Honoring Black History

Common Wealth

Art by African Americans in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Published by MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Edited with text by Lowery Stokes Sims. Text by Dennis Carr, Janet L. Comey, Elliot Bostwick Davis, Aiden Faust, Nonie Gadsden, Edmund Barry Gaither, Karen Haas, Erica E. Hirshler, Kelly Hays L'Ecuyer, Taylor L. Poulin, Karen Quinn.

The story of African Americans in the visual arts has closely paralleled their social, political and economic aspirations over the last 400 years. From enslaved craftspersons to contemporary painters, printmakers and sculptors, African American artists have created a wealth of artistic expression that addresses common experiences, such as exclusion from dominant cultural institutions, and confronts questions of identity and community. This generously illustrated volume gathers more than 100 works of art in a variety of media by leading figures from the nineteenth century to the present—among them, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Lois Mailou Jones, Gordon Parks, Wifredo Lam, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon and Kerry James Marshall—alongside many others who deserve to be better known, including artists from the African diaspora in South America and the Caribbean. Arranged thematically and featuring authoritative texts that provide historical and interpretive context, Common Wealth invites readers to share in a rich outpouring of art that meets shared challenges with individual creative responses.

PUBLISHER
MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 9.5 x 11 in. / 256 pgs / 145 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 1/27/2015
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Catalog: SPRING 2015 p. 67   

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ISBN 9780878468157 TRADE
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In stock

Jacob Lawrence: Moving Forward

Paintings, 1936-1999

Published by DC Moore Gallery.
Foreword by David C. Driskell. Text by Patricia Hills.

One of the most prominent American painters of the twentieth century, Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) worked in a highly personal manner, creating Modernist views of everyday life as well as epic narratives of American history and historical figures. His work is direct and forceful, in keeping with his lifelong conviction that art could effect social change. At the same time, it is essentially humanistic, exploring the many challenges of African-American life as a means of addressing the universality of the human experience. Jacob Lawrence: Moving Forward, Paintings 1936-1999 celebrates the artist's long and productive career spanning more than 60 years. Beginning with lively street scenes of 1930s Harlem, when the young painter was establishing his artistic viewpoint, it highlights important examples from every decade of his working life, including a tribute to Jackie Robinson--the first African-American to play in the major leagues--and the powerful Hiroshima series, done for a reissue of John Hersey's well-known book on the horrific event. This survey concludes with some of Lawrence's final narratives of labor and leisure in his Builders and Games series of the 1990s. In addition to 58 images of the artist's work, this volume features an appreciation by David C. Driskell, noted artist, curator and art historian, who was a friend of Lawrence's for many decades, and an insightful overview of Lawrence's life and art by Patricia Hills, the distinguished scholar of American art.

PUBLISHER

BOOK FORMAT
Hardback, 11.25 x 9 in. / 80 pgs / 53 color / 5 duotone.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 7/1/2008
Out of stock indefinitely

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Catalog: FALL 2008 p. 91   

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ISBN 9780981525013 TRADE
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Distance and Desire

Published by Steidl.
Edited by Tamar Gard. Contributions by Awam Amkpa, Jennifer Bajorek, Elizabeth Edwards, Cheryl Finley.

Distance and Desire is the first major publication to stage a dialogue between the ethnographic visions of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century African photography and engagements with this imagery by contemporary artists. Presenting an extraordinary range of portraits, albums, postcards, cartes de visite and books from Southern Africa, as well as recent photography and video art from The Walther Collection, the catalogue includes original thematic essays by leading art historians, anthropologists and cultural critics. Distance and Desire offers new perspectives on the African archive, reimagining its diverse histories and changing meanings. It investigates typical representations of African subjects, from scenes in nature, to romanticized images of semi-nude models, to modern sitters posing in stylized studios, critically addressing the politics of colonialism and the complex issues of gender and identity. Among many diverse topics, the catalogue examines in-depth a series of cartes de visite from the Diamond Fields in Kimberley, the figure of the Zulu, the history of South Africa's prominent studio photographers, A.M. Duggan-Cronin's extensive ethnographic study The Bantu Tribes of South Africa and the archive of elegant family portraits reproduced by the contemporary artist Santu Mofokeng in The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950. The catalogue also reveals how the heritage of African imagery figures in the practices of contemporary African and African American artists, whose compelling photography and video art reworks the archive through satire or appropriation.

PUBLISHER
Steidl

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 9.75 x 12.5 in. / 352 pgs / illustrated throughout.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 5/1/2013
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Catalog: FALL 2014

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ISBN 9783869306513 TRADE
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Zwelethu Mthethwa

Published by Aperture.
Text by Isolde Brielmaier, Okwui Enwezor.

