Black artists of different generations are gaining more recognition and opportunities. Various illustrated art books published in 2019 focus on individual artists, including Kwame Braithwaite, Robert Colescott, Lubaina Himid, Suzanne Jackson, and Julie Mehretu. Other selections explore the art collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem, highlight young Black artists in fashion photography, and consider the history of Black artists and audiences at the Museum of Modern Art. These books are filled with beautiful images and fresh scholarship. (Titles listed in order of publication date.)
“Stick to the Skin: African American and Black British Art, 1965-2015,” By Celeste-Marie Bernier, with a foreword by Lubaina Himid (University of California Press, 344 pages). | Harcdover, Published Jan. 8, 2019
1. Stick to the Skin: African American and Black British Art, 1965-2015
Described as the first “comparative history of African American and Black British artists, artworks, and movements,” this book covers more than 50 artists active between 1965 and 2015. It brings together artists from both the UK and the United States, discussing various themes and artists from this time period. It explores narratives around slavery, anti-portraiture, storytelling, and struggle, with a focus on works of art from this era.
“Black Refractions: Highlights From the Studio Museum in Harlem,” Edited by Connie H. Choi, with forewords by Thelma Golden and Pauline Willis, and contributions from Kellie Jones (Rizzoli, 232 pages). | Hardcover, Published Jan. 15, 2019
2. Black Refractions: Highlights From the Studio Museum in Harlem
Over the past 50 years, the Studio Museum in Harlem has acquired numerous artworks, including pieces by a wide range of artists such as Alma Thomas, Beauford Delaney, and Kerry James Marshall. This book documents a traveling exhibition featuring about 100 works from the museum’s collection, showcasing the depth and breadth of the works. Alongside each illustration is a brief essay, shedding light on the history of the museum and its collection strategy.
“`html
3. Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful
In the late 1950s and 60s, Harlem photographer Kwame Braithwaite combined his art, political vision, and buy black philosophy, to effect economic and social change. He trained his lens on the beauty of blackness, celebrating natural hair and a full range of skin tones and formalized his ideals through two organizations he founded with his older brother—African Jazz Arts Society and Studios (AJASS), a collective of multidisciplinary artists, and Grandassa Models (1962), a troupe composed of black women. “Black is Beautiful” is the first monograph to document his career. It accompanies a traveling exhibition organized by the Aperture Foundation and features a compelling mix of studio portraits, street shots, album cover images, and behind-the-scenes photographs of prominent jazz figures. A three-part essay by Tanisha C. Ford explores Braithwaite’s multifaceted practice and contextualizes his work. In the preface, Braithwaite writes that his goal “was to make sure that for generations to come, everyone who sees my work knows the greatness of our people.”
“Braithwaite witnessed and chronicled the responses of young black Harlemites to the 1960s, providing a visual narration of how they employed dress, politics, and music to challenge notions of disenfranchisement and create their own kinds of beauty.” — Deborah Willis
4. Lubaina Himid: Workshop Manual
A real treasure, this lavishly illustrated volume serves as a “manual” of Lubaina Himid’s ambitious practice. An artist, curator, professor, and pioneer in the UK Black Arts Movement, Himid has been a stalwart presence in the British art world for four decades. Her work focuses on black representation, identity, and creativity; references slavery, colonialism, contemporary politics, migration, and refugees; and challenges the historic invisibility of blacks in British society. She makes works on paper; paintings on canvas, wood, and porcelain; and installations influenced by her early work in theater design. Long overdue recognition of her contributions has come in the past several years through a succession of institutional exhibitions and the Turner Prize, which she won in 2017. Himid is the first black woman and oldest artist to receive the prestigious prize. While she has been active for two generations, this volume is the first full monograph of her work. Featuring 280 color images of work made throughout her career (1976-2018), the volume explores both her curatorial and artistic practices. More than a dozen series on view in three recent survey exhibitions are highlighted, with Himid contributing illuminating texts about the artwork, explaining their backgrounds and meaning. Courtney J. Martin writes about Himid’s curatorial foundation which began when she was pursuing a masters at the Royal College of Art. Himid surveyed other young black artists and wrote her thesis about their experiences. Zoé Whitley considers “visible strategies” in Himid’s paintings. Other curators reflect on collaborating with Himid on recent solo exhibitions through essays and a conversation with the artist.
