin; a meditation on the politics and aesthetics of Sherald's portraiture by cultural scholar Kevin Quashie; and a conversation between Sherald and acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Amy Sherald was born in Georgia in 1973 and received her MFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2004. She has been included in countless group shows at galleries and museums worldwide as well as the subject of solo exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, among others. Sherald lives in Baltimore and New Jersey.

How artists from Paul Klee and Mierle Laderman Ukeles to Faith Ringgold and Deborah Roberts have explored childhood themes of innocence, spontaneity and storytelling

Artists have long been inspired by children—by their imagination, creativity and unique ways of seeing and being in the world—and have made work that depicts and involves children as collaborators, that represents or mimics their ways of drawing or telling stories, that highlights their unique cultures, and that addresses ideas of innocence and spontaneity closely associated with children. To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood surveys how artists have reflected on and contributed to notions of childhood from the early 20th century to the present. The works in To Begin Again offer distinctive viewpoints and experiences, revealing how time and place, economics and race, and representation and aesthetics fundamentally shape how we experience and understand early development. The catalog underscores that while there is no single, uniform idea of childhood, it is nevertheless the ground upon which so much of society is built, negotiated and imagined.
Artists include: Ann Agee, John Ahearn, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Francis Alÿs, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Brian Belott, Jordan Casteel, Lenka Clayton, Allan Rohan Crite, Henry Darger, Karon Davis, Robert Gober, Jay Lynn Gomez, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Duane Hanson, Mona Hatoum, Sharon Hayes, Ekua Holmes, Mary Kelly, Paul Klee, Justine Kurland, Helen Levitt, Tau Lewis, Glenn Ligon, Oscar Murillo, Rivane Neuenschwander, Berenice Olmedo, Charles Ray, Faith Ringgold, Deborah Roberts, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Rachel Rose, Heji Shin, Sable Elyse Smith, Becky Suss, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Cathy Wilkes and Carmen Winant.

A fun and fact-filled introduction to the dismissed Black art masters and models who shook up the world.

Elegant. Refined. Exclusionary. Interrupted. The foundations of the fine art world are shaking. Beyoncé and Jay-Z break the internet by blending modern Black culture with fine art in their iconic music video filmed in the Louvre. Kehinde Wiley powerfully subverts European masterworks. Calls resonate for diversity in museums and the resignations of leaders of the old guard. It’s clear that modern day museums can no longer exist without change—and without recognizing that Black people have been a part of the Western art world since its beginnings. Quietly held within museum and private collections around the world are hundreds of faces of Black men and women, many of their stories unknown. From paintings of majestic kings to a portrait of a young girl named Isabella in Amsterdam, these models lived diverse lives while helping shape the art world along the way. Then, after hundreds of years of Black faces cast as only the subject of the white gaze, a small group of trailblazing Black American painters and sculptors reached national and international fame, setting the stage for the flourishing of Black art in the 1920s and beyond. Captivating and informative, BLK ART is an essential work that elevates a globally dismissed legacy to its proper place in the mainstream art canon. From the hushed corridors of royal palaces to the bustling streets of 1920s Paris—this is Black history like never seen before.

The most comprehensive survey of Weems’ genre-defying oeuvre yet published

One of the most influential American artists working today, Carrie Mae Weems has investigated narratives around family, race, gender, sexism, class and the consequences of power for more than 40 years. Her complex oeuvre—always ahead of its time, and profoundly formative for younger generations of artists—has employed photography (for which she is best known), fabric, text, audio, digital images, installation and video. Writing in the New York Times, Holland Cotter succinctly described Weems as “a superb image maker and a moral force, focused and irrepressible.”
This volume, spanning four decades of work, is the most thorough survey yet published. It includes Weems’ earliest series, such as Family Pictures and Stories, for which she photographed her relatives and close friends; the legendary Kitchen Table Series, in which she posed in a domestic setting; and other critically acclaimed works and series such as Ain’t Jokin’, Colored People, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, Not Manet’s Type, The Jefferson Suite, Monuments, Roaming, Museums, Constructing History (A Class Ponders the Future), Slow Fade to Black and the Obama Project, among many others. Contextualizing these pieces are essays by LaCharles Ward and Fred Moten and a chronology by Raul Muñoz. The book also includes a visual essay by Weems that presents a personal selection of her own works from the artist's perspective. The accompanying exhibition is organized by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with Fundación Foto Colectania, Barcelona and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, where the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems. The Evidence Of Things Not Seen took place from April 2 through July 10, 2022.
Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953) has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships, and is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Weems lives in Brooklyn and Syracuse, New York.

