Art & Culture
- The Black Family Reunion Cookbook: Recipes and Food Memories by The National Council of Negro Women
The Black Family Reunion Cookbook: Recipes and Food Memories by The National Council of Negro Women
Sold outInspired by the Black Family Reunion Celebrations, held in seven cities every summer, this book reflects the local, national, and international heritage of the African American community. With first-person reminiscences and recipes from celebrities like Wilma Rudolph, Natalie Cole, Esther Rolle, and Patti LaBelle, this cookbook offers a delightful diversity of over 250 dishes. Line drawings throughout. - Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice
Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice
by Accra Shepp
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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.
- Jamel Shabazz: Albums
Jamel Shabazz: Albums
$50.00Photo albums from the archives of the iconic chronicler of New York's 1980s rap, hip-hop and Black culture
The influential Brooklyn-based photographer Jamel Shabazz has been making portraits of New Yorkers for more than 40 years, creating an archive of cultural shifts and struggles across the city. His portraits of different communities underscore the street as a space for self-presentation, whether through fashion or pose. In every instance Shabazz aims, in his words, to represent individuals and communities with “honor and dignity.” This book—awarded the Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book Prize—presents, for the first time, Shabazz’s work from the 1970s to ’90s as it exists in his archive: small prints thematically grouped and sequenced in traditional family photo albums that function as portable portfolios.
Shabazz began making portraits in the mid-1970s in Brooklyn, Queens, the West Village and Harlem. His camera was also at his side while working as an officer at Rikers Island in the 1980s, where he took portraits of inmates. This book features selections from over a dozen albums, many previously unseen, and includes his earliest photographs as well as images taken inside Rikers Island, all accompanied by essays that situate Shabazz’s work within the broader history of photography.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Jamel Shabazz (born 1960) picked up his first camera at the age of 15 and began documenting his communities, inspired by photographers such as Leonard Freed, James Van Der Zee and Gordon Parks. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including those at the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Shabazz is the author of Back in the Days (2001) and Sights in the City (2017). - Maxwell Alexandre: Pardo é Papel: The Glorious Victory and New Power
Maxwell Alexandre: Pardo é Papel: The Glorious Victory and New Power
edited by Alessandra Gómez
Sold outOn Alexandre’s politically nuanced painting cycle affirming Black iconicity
Published for his first North American solo exhibition, this catalog presents Brazilian artist Maxwell Alexandre’s (born 1990) ongoing series Pardo é Papel. Suspended from the ceiling, Alexandre’s large-scale paintings portray striking scenes of communal leisure interspersed with religious and art-historical imagery. Pop-cultural symbols appear alongside these images, including depictions of Black cultural icons such as Beyoncé, Nina Simone and Elza Soares, and commercial products from his childhood such as popular plastic blue Capri pools, Danone yogurt and the chocolate drink Toddynho. Alexandre paints his Black subjects on brown craft paper—pardo, in Portuguese. Although the main series title translates directly as “brown is paper” to reference the pardo paper itself, historically the term holds double significance as an ambiguous racial category in Brazil. Alexandre uses pardo paper to affirm and empower Blackness.
- 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
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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.
- The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being by Ramon Amaro
The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being by Ramon Amaro
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On the abstruse nature of machine learning, mathematics, and the deep incursion of racial hierarchy.
To impair the racial ordering of the world, The Black Technical Object introduces the history of statistical analysis and “scientific” racism into research on machine learning. Computer programming designed for taxonomic patterning, machine learning offers useful insights into racism and racist behavior, but its connection to the racial history of science and the Black lived experience has yet to be developed. In this book, Ramon Amaro explores how the history of data and statistical analysis informs the complex relationship between race and machine learning. He juxtaposes a practical analysis of this type of computerized learning with a theory of Black alienation in order to inspire alternative approaches to contemporary algorithmic practice. In doing so, Amaro contemplates the abstruse nature of programming and mathematics, as well as the deep incursion of racial hierarchies.