Since Apartheid's fall in 1994, South African photography has exploded from the grip of censorship onto the world stage. A key figure in this movement is Zwelethu Mthethwa, whose portraits powerfully frame black South Africans as dignified and defiant individuals, even under the duress of social and economic hardship. Photographing in urban and rural industrial landscapes, Mthethwa documents a range of aspects in South Africa, from domestic life and the environment to landscape and labor issues. Mthethwa's work challenges the conventions of both Western documentary work and African commercial studio photography, marking a transition away from the visually exotic and diseased--or "Afro-pessimism," as curator Okwui Enwezor has described it--and employing a fresh approach marked by color and collaboration. Zwelethu Mthethwa, the artist's long awaited first comprehensive monograph provides an overview of his work to date, and features the stunning portraits that have brought him international acclaim.
Born in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, in 1960, Zwelethu Mthethwa received his BFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, a then white-only university he entered under special ministerial consent. In 1989, he received his Master's degree while on a Fulbright Scholarship to the Rochester Institute of Technology. Mthethwa has had more than 35 international solo exhibitions and has been featured in numerous group shows, including the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 and Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography at the International Center of Photography, New York, in 2006. He is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, and lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

PUBLISHER
Aperture

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 12 x 10 in. / 120 pgs / 75 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 3/31/2010
No longer our product

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ISBN 9781597111133 TRADE
List Price: $55.00 CDN $65.00

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30 Americans

Rubell Family Collection, Third Edition

Published by Rubell Family Collection.
Text by Franklin Sirmans, Glenn Ligon, Robert Hobbs, Michele Wallace.

Since the 1960s, Miami's Rubell family has collected the works of the most relevant contemporary African American artists as an integral part of their broader mission to collect the most interesting art of our time. 30 Americans serves as both the catalogue for their current exhibition of African American art at the Contemporary Art Center New Orleans and a visual record of the Rubell family's diverse collection, which spans genres and generations. This expanded third edition contains not only artists long collected by the Rubells such as Robert Colescott, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Renée Green, David Hammons, Barkley Hendricks, Kerry James Marshall, Gary Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Kara Walker and Carrie Mae Weems, but also those who have recently been catapulted to the forefront of the art world, such as Kalup Linzy, Nick Cave, Iona Rozeal Brown, Rashid Johnson, Mikalene Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Kehinde Wiley and Wangechi Mutu.

PUBLISHER
Rubell Family Collection

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 8.5 x 13 in. / 223 pgs / 121 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 4/30/2014
Out of print

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Catalog: FALL 2014 p. 126   

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ISBN 9780982119594 TRADE
List Price: $39.95 CDN $53.95 GBP £35.00

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Gordon Parks: Segregation Story

Published by Steidl.
Foreword by Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Brett Abbott. Introduction by Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Text by Maurice Berger.

In September 1956, Life magazine published a photo-essay by Gordon Parks entitled "The Restraints: Open and Hidden," which documented the everyday activities and rituals of one extended African American family living in the rural South under Jim Crow segregation. One of the most powerful photographs depicts Joanne Thornton Wilson and her niece, Shirley Anne Kirksey, standing in front of a theater in Mobile, Alabama, an image which became a forceful "weapon of choice," as Parks would say, in the struggle against racism and segregation. While 26 photographs were eventually published in Life and some were exhibited in his lifetime, the bulk of Parks' assignment was thought to be lost. In 2011, five years after Parks' death, The Gordon Parks Foundation discovered more than 70 color transparencies at the bottom of an old storage bin marked "Segregation Series" that are now published for the first time in Segregation Story.

PUBLISHER
Steidl

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 10 x 11.5 in. / 112 pgs / illustrated throughout.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 2/28/2015
Out of print

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Catalog: FALL 2014 p. 12   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783869308012 TRADE
List Price: $45.00 CDN $60.00

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Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff

Published by Ludion.
Edited by Nav Haq. Text by Okwui Enwezor, Nav Haq. Interview by Dieter Roelstraete.

Kerry James Marshall (born 1955) is widely admired for his painterly and sculptural explorations of Afro-American identity and history, and his attendant critiques of art history and the art economy. Among his well-known works are Rhythm Mastr, a comic book that transposes African mythology to a contemporary city; the Garden Project, which draws on the idyllic-sounding names given to housing projects; the Lost Boys series, which portrays young, disenfranchised black men; and his gigantic stamps of Black Power slogans. "I've always wanted to be a history painter on the grand scale of Giotto and Géricault," he once said, and he has created many mural-sized canvases interweaving heroic and everyday aspects of recent Afro-American history. This monograph offers the largest retrospective of his works in all media, from painting and sculpture to collage, photography and installation. Limited stock available.

