Amy Sherald’s work, life, and significance for American art, as revealed in her powerful figurative paintings of Black subjects
 
Bringing together nearly all of her artwork to date, this lavishly illustrated volume situates the work of Amy Sherald (b. 1973) within the context of American realist and figurative painting. Encompassing the full arc of her career, from her poetic early works to the distinctive figure paintings and portraits that have become her hallmark, Amy Sherald: American Sublime unfolds her method of selecting individuals she meets on the street and using facial expression, body language, and clothing choices to create paintings that transcend portraiture and expand the canon of American art. Essays by curators Sarah Roberts and Rhea Combs; poet and writer Elizabeth Alexander; artist Dario Calmese; and renowned scholar Deborah Willis contextualize and illuminate Sherald’s creation of a new form of imaginative portraiture. Often depicting her subjects’ skin in gray monochrome, surrounded by few markers of place, time, or context beyond the clothes they wear, Sherald challenges the assumption that Black life is inextricably bound with struggle, creating images that engage in more expansive thinking about race and representation and the wide-open possibilities and complexities of every individual. Whether a passerby or the former first lady Michelle Obama, Sherald’s subjects are at ease with themselves, the world, and one another.
 
Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
 
Exhibition Schedule:
 
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
(November 16, 2024–March 9, 2025)
 
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
(April 9–August 3, 2025)
 
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC
(September 2025–January 2026)

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"A fine, powerful book.” —Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gilead

From the moment Ava Carson and her ten-year-old son, Toussaint, arrive at the Glenn Avenue family shelter in Philadelphia 1985, Ava is already plotting a way out. She is repulsed by the shelter's squalid conditions: their cockroach-infested room, the barely edible food, and the shifty night security guard. She is determined to rescue her son from the perils and indignities of that place, and to save herself from the complicated past that led them there.

Ava has been estranged from her own mother, Dutchess, since she left her Alabama home as a young woman barely out of her teens. Despite their estrangement and the thousand miles between them, mother and daughter are deeply entwined, but Ava can't forgive her sharp-tounged, larger than life mother whose intractability and bouts of debilitating despair brought young Ava to the outer reaches of neglect and hunger.

Ava wants to love her son differently, better. But when Toussaint’s father, Cass, reappears, she is swept off course by his charisma, and the intoxicating power of his radical vision to destroy systems of racial injustice and bring about a bold new way of communal living. 

Meanwhile, in Alabama, Dutchess struggles to keep Bonaparte, once a beacon of Black freedom and self-determination, in the hands of its last five Black residents—families whose lives have been rooted in this stretch of land for generations—and away from rapidly encroaching white developers. She fights against the erasure of Bonaparte's venerable history and the loss of the land itself, which she has so arduously preserved as Ava's inheritance.

As Ava becomes more enmeshed with Cass, Toussaint senses the danger simmering all around him—his well-intentioned but erratic mother; the intense, volatile figure of his father who drives his fledgling Philadelphia community toward ever increasing violence and instability. He begins to dream of Dutchess and Bonaparte, his home and birthright, if only he can find his way there. 

Brilliant, explosive, vitally important new work from one of America’s most fiercely talented storytellers.

A visual journey of Caribbean art profiling more than 60 contemporary Caribbean artists, curated by award winning multidisciplinary artist and textile surface designer, Malene Barnett .

Through powerful interviews with more than 60 artists and designers of Caribbean heritage, accompanied by gorgeous photographs, Crafted Kinship takes readers on a unique journey through the world of Black Caribbean creativity. Each maker crafts a kinship with the land, the people, the culture of their country of origin. Their art explores and reflects deeply on themes like African origins, ancestors, Black womanhood/Black manhood, identity, joy, memory, and the complicated and painful history of migration and diaspora. An art that is more often than not multidisciplinary, created by makers who eschew traditional labels by reshaping the boundaries around art and design.