Series Overview: In the decades that followed the demise of decolonial struggles and the end of the USSR, a great deal of intellectual effort was devoted to conceptualizing political emancipation as freedom from the masses rather than freedom for the masses. Focusing on connectivity rather than on collectivity, these modalities of political action led to depoliticizing effects and to a certain counter-political ethos expressed in terms such as parapolitics, psychopolitics, or micropolitics, all which this series terms “antipolitical.” Rather than counter the arguments that each term puts forth, On the Antipolitical, edited by Ana Teixeira Pinto, suggests historizing this disposition, situating it within the neocolonial continuum that animates the digital frontier as the new locus of settler becoming. - Feminism
Feminism
by Bernardine Evaristo
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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.” - Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook
Decolonizing Design: A Cultural Justice Guidebook
by Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall
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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. - A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration
A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration
by Jessica Bell Brown & Ryan N. Dennis
$45.00Contemporary artists and writers reflect on the Great Migration and the ways that it continues to inform the Black experience in America
Contemporary artists and writers reflect on the Great Migration and the ways that it continues to inform the Black experience in America
The Great Migration (1915–70) saw more than six million African Americans leave the South for destinations across the United States. This incredible dispersal of people across the country transformed nearly every aspect of Black life and culture. Offering a new perspective on this historical phenomenon, this incisive volume presents immersive photography of newly commissioned works of art by Akea, Mark Bradford, Zoë Charlton, Larry W. Cook, Torkwase Dyson, Theaster Gates Jr., Allison Janae Hamilton, Leslie Hewitt, Steffani Jemison, Robert Pruitt, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, and Carrie Mae Weems. The artists investigate their connections to the Deep South through familial stories of perseverance, self-determination, and self-reliance and consider how this history informs their working practices. Essays by Kiese Laymon, Jessica Lynne, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, and Willie Jamaal Wright explore how the Great Migration continues to reverberate today in the public and private spheres and examine migration as both a historical and a political consequence, as well as a possibility for reclaiming agency.
Published in association with the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Mississippi Museum of Art - Women Painting Women
Women Painting Women
by Andrea Karnes
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Replete with complexities, abjection, beauty and joy, Women Painting Women offers new ways to imagine the portrayal of women, from Alice Neel to Jordan Casteel
A thematic exploration of nearly 50 female artists who choose women as subject matter in their works, Women Painting Women includes nearly 50 portraits that span the 1960s to the present. International in scope, the book recognizes female perspectives that have been underrepresented in the history of postwar figuration. Painting is the focus, as traditionally it has been a privileged medium for portraiture, particularly for white male artists. The artists here use painting and women as subject matter and as vehicles for change. They range from early trailblazers such as Emma Amos and Alice Neel to emerging artists such as Jordan Casteel, Somaya Critchlow and Apolonia Sokol. All place women—their bodies, gestures and individuality—at the forefront.
The pivotal narrative in Women Painting Women is how the artists included use the conventional portrait of a woman as a catalyst to tell another story outside of male interpretations of the female body. They conceive new ways to activate and elaborate on the portrayal of women by exploring themes of the Body, Nature Personified, Selfhood and Color as Portrait. Replete with complexities, realness, abjection, beauty, complications, everydayness and joy, the portraits in this volume make way for women artists to share the stage with their male counterparts in defining the image of woman and how it has evolved.
Artists include: Rita Ackermann, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Emma Amos, María Berrío, Louise Bonnet, Lisa Brice, Joan Brown, Jordan Casteel, Somaya Critchlow, Kim Dingle, Marlene Dumas, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Nicole Eisenman, Tracey Emin, Natalie Frank, Hope Gangloff, Eunice Golden, Jenna Gribbon, Alex Heilbron, Ania Hobson, Luchita Hurtado, Chantal Joffe, Hayv Kahraman, Maria Lassnig, Christiane Lyons, Danielle Mckinney, Marilyn Minter, Alice Neel, Elizabeth Peyton, Paula Rego, Faith Ringgold, Deborah Roberts, Susan Rothenberg, Jenny Saville, Dana Schutz, Joan Semmel, Amy Sherald, Lorna Simpson, Arpita Singh, Sylvia Sleigh, Apolonia Sokol, May Stevens, Claire Tabouret, Mickalene Thomas, Nicola Tyson and Lisa Yuskavage. - 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 - Black American Portraits: From the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Black American Portraits: From the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
edited by Christine Kim
$49.95A celebratory visual chronicle of the many ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves
Spanning over two centuries from around 1800 to the present day, Black American Portraits chronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes. Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, curated by David C. Driskell at LACMA 45 years ago, this book is a companion to the exhibition of the same name that reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters and spaces. This selection of approximately 140 works from LACMA’s permanent collection highlights emancipation, scenes from the Harlem Renaissance, portraits from the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, multiculturalism of the 1990s and the spirit of Black Lives Matter.