“Himid wants to see change—it is no small task she is setting herself. Through her work Himid problematises historiography, questions power relationships and makes visible marginal positions across time, race, gender, sexual orientation and class.” — Lisa Panting & Malin Stahl
“““html
“Trenton Doyle Hancock: Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass” by Denise Markonish, with contributions by Trenton Doyle Hancock, Lauren Haynes, Diana Nawi, Enongo Laumuba-Kasongo (a.k.a. Sammus), and Frank Oz (Prestel, 224 pages). | Published July 12, 2019
5. Trenton Doyle Hancock: Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass
The toys, comic books, horror films, and super heroes Houston-based Trenton Doyle Hancock loved as a child have influenced his unique artistic practice featuring imaginative characters (Mounds and Vegans) and a self-created mythological universe. This insightful volume delves into Hancock’s personal background and inspirations, chronicling his most expansive exhibition to date. “Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass” at MASS MoCA showcased his paintings, drawings, and installations side by side with items from his toy and pop culture collections as well as pages from an upcoming graphic novel. In the foreword of the catalog, curator Denise Markonish describes the immersive exhibition as a carnivalesque toy fair, bringing together Trent’s interests and characters to provide a comprehensive snapshot of his imagination. Abundant with illustrations of his work and installation images from the exhibition, the book contains a vibrant blend of art and text. It is an explosion of color with essays, two conversations with the artist, and a “Moundverse Timeline” printed on brightly colored pages such as blue, green, pink, yellow, and red. In a further display of eclecticism, the volume includes an iron-on patch with the book’s title embroidered on it, which can be removed and worn as a keepsake by fans of Hancock and his otherworldly creations.
Trenton Doyle Hancock’s visual art draws inspiration from artists like Philip Guston and Henry Darger, and his forthcoming graphic novel “traces the birth of the Mounds and Vegans—the plants and mutants that are forever at war—through which he explores good, evil, authority, race, moral relativism, and religion.”
“Deborah Roberts: The Evolution of Mimi,” Edited by Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, with a foreword by Mary Schmidt Campbell, contributions from Kirsten Pai Buick, Erin J. Gilbert, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and Antwaun Sargent, and a postscript by Franklin Sirmans (Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia for Spelman College of Fine Art, 160 pages). | Published July 29, 2019
6. Deborah Roberts: The Evolution of Mimi
On the surface, it may appear that artist Deborah Roberts’ journey began about five years ago, when her mixed-media collages of black girls gained wider recognition. However, she has actually been honing her craft for nearly three decades, if not longer. “I’ve been working on my craft for nearly thirty years, maybe longer,” Roberts shared in a conversation with Valerie Cassel Oliver, featured in “Deborah Roberts: The Evolution of Mimi.” She elaborated, “I had my own gallery at one point, did workshops, created projects with students. But that earlier work was something entirely different. The process is different as is the language and the way it is being presented. What I am doing right new, that’s new to people, but not new to me. The language of the work has shifted, but it’s not different work. How I create has evolved over time, but I am still preoccupied with questions of beauty, family, identity, and love.” The catalog documents an exhibition at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, featuring over 80 works—paintings, collages, and hand-painted serigraphs created between 2007 and 2017. The show traced Roberts’ transformation from a figurative painter to a collage artist with a sustained interest in the power and vulnerability of black girls and the complexity of blackness. With over 100 pages showcasing the exhibition and essays by Kirsten Pai Buick, Erin J. Gilbert, and Antwaun Sargent, the book provides invaluable insight into Roberts’ timeless and thought-provoking work.
“`
“Among Others: Blackness at MoMA,” by Darby English and Charlotte Barat, with contribution from Mabel O. Wilson, et al. (Museum of Modern Art, 488 pages). | Published Aug. 20, 2019
7. Among Others: Blackness at MoMA
Art historian Darby English and Charlotte Barat collaborated on “Among Others: Blackness at MoMA.” The book delves into the Museum of Modern Art’s engagement with black artists and art about blackness. A comprehensive essay titled “A Legacy of Deficit” outlines the museum’s challenges in this area. The book also features a second essay, “White by Design” by Mabel O. Wilson, which discusses the lack of works by black architects and designers in the museum’s design and architecture collections. The publication contains illustrations of approximately 200 works from MoMA’s collection, mostly by black artists, along with writings by contributing scholars, curators, and artists. The cover image is an untitled circa 1960-63 photograph by Ernest Cole, reflecting the apartheid-era scene.