PUBLISHER
Ludion

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 8.25 x 10.25 in. / 192 pgs / 100 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 4/30/2014
Out of stock indefinitely

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Catalog: FALL 2014 p. 127   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9789461301260 FLAT40
List Price: $49.95 CDN $67.50

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Black Fire! New Spirits!

Images of a Revolution: Radical Jazz in the USA 1960-75

Published by Soul Jazz Books.
Edited by Stuart Baker.

Vintage portraits of the giants of 1960s Free Jazz, from John Coltrane to Miles Davis

PUBLISHER
Soul Jazz Books

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 12.5 x 12.5 in. / 192 pgs / 75 color / 125 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 5/31/2014
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Catalog: SPRING 2014 p. 65   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780957260016 TRADE
List Price: $49.95 CDN $67.50

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In stock

Mama Casset: PhotoBolsillo

Published by La Fábrica.

The great Senegalese photographer Mama Casset (1908-1992) was introduced to photography at the tender age of 12 by the French photographer Oscar Latakia, a friend of his father's who tutored Casset in the fundamentals of the art. Casset learned quickly, and by 1943 he had opened his first studio in Dakar, obtaining plenty of portraiture work, primarily among the capital's bourgeoisie. As the European-operated photography studios began to close as Senegalese independence approached, Casset's popularity and success benefited from the dwindling of the competition, enabling him to open a second studio in M'Bour, south of Dakar. When independence at last arrived for the country, Casset received the prestigious commission to make the official portrait of the first president of Senegal, Leopold Sedar Senghor. Over the subsequent years, Casset was to grow blind and was sadly forced to abandon his lucrative business in 1983, when a fire destroyed his studio and much ofits archives. By that time, however, Casset's legacy was assured, and his work had inspired several generations of West African photographers, who had grown up with his photographs in their family albums. This volume selects the highlights of his career.

PUBLISHER
La Fábrica

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback , 5.25 x 7 in. / 112 pgs / illustrated throughout.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 12/31/2011
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Catalog: FALL 2011 p. 163   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9788492498529 FLAT40
List Price: $20.00 CDN $27.95 GBP £18.00

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In stock

Elisabeth Meier: Blantyre

Published by Hatje Cantz.
Text by Martin Jaeggi.

What does clothing tell us about the customs of other cultures? Swiss costume designer Elisabeth Meier (born 1956) traveled to Blantyre, the commercial capital of Malawi, to document the city's codes of dress. Her portraits--with their interplay of fabrics, colors, forms and structures--aid us in understanding the role of clothing in an African culture that still oscillates between tradition and modernity.

PUBLISHER
Hatje Cantz

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 6.75 x 9.5 in. / 96 pgs / 44 color / 14 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 4/30/2011
Out of print

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Catalog: SPRING 2011 p. 163   

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ISBN 9783775726757 TRADE
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Lorna Simpson: Works on Paper

Published by Aspen Art Press.
Text by Hilton Als, Connie Butler, Franklin Sirmans, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Anna Deveare Smith.

One of the leading artists of her generation, Lorna Simpson (born 1960) came to prominence in the mid-1980s through her photographic and textual works that challenged conventional attitudes toward race, gender and cultural memory with a potent mixture of formal elegance and conceptual rigor. Published on the occasion of her 2013 exhibition at Aspen Art Museum, Lorna Simpson: Works on Paper highlights four recent bodies of work on paper that explore the complex relationship between the photographic archive and processes of self-fashioning, including a new group of works being developed during her time as the AAM’s 2013 Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence. As in Simpson’s earlier works, these new drawings and collages take the African-American woman as a point of departure, continuing her longstanding examination of the ways that gender and culture shape the experience of life in our contemporary multiracial society. This beautifully illustrated catalogue features new scholarship by New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als, MoMA Chief Curator of Drawings, Connie Butler, LACMA Chief Curator of Contemporary Art, Franklin Sirmans, and the AAM’s Nancy and Bob Magoon CEO and Director, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson.

PUBLISHER
Aspen Art Press

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 8 x 10 in. / 336 pgs / illustrated throughout.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 11/30/2013
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Catalog: FALL 2013 p. 48   

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ISBN 9780934324632 TRADE
List Price: $65.00 CDN $87.00 GBP £57.00

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Seydou Keita: Photographs, Bamako, Mali 19491970

Published by Steidl.
Introduction by Kathy Ryan.

