"Taking its title from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, exhibition Black Is, Black Ain't (April 20 – June 8, 2008) explored a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and retained. Curated by the Renaissance Society's Associate Curator and Education Director Hamza Walker, the exhibition brought together works by twenty-seven black and non- ..."
"From 1972 to 1991, Eleanor Antin (born 1935) created multiple personae of different genders, races, professions, historical contexts and geographic locations. The artist called this motley group--which includes a deposed king, an exiled film director, ambitious ballerinas and hard-working nurses--her "selves." The selves' manifestations were as diverse as their stories: some were embodied by Antin and captured in photographs and on vide ..."
"Glenn Ligon is one of the preeminent members of a generation of American artists who came to prominence in the late 1980s with conceptually-based paintings, photographs and text-oriented works concerning the social, linguistic and political constructions of race, gender and sexuality. Incorporating sources as diverse as photographic scrapbooks and Richard Pryor's stand-up comedy routines--his lush coal-dust paintings of excerpts from Ja ..."
"Celebrated multimedia artist Kori Newkirk achieved notoriety by artfullytransfiguring pedestrian objects from African-American culture - likebeads, basketballs and hair picks - into symbols through which viewersare led to experience and interact with black beauty and life. The firstmajor publication of Newkirk's compelling work, this softcoverexhibition catalog features illustrations and full-color photographs thatchart Newkirk's creati ..."
"Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s is the first major museum survey to historicize art made in the United States during this pivotal decade. Showcasing approximately sixty-five works by forty-five artists, the book includes installations, paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, video, sound, and digital art. Come as You Are offers an overview of art made in the United States between 1989 and 2001, a period bookended by two indelible eve ..."
Bound to Appear(Updated) Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America by HueyCopeland Hardcover, 280 Pages, Published 2013 by University Of Chicago Press ISBN-13: 978-0-226-11570-2, ISBN: 0-226-11570-4
"At the close of the twentieth century, black artists began to figure prominently in the mainstream American art world for the first time. Thanks to the social advances of the civil rights movement and the rise of multiculturalism, African American artists in the late 1980s and early '90s enjoyed unprecedented access to established institutions of publicity and display. Yet in this moment of ostensible freedom, black cultural practitione ..."
Bound to Appear Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America by HueyCopeland 296 Pages, Published 2013 by University Of Chicago Press ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01312-1, ISBN: 0-226-01312-X
"This year, outsiders are in. . . . And lots of museums, galleries, magazines and
collectors are standing in line to seize the moment with artists whose skin colors,
languages, national origins, sexual preferences or strident messages have kept
them out of the mainstream. Say it's about time, blame it on guilt, call it a
certificate of altruism for the living-room wall. Whatever, Lorna Simpson fits the
bill.24 Indeed, she did. The a ..."
"Never hesitant to explore new territory, Fred Wilson, in a major solo exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, displays his growing interest in the medium of glass. He has taken the title of the exhibition, Black Like Me, from John Howard Griffin's groundbreaking 1961 book of the same name. A white civil-rights activist, Griffin dyed his skin black and traveled throughout the South to directly understand the nature of racial p ..."
"This important new book addresses a key area of post-colonial studies coined by the British academic Paul Gilroy in 1993 - the notion of 'The Black Atlantic' - and its relation to visual art from 1900 to today. It traces the imaginary and actual journeys of influential artists and intellectuals from North America, the Caribbean and Latin America across the Atlantic to Europe, the reverse direction to that of the slave-ships that carried ..."
"The work of Jennie C. Jones (born 1968) spans multiple mediums, from paintings, sculptures and works on paper to audio collages and immersive sound installations. Jones employs the visual languages of abstraction and minimalism to draw out the parallels and disjunctions between the history of modernism and the history of African American music, particularly jazz. This volume documenting the artist’s midcareer survey at Contemporary Arts ..."
"Clifford Owens (born 1971) has long been aware that the history of African-American performance art remains largely unwritten. Rather than rectifying the oversight in scholarly terms, Owens has created an unprecedented artistic project, a compendium of African-American performance art that is both highly personal and thoroughly historical. This volume, Owens' first publication, includes written performance scores that Owens solicited fr ..."
"... Geof Oppenheimer, Ryan Rice, Cassandra Smith, J. Michael Terry, Yesomi Umolu, and L. A. Williams. I thank Pamela Ayo Yetunde for her guidance. Jill Brienza and Lisa M. Gill have my continual gratitude for over two decades of friendship ..."
""Psychic Wounds: On Art & Trauma examines over 60 international artists whose memory of historical trauma has provided them with a unique power to generate works of art."