“We who are alive can say the least of anyone about the future of The Museum of Modern Art. But we can envision it and work toward what the mind’s eye sees—a MoMA future in which the black artist is not a special occasion or subject, but just one artist among others.”
— Darby English and Charlotte Barat
“Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott,” Edited by Lowery Stokes Sims and Raphaela Platow, with contribution from Matthew Weseley (Rizzoli, 256 pages). | Published Sept. 24, 2019
8. Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott
“Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott” provides a comprehensive overview of Robert Colescott’s work. This book, accompanied by a career-spanning survey organized by CAC Cincinnati, features over 80 paintings spanning 50 years. The catalog contextualizes the paintings with essays, interviews, and reflections from various individuals who knew the artist, including scholars, curators, and artists. The volume offers insights into Colescott’s life and work, capturing his storytelling prowess and the depth of his artistic contributions. Several essays and personal accounts provide a rich understanding of the artist and his impact. Miriam Roberts writes about curating his 1997 Venice Biennale exhibition, while Carrie Mae Weems discusses the fascinating portrait she made with him for the show.The first black artist to have a solo exhibition in the American Pavilion in Venice was Robert Colescott. The legacy of race in their family is discussed by his cousin, along with a selection of Colescott’s writings about his own work and that of artists William H. Johnson and Bob Thompson. It wasn’t widely known that Colescott passed for white until he traveled to Cairo, Egypt in the mid-1960s, and returned to the United States several years later to create the satirical paintings addressing black identity for which he became known.
Senga Nengudi’s work blends sculpture, performance, and dance and is informed by concerns with racial and gender equality, spirituality, and the impact of life experiences on the human body. The book “Senga Nengudi: Topologies” presents the first comprehensive overview of her five-decade career, featuring more than 40 works from her Water Compositions in the 1970s to her fluttering fabric “spirits” and R.S.V.P. series of pantyhose sculptures. The catalog includes an essay by Kellie Jones about Studio Z, a reflection from Linda Goode Bryant on Nengudi’s 1977 R.S.V.P. exhibition, and a wealth of archival material.
“Suzanne Jackson: Five Decades” traces the career of Suzanne Jackson, a dancer-turned-artist who began her career in Los Angeles and later earned a master’s degree in theater design from Yale University. This volume accompanies the first full-career survey and comprehensive presentation of Jackson’s work. It includes essays about her life and inspirations, her various techniques, a chronology, and full-color plates that explain titles and symbolic references.The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion
Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Aperture Foundation in New York, “The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion” introduces 15 young photographers forging impressive careers in the fashion world. Celebrating the black body, their striking images are redefining beauty. “Untitled (Hijab Couture), New York” (2019) by Tyler Mitchell appears on the cover of the fully illustrated volume. The stunning portrait features model Ugbad Abdi wearing a pink head covering blanketed with soft sculptural flowers. When Beyoncé graced the cover of American Vogue’s fall fashion issue in September 2018, she was photographed by Atlanta-born, Brooklyn-based Mitchell. The assignment made history. Incredibly, Mitchell, then 23, was the first black photographer to shoot the magazine’s cover. His singular feat has brought attention to a new generation of image makers. Mitchell, along with Campbell Addy, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Micaiah Carter, Awol Erizku, Quil Lemons, Daniel Obasi, Ruth Ossai, and Dana Scruggs, among others, are using fashion photography as an aesthetic and political vehicle, bringing visibility to their practices and their subjects. Their work has appeared in outlets such as Artforum, GQ, Allure, Wall St. Journal, Financial Times, i-D, Interview, Playboy, The New Yorker, New York magazine, W magazine, and international editions of Vogue. “The pictures and their makers are part of a new black vanguard of photographers who are working internationally, across the African diaspora, and using their cameras to create contemporary portrayals of black life that are reframing established representational paradigms,” author Antwaun Sargent writes in the essay that opens the book. The photographers hail from New York, Atlanta, California, Chicago, Africa, and Europe. Sargent writes briefly about each artist and further explores their work with a portfolio of images. Conversations among Sargent and a selection of the photographers with Shaniqwa Jarvis, Mickalene Thomas, and Deborah Willis, conclude the volume.