A photographic celebration and exploration of Black identity and experience through the twentieth century from the founder and curator of the hit multimedia platform Black Archives.

Renata Cherlise’s family loved capturing their lives in photographs and home movies, sparking her love of archival photography. Following in her family’s footsteps, Cherlise established Black Archives, which presents a nuanced representation of Black people across time living vibrant, ordinary lives. Through the platform, many have discovered and shared images of themselves and their loved ones experiencing daily life, forming multidimensional portraits of people, places, and the Black community. These photographs not only tell captivating stories, they hold space for collective memory and kinship. 
 
Black Archives is a stunning collection of timeless images that tell powerful, joyful stories of everyday life and shed light on Black culture’s dynamic, enduring influence through the generations. The images showcase reunions, nights out on the town, parents and children, church and school functions, holidays, big life events, family vacations, moments at home, and many more occasions of leisure, excitement, reflection, and pride.
 
Featuring more than three hundred images that spotlight the iconic and the candid, Black Archives offers a nuanced compendium of Black memory and imagination. 

• Artists, art collectors, art lovers, and museumgoers
• Educators and students
• Anyone interested in learning about contemporary African art

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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 essential oral history of hip-hop, from its origins on the playgrounds of the Bronx to its reign as the most powerful force in pop culture

The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it’s the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artists—nearly all of them people of color from some of America’s most overlooked communities—pushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers.
 
And yet, the stories of many hip-hop pioneers are at risk of being lost forever. Now, in The Come Up, New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Abrams offers the most comprehensive account so far of hip-hop’s rise. In more than 300 interviews conducted over three years, Abrams has captured the stories of the DJs, executives, producers, and artists who both witnessed and themselves forged the history of hip-hop. Masterfully combining these voices into a symphonic narrative, Abrams traces how the genre grew out of the resourcefulness of a neglected population in the South Bronx, and from there how it flowed into the city’s other boroughs, and beyond—from electrifying live gatherings onto radio and vinyl, below to the Mason-Dixon line, to the West Coast through gangster rap and G-funk, and then across generations.
 
Abrams has on record Grandmaster Caz detailing hip-hop’s infancy, Edward “Duke Bootee” Fletcher describing the origins of “The Message,” DMC narrating his role in introducing hip-hop to the mainstream, Ice Cube recounting N.W.A’s breakthrough and breakup, Kool Moe Dee recounting his Grammys boycott, and countless more key players. Throughout, Abrams conveys with singular vividness the drive, the stakes, and the relentless creativity that ignited one of the greatest revolutions in modern music.

After a century of racist whitewashing, country music is finally reckoning with its relationship to Black people. In this timely work—the first book on Black country music by a Black writer—Francesca Royster uncovers the Black performers and fans, including herself, who are exploring the pleasures and possibilities of the genre.

Informed by queer theory and Black feminist scholarship, Royster’s book elucidates the roots of the current moment found in records like Tina Turner’s first solo album, Tina Turns the Country On! She reckons with Black “bros” Charley Pride and Darius Rucker, then chases ghosts into the future with Valerie June. Indeed, it is the imagination of Royster and her artists that make this music so exciting for a genre that has long been obsessed with the past. The futures conjured by June and others can be melancholy, and are not free of racism, but by centering Black folk Royster begins to understand what her daughter hears in the banjo music of Our Native Daughters and the trap beat of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.” A Black person claiming country music may still feel a bit like a queer person coming out, but, collectively, Black artists and fans are changing what country music looks and sounds like—and who gets to love it.

A nuanced profile, in image and text, of the great Black Power leader at the exhilarating moment of the movement’s ascendancy