Seydou Keďta was born in Bamako, Mali in 1921, then part of the colony of French Sudan and a bustling transportation hub on the route to Dakar. With a Kodak Brownie given to him by his uncle, Keďta took up photography at the age of 14, going on to establish what would become Bamako's most successful portraiture enterprise of the 1950s and 60s. Photographs, Bamako, Mali 1949–1970 draws on an expanded archive to offer over 400 portraits, mostly unpublished, from the height of the photographer's productivity in downtown Bamako. Providing lushly patterned backdrops and props that now serve to date distinct periods in his career, the artist often styled his subjects but also encouraged their active participation, hanging sample portraits around the studio as inspiration. Migratory youth, government officials, shop owners and Bamako's cultural elite all make appearances here, and while Keďta's photographs served as both family record and cultural status symbol for the clients who commissioned them, these images have become a lasting visual record of Mali at that time. Seydou Keďta's work made its first international appearance in 1991 and has been exhibited extensively across Europe, Japan and the United States.

PUBLISHER
Steidl

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 10.75 x 14 in. / 400 pgs / illustrated throughout.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 10/15/2011
Out of stock indefinitely

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Catalog: FALL 2014

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ISBN 9783869303017 TRADE
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Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases 2006-2014

Published by Steidl.
Text by Zanele Muholi, Gabeba Baderoon.

In Faces and Phases, Zanele Muholi embarks on a journey of "visual activism" to ensure black queer and transgender visibility. Despite South Africa's progressive Constitution and 20 years of democracy, black lesbians and transgender men remain the targets of brutal hate crimes and so-called corrective rapes. Taken over the past eight years, the more than 250 portraits in this book, accompanied by moving testimonies, present a compelling statement about the lives and struggles of these individuals. They also comprise an unprecedented and invaluable archive: marking, mapping and preserving an often invisible community for posterity.

PUBLISHER
Steidl

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 6.5 x 9.5 in. / 368 pgs / illustrated throughout.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 11/30/2014
Out of stock indefinitely

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Catalog: FALL 2014 p. 13   

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ISBN 9783869308074 TRADE
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Kara Walker: Dust Jackets for the Niggerati

Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co..
Text by Hilton Als, James Hannaham, Christopher Stackhouse, Kevin Young.

African-American artist Kara Walker (born 1969) has been acclaimed internationally for her candid investigations of race, sexuality and violence through the lens of reconceived historical tropes. She had her first solo show at The Drawing Center in New York City in 1994 and, at the age of 28 in 1997, was one of the youngest people to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. This publication documents Dust Jackets for the Niggerati--and Supporting Dissertations, Drawings Submitted Ruefully by Dr. Kara E. Walker, a major series of graphite drawings and hand-printed texts on paper that grew out of Walker’s attempts to understand how interpersonal and geopolitical powers are asserted through the lives of individuals. In scenes that range from the grotesque to the humorous to the tragic, these works vividly and powerfully explore the themes of transition and migration that run through the African-American experience. The accompanying essays take us through Walker’s saga of American experience--the dual streams of renewal and destruction that trace parallel lines through the last century’s rapid urbanization and the complementary emergence of a “New Negro” identity. Fully illustrated with reproductions of the entire series, and designed by award-winning design studio CoMa with Walker’s close collaboration, Dust Jackets for the Niggerati represents a major contribution to the career of one of our most significant and complex contemporary artists.

PUBLISHER
Gregory R. Miller & Co.

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.25 x 12.25 in. / 144 pgs / 78 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 9/30/2013
Out of print

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Catalog: SPRING 2013 p. 26   

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ISBN 9780982681367 TRADE
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Henry Taylor

Published by MoMA PS1.
Text by Laura Hoptman, Naima Keith. Interview by Peter Eleey.

Los Angeles-based artist Henry Taylor (born 1958) applies his brush both to canvas and to unconventional materials--suitcases, crates, cereal boxes, cigarette packs--using everyone and everything around him as source material. While Taylor drew and painted in his youth, he studied art formally only later in life, attending the California Institute of the Arts after working for ten years as a psychiatric nurse at a state hospital. This experience sharpened his interest in, and appreciation for, individuals from all economic and social backgrounds, and encouraged a passion to create an intensely empathetic style of portraiture. Published on the occasion of Taylor’s 2012 exhibition at MoMA PS1, where the artist established his New York studio for the duration of the show, the publication explores Taylor’s ambitious and deeply humanistic project to present a worldview defined by the people--extraordinary and ordinary--with whom we live.

PUBLISHER
MoMA PS1