Curated by Malene Barnett, an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and textile surface designer of Jamaican and Vincentian descent, Crafted Kinship is the first book in which Caribbean makers share the intimate stories of their art-making process and how their countries of origin influence and inform how and what they create. Included are makers working across all mediums. Meet Anina Major, a Bahamian visual artist whose work attempts to reclaim the significance of straw basketry through her ceramics; Basil Watson, a Jamaican figurative artist and sculptor famous for his stunning bronze figures that are exhibited outdoors all over the world; Renee Cox, a Jamaican photographer whose work celebrates Black womanhood; La Vaughn Belle, a multidisciplinary artist from St. Croix who draws from archival sources to interrogate colonial legacies; Sonya Clark, a textile artist and educator of Jamaican, Trinidadian, and Bajan heritage who works with hair and other meaningful materials to explore issues of power, race, and gender; and Nyugen E. Smith, an interdisciplinary artist of Trinidadian and Haitian ancestry whose fluid stream of consciousness is expressed through objects, performance, music, and moving image.

Undoubtedly the most influential black intellectual of the twentieth century and one of America's finest historians, W.E.B. DuBois knew that the liberation of the African American people required liberal education and not vocational training. He saw education as a process of teaching certain timeless values: moderation, an avoidance of luxury, a concern for courtesy, a capacity to endure, a nurturing love for beauty. At the same time, DuBois saw education as fundamentally subversive. This was as much a function of the well-established role of educationfrom Plato forwardas the realities of the social order under which he lived. He insistently calls for great energy and initiative; for African Americans controlling their own lives and for continued experimentation and innovation, while keeping education's fundamentally radical nature in view.

Though containing speeches written nearly one-hundred years ago, and on a subject that has seen more stormy debate and demagoguery than almost any other in recent history, The Education of Black People approaches education with a timelessness and timeliness, at once rooted in classical thought that reflects a remarkably fresh and contemporary relevance.

Come celebrate the paperback release of The Long Songs of W.E.B DuBois with author, Honoree Fanonne Jeffers & Jacqueline Allen Tremble. 

Event Deets

When: May 10 at 7PM CST

Where: Virtual via Crowdcast

How: Register on this page or head over to register on Crowdcast directly using this link.  If you register using our website (with or without purchasing the book) and not Crowdcast, you will register a Crowdcast watch link at least 24 hours before the start of the event.

About the Book

“My life had its significance and its only deep significance because it was part of a Problem,” W. E. B. Du Bois once wrote. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood these words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother, the descendant of slaves and tenant farmers—Ailey carries the weight of this Problem on her shoulders.

The daughter of an accomplished doctor and a strict schoolteacher, Ailey is raised in the City but spends summers in the small Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother’s family has lived since their ancestors arrived from Africa in bondage. Growing up, she struggles with this duality, a battle for belonging that shapes her identity. On one side are her exacting parents and her imperious, light-skinned grandmother Nana Claire, to whom skin color is paramount. On the other, Ailey feels the pull of the “deep country” of her mother’s land-tending family, whose forebears endured the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow.

But how can Ailey live up to everyone’s expectations when half of her family rejects the truth of a fraught racial history, while the rest can’t ever seem to break away from it?

About the Author

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is a fiction writer, poet, and essayist. She is the author of five poetry collections, including the 2020 NBA-nominated collection The Age of Phillis. She was a contributor to The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward, and has been published in the Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and other literary publications. Jeffers was elected into the American Antiquarian Society, whose members include fourteen U.S. presidents, and is Critic at Large for Kenyon Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at University of Oklahoma.

About the Moderator

 JACQUELINE ALLEN TRIMBLE lives and writes in Montgomery, Alabama, where she is  a professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. She a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow (Poetry), an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow and a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in various online and print publications including The Griot, The Offing, The Louisville Review,  and Blue Lake Review.  American Happiness (2016), her first collection, published by NewSouth Books, won the Balcones Poetry Prize.   Trimble's next collection, How to Survive the Apocalypse, is forthcoming from NewSouth Books in fall of 2022.