Countering a visual culture that often demonizes Blackness and fetishizes the spectacle of Black pain, these images center love, abundance, family, community and exuberance. Black American Portraits depicts Black figures in a range of mediums such as painting, drawing, prints, photography, sculpture, mixed media and time-based media. In addition to work by artists of African descent, Black American Portraits includes several works by artists of other backgrounds who have exemplified a thoughtfulness about, sensitivity toward and commitment to Black artists, communities, histories and subjects.
Artists include: Alvin Baltrop, Edward Biberman, Bisa Butler, Jordan Casteel, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Bruce Davidson, Stan Douglas, rafa esparza, Shepard Fairey, Charles Gaines, Sargent Claude Johnson, Deana Lawson, Kerry James Marshall, Alice Neel, Lorraine O'Grady, Catherine Opie, Amy Sherald, Ming Smith, Henry Taylor, Tourmaline, Mickalene Thomas, James Van Der Zee, Carrie Mae Weems, Charles White, Kehinde Wiley and Deborah Willis. - Living While Black: Portraits of Everyday Resistance
Living While Black: Portraits of Everyday Resistance
by Ajuan Mance
$22.95In 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
- Amy Sherald: The World We Make
Amy Sherald: The World We Make
by Amy Sherald
$55.00The 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. - To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood
To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood
edited by Jeffrey De Blois & Ruth Erickson
$39.95How 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. - African Art Now: 50 Pioneers Defining African Art for the Twenty-First Century
African Art Now: 50 Pioneers Defining African Art for the Twenty-First Century
by Osei Bonsu
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With African artists attracting sizable audience numbers to museums, setting sky-high auction records, and appearing in mainstream press, it has become impossible to overlook the cultural significance of contemporary African art today. Author and curator Osei Bonsu's engaging profiles of leading African artists—along with gorgeous full-color reproductions of their work—introduce readers to a generation of movers and shakers whose innovative artwork reflects on Africa as both an idea and an experience. Using diverse forms, languages, and expressions to articulate what it means to be a part of the world, these artists generate alternate histories and imaginative futures—work that is both personal and political, universal and incredibly specific. Their work helps define contemporary African art as a vast artistic and cultural movement.
STELLAR ROSTER OF ARTISTS: Amoako Boafo, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Bronwyn Katz—from household names to up-and-coming artists, African Art Now features some of the most exciting artists working today.
IMPORTANT AND TIMELY: Over the past two decades, contemporary African art has become part of the global mainstream, inspiring countless exhibitions, fairs, and auctions around the world. And yet, African art remains overlooked as an area of dedicated study due to continued academic and cultural bias. This book shines a spotlight on the artists whose wide-ranging accomplishments represent the shifting dynamics and boundless possibilities of African art today.
Perfect for:- Artists, art collectors, art lovers, and museumgoers
- Educators and students
- Anyone interested in learning about contemporary African art
- Comrade Sisters
Comrade Sisters
by Stephen Shames
Sold outForeword by Angela Davis: “This stunning collection of historical photographs, complimented by contemporary conversations with women members of the Black Panther Party, reminds us that women were literally the heart of this new political approach to Black freedom.”Many of us have heard these three words: Black Panther Party. Some know the Party's history as a movement for the social, political, economic and spiritual upliftment of Black and indigenous people of color – but to this day, few know the story of the backbone of the Party: the women. It's estimated that six out of ten Panther Party members were women. While these remarkable women of all ages and diverse backgrounds were regularly making headlines agitating, protesting, and organizing, off-stage these same women were building communities and enacting social justice, providing food, housing, education, healthcare, and more. Comrade Sisters is their story.The book combines photos by Stephen Shames, who at the time was a 20-year-old college student at Berkeley. With the complete trust of the Black Panther Party, Shames took intimate, behind-the-scenes photographs that fully portrayed Party members' lives. This marks his third photo book about the Black Panthers and includes many never before published images.Ericka Huggins, an early Party member and leader along with Bobby Seale and Huey Newton, has written a moving text, sharing what drew so many women to the Party and focusing on their monumental work on behalf of the most vulnerable citizens. Most importantly, the book includes contributions from over fifty former women members – some well-known, others not – who vividly recall their personal experiences from that time. Other texts include a foreword by Angela Davis and an afterword by Alicia Garza. All Power to the People.We are very excited to share with you a preview of what's to come! - Amoako Boafo
Amoako Boafo
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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. - Kerry James Marshall: Mastry
Kerry James Marshall: Mastry
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The definitive monograph on contemporary African American painter Kerry James Marshall, accompanying a major traveling retrospective. This long-awaited volume celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America’s greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition. With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this monumental book features essays by noted curators as well as the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist’s career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism.
- Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions
Black Country Music: Listening for Revolutions
by Francesca T. Royster
$24.95Black Country Music tells the story of how Black musicians have changed the country music landscape and brought light to Black creativity and innovation. 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.
- What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation by Tom Finkelpearl
What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation by Tom Finkelpearl
$29.95What 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. - Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power
Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power
$50.00A 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. - Beautiful, Still.
Beautiful, Still.
by Colby Deal
$55.00Beautiful, Still is the first monograph from photographer Colby Deal, documenting the people, objects, and environments of everyday life in the Third Ward neighbourhood in Houston, Texas, where the artist grew up. In this ongoing project, currently consisting of over a thousand negatives, Deal sets out to provide a visual record of overlooked communities and the cultural characteristics gradually being erased by gentrification, as well as a depiction of communities of colour whose members are often portrayed with negative connotations. Through these instinctive black-and-white photographs, Deal's down-to-earth approach to his subjects is made apparent; at times candid and blurred, other times poised and sharply focussed, the series builds to convey the dynamism and vibrancy of family, community, and individual life in the Third Ward. The scratches and dust left on the negatives reflect the marks of lived life and simultaneously suggest the fragility of these documents and the corresponding precarity of the fabrics of social life they often depict. Deal's almost conversational tone - the anthesis of media portrayals of the neighbourhood - invites his viewers in with a sense of joy and intuitive playfulness. From these alternately staged and documentary images, a new narrative emerges about a reductively and oppressively narrativized place, celebrating the agency and freedom that the photographic medium can offer. - Textures: The History and Art of Black Hair by Tameka Ellington
Textures: The History and Art of Black Hair by Tameka Ellington
$39.95Textures synthesizes research in history, fashion, art, and visual culture to reassess the “hair story” of peoples of African descent. Long a fraught topic for African Americans and others in the diaspora, Black hair is here addressed by artists, barbers, and activists in both its historical perceptions and its ramifications for self and society today. Combs, products, and implements from the collection of hair pioneer Willie Morrow are paired here with masterworks from artists like Sonya Clark, Lorna Simpson, Mickalene Thomas, and Alison Saar. Exploring topics such as the preferential treatment of straight hair, the social hierarchies of skin, and the power and politics of display, Textures is a landmark exploration of Black hair and its important, complicated place in the history of African American life and culture. - Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech
Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech
edited by Michael Darling
$79.95The 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.
- Gordon Parks: Segregation Story
Gordon Parks: Segregation Story
Sold outAn 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. - Kitchen Table Series
Kitchen Table Series
by Carrie Mae Weems
$60.00“In book form, Kitchen Table is more intimate…. Unlike the experience of meandering through a museum, stepping back to appreciate the images and nearing the text panels to skim them, the pace of exploration is now in a person’s hands.” –Hilary Moss, New York Times
This publication is dedicated solely to the early and canonical body of work by American artist Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953). The 20 photographs and 14 text panels that make up Kitchen Table Series tell a story of one woman’s life, as conducted in the intimate setting of her kitchen. The kitchen, one of the primary spaces of domesticity and the traditional domain of women, frames her story, revealing to us her relationships—with lovers, children, friends—and her own sense of self, in her varying projections of strength, vulnerability, aloofness, tenderness and solitude.
As Weems describes it, this work of art depicts “the battle around the family ... monogamy ... and between the sexes.G6 Weems herself is the protagonist of the series, though the woman she depicts is an archetype. Kitchen Table Series seeks to reposition and reimagine the possibility of women and the possibility of people of color, and has to do with, in the artist’s words, “unrequited love.” - 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! - The Migration Series: The Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence
The Migration Series: The Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence
$35.00Lawrence'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.
- Faith Ringgold: Politics / Power
Faith Ringgold: Politics / Power
by Faith Ringgold
$49.95Ringgold'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. - Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories: Reflections
Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories: Reflections
by Theaster Gates
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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. - Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art
Art as Social Action: An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art
by Gregory Sholette, Chloë Bass. & Social Practice Queens
$24.99"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.
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