“To convey black beauty is an act of justice.” — Tyler Mitchell
Roy DeCarava: Light Break
This catalog accompanied “Roy DeCarava: Light Break,” a survey exhibition celebrating the centennial of the artist’s birth at David Zwirner Gallery in New York City. “DeCarava” is pressed into the front cover of the cloth-bound volume in copper foil lettering. The same treatment is applied to the back cover in silver foil. At once spare and elegant, the minimalist approach continues on the interior where the black-and-white photographs of Roy DeCarava (1919-2009) take center stage. The array of images dating from 1948 to 2006, showcase his dexterity with light and shadow and commitment to printing techniques that produced a full spectrum of rich tonal grays. DeCarava’s subject is Harlem, the neighborhood where he grew up. He combines “formal acuity with an intimate and deeply human treatment of his subjects,” training his lens on people (intimate moments, close-ups, and wide angle perspectives), natural and architectural landscapes, and abstract compositions. The preface is by Zoé Whitley and Sherry Turner DeCarava contributes the introduction and an essay titled “Celebration.” Turner DeCarava is the late photographer’s wife. An art historian, she manages his estate. She notes that he rarely spoke publicly about his work. Her writing highlights and quotes “some of his prescient thoughts, gathered from forty years of conversations and interviews…”
“My concern is always in how I use the light, process my highlights, modulate my grays. The emphasis is really not on black tones. Most of my images that seem black are not black at all, they are a very dark gray.” — Roy DeCarava
“Julie Mehretu,” by Christine Y. Kim and Rujeko Hockley, with contributions from Andrianna Campbell, Fred Moten, Adrienne Edwards, Leslie Jones, Dagmawi Woubshet, Mathew Hale, and afterword by Thelma Golden (Prestel, 320 pages). | Hardcover, Published Nov. 15, 2019
13. Julie Mehretu
Over the last 25 years, Julie Mehretu has been creating intricate abstract paintings influenced by geographical maps and architectural blueprints. Her work references LaGuardia Airport and European ruins, addressing geopolitics, displacement, and more. Some of her pieces burst with color, while others are predominantly gray and black. Her recent work includes hints of figuration. The book “Julie Mehretu” compiles a comprehensive overview of her evolving body of work from 1996 to the present for the first time. The generously illustrated volume reproduces her extensive paintings and detailed drawings, including full-page details. Writings by co-curators Christine Y. Kim and Rujeko Hockley, among others, explore Mehretu’s practice and unpack the content and meaning embedded in her work. Kim’s four-part chronological essay traces the development of the artist’s various series and major works. Each section begins with a fascinating “visual archive,” a collage of images compiled by Mehretu charting her sources and inspirations, offering insight into her process.
“While Mehretu is an assembler of facts, her obsession is equally, if not more so, with fictions. Her works may begin as prose reports, dispatches, statements, commentaries, news, but they aspire to poetry, tales, fables, poems, legends, and ballads. Her paintings are stories she tells about herself and the world, her worlds—past and present.” — Adam Weinberg
“Member: Pope.L, 1978-2001” Edited by Stuart Comer and Danielle Jackson, with a foreword by Glenn D. Lowry, and text contributions by many others (Museum of Modern Art, 144 pages). | Published Nov. 19, 2019
14. member: Pope.L, 1978-2001
Artist Pope.L is known for controversial performances such as crawling through Times Square wearing a suit or a Superman costume, chaining himself to the door of an ATM wearing a skirt made of money, and sitting on a toilet eating the Wall Street Journal. These performances aim to uncover uncomfortable economic, social, and political truths in American life and highlight the disparities between living as a black versus white individual. The book “member: Pope.L, 1978-2001” examines 13 of his early works, street interventions, and experimental theater that largely defined his career. Each notable work is explored in this volume with documentary photographs and brief essays by various artists and curators. The book serves as an essential primer on Pope.L, and the subversive branding is embedded in the design with a small hole punched out of the center and the bottom right-hand corner missing entirely.