Gordon Parks’ 1967 Life magazine essay “Whip of Black Power” is a nuanced profile of the young, controversial civil rights leader Stokely Carmichael. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Carmichael gained national attention and inspired media backlash when he issued the call for Black Power in Greenwood, Mississippi, in June 1966. Parks shadowed him from the fall of 1966 to the spring of 1967, as Carmichael gave speeches, headed meetings and promoted the growing Black Power movement. Parks’ photos and writing addressed Carmichael’s intelligence and humor, presenting the whole man behind the headline-making speeches and revealing his own advocacy of Black Power and its message of self-determination and love.
Stokely Carmichael and Black Power delves into Parks’ groundbreaking presentation of Carmichael, with analysis of his images and accompanying text about the charismatic leader. Lisa Volpe explores Parks’ complex understanding of the movement and its leader, and Cedric Johnson frames Black Power within the heightened political moment of the late 1960s. Carmichael’s own voice is represented through a reprint of his important 1966 essay “What We Want.”
Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was a photographer, filmmaker, musician and author whose 50-year career focused on American culture, social justice, the civil rights movement and the Black American experience. Born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, Parks was awarded the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1942, which led to a position with the Farm Security Administration. In 1969 he became the first Black American to write and direct a major feature film, The Learning Tree, and his next directorial endeavor, Shaft (1971), helped define a film genre.

The first comprehensive monograph on Mickalene Thomas, a key figure in 21st-century contemporary art

Over the past two decades, Mickalene Thomas’s critically acclaimed and extensive body of work has spanned painting, collage, photography, video, and the immersive installations that have become her signature. With influences ranging from nineteenth-century painting to popular culture, Thomas’s art articulates a complex and empowering vision of aspiration and self-image through gender and race while expanding on and subverting common definitions of beauty, sexuality, and celebrity. This book, made in close collaboration with Thomas, is the first to survey the breadth of her extraordinary career. Publication coincides with the opening of Mickalene Thomas’s first global exhibition, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, at Lévy Gorvy galleries in New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris.

Explores expressionlessness, inscrutability, and emotional withholding in Black cultural production

Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan tracks instances and meanings of deadpan—a vaudeville term meaning “dead face”—across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life.

Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing of African American aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive. Beginning with the expressionless faces of mid-twentieth-century documentary photography and proceeding to early twenty-first-century drama, this project examines performances of blackness’s deadpan aesthetic within and beyond black embodiments, including Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, as well as Buster Keaton’s signature character and Steve McQueen’s restitution of the former’s legacy within the continuum of Black cultural production.

The essential volume on the great fashion designer, entrepreneur and Louis Vuitton artistic director, back in print

This authoritative Virgil Abloh compendium, created by the designer himself, accompanies his acclaimed landmark 2019–23 touring exhibition and offers in-depth analysis of his career and his inspirations. More than a catalog, Figures of Speech is a 500-page user’s manual to Abloh's genre-bending work in art, fashion and design.
The first section features essays and an interview that examine Abloh’s oeuvre through the lenses of contemporary art history, architecture, streetwear, high fashion and race, to provide insight into a prolific and impactful career that cuts across mediums, connecting visual artists, musicians, graphic designers, fashion designers, major brands and architects. The book also contains a massive archive of images culled from Abloh’s personal files on major projects, revealing behind-the-scenes snapshots, prototypes, inspirations and more—accompanied by intimate commentary from the artist. Finally, a gorgeous full-color plate section offers a detailed view of Abloh’s work across disciplines.

Virgil Abloh (1980–2021) was a fashion designer and entrepreneur, and the artistic director of Louis Vuitton's men's wear collection from 2018 to 2021. He was also CEO of the Milan-based label Off-White, a fashion house he founded in 2013. Born in Rockford, Illinois, to Ghanaian parents, he entered the world of fashion with an internship at Fendi in 2009 alongside rapper Kanye West. The two began an artistic collaboration that would launch Abloh's career with the founding of Off-White. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2018.

An expanded edition of Parks’ classic account of race relations in America, with previously unpublished images and texts

This expanded edition of Gordon Parks: Segregation Story includes around 30 previously unpublished photographs, as well as enhanced reproductions created from Parks’ original color transparencies; newly discovered descriptions Parks wrote for the photographs; a manuscript of film-developing instructions and captions Parks authored with Samuel F. Yette; previously published texts by the late art historian Maurice Berger and the esteemed journalist and civil rights activist Charlayne Hunter-Gault; and a new essay by artist Dawoud Bey.
After the photographs were first presented in a 1956 issue of Life magazine, the bulk of Parks’ assignment was thought to be lost. In 2011, five years after Parks’ death, the Gordon Parks Foundation found more than 200 color transparencies belonging to the series. In 2014 the series was first published as a book, and since then new photographs have been uncovered.
In the summer of 1956, Life magazine sent Gordon Parks to Alabama to document the daily realities of African Americans living under Jim Crow laws in the rural South. The resulting color photographs are among Parks’ most powerful images, and, in the decades since, have become emblematic representations of race relations in America. Pursued at grave danger to the photographer himself, the project was an important chapter in Parks’ career-long endeavor to use the camera as a weapon for social change.
Gordon Parks (1912–2006) was born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912. An itinerant laborer, he worked as a brothel pianist and railcar porter, among other jobs, before buying a camera at a pawnshop, training himself and becoming a photographer. He evolved into a modern-day Renaissance man, finding success as a film director, writer and composer. The first African American director to helm a major motion picture, he helped launch the blaxploitation genre with his film Shaft (1971). Parks died in 2006.

A new wave of Black photographers and artists - across portraiture, fine art, documentary and fashion - are depicting Black subjects in completely original ways, and in doing so laying claim to their own stories of identity. As We See It brings together over 30 of these key image makers, who are investigating visually refreshing narratives on the representation of Black cultural identity.

Lawrence's landmark series on African American migration in context

In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then just 23 years old, made a series of 60 small tempera paintings on the Great Migration, the decades-long mass movement of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North that began in 1915–16. The child of migrant parents, Lawrence worked partly from his own experience and partly from long research in his neighborhood library. The result was an epic narrative of the collective history of his people. Moving from scenes of terror and violence to images of great intimacy, and drawing on film, photography, political cartoons and other sources in popular culture, Lawrence created an innovative format of sequential panels, each image accompanied by a descriptive caption. Within months of its completion, the series entered the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Phillips Memorial Gallery (today The Phillips Collection), Washington, DC, each institution acquiring 30 panels.

The Migration Series is now a landmark in the history of modern art. Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series, now in paperback, grounds Lawrence’s work in the cultural and political debates that shaped his art and demonstrates its relevance for artists and writers today. The series is reproduced in full; short texts accompanying each panel relate them to the history of the Migration and explore Lawrence’s technique and approach. Alongside scholarly essays, the book also includes 11 newly commissioned poems, by Rita Dove, Nikky Finney, Terrance Hayes, Tyehimba Jess, Yusef Komunyakaa, Patricia Spears Jones, Natasha Trethewey, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Crystal Williams and Kevin Young, that respond directly to the series. The distinguished poet Elizabeth Alexander edited and introduces the section.

Ringgold's most formative and influential political works are gathered in this beautifully designed clothbound volume

Alongside reproductions of key works made between 1967 and 1981, Faith Ringgold: Politics / Power provides an overview of Ringgold's seminal artistic and activist work, and its historical context during these years, including accounts by the artist herself.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Ringgold, a dedicated and impassioned civil rights advocate, established her voice as a feminist and within the Black Arts Movement. Her influential work expressed her in-depth knowledge of art history and contemporary art, as well as her activism. Spanning mediums such as painting, cut paper works, posters, collage and textile art, the works presented in this publication foreground the artist’s explicitly political pieces, for which she deployed new material and formal processes, and developed a radical aesthetics and vocabulary.
Organized chronologically, the book allows readers to retrace the artist’s foundational creative approaches to contemporaneous social, political and artistic questions. It includes illustrations of individual artworks together with previously unpublished work and archival materials.

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.

"Art as Social Action . . . is an essential guide to deepening social art practices and teaching them to students." —Laura Raicovich, president and executive director, Queens Museum

Art as Social Action is both a general introduction to and an illustrated, practical textbook for the field of social practice, an art medium that has been gaining popularity in the public sphere. With content arranged thematically around such topics as direct action, alternative organizing, urban imaginaries, anti-bias work, and collective learning, among others, Art as Social Action is a comprehensive manual for teachers about how to teach art as social practice.

Along with a series of introductions by leading social practice artists in the field, valuable lesson plans offer examples of pedagogical projects for instructors at both college and high school levels with contributions written by prominent social practice artists, teachers, and thinkers, including:

• Mary Jane Jacob
• Maureen Connor
• Brian Rosa
• Pablo Helguera
• Jen de los Reyes
• Jeanne van Heeswick
• Jaishri Abichandani
• Loraine Leeson
• Ala Plastica
• Daniel Tucker
• Fiona Whelan
• Bo Zheng
• Dipti Desai
• Noah Fischer

Lesson plans also reflect the ongoing pedagogical and art action work of Social Practice Queens (SPQ), a unique partnership between Queens College CUNY and the Queens Museum.

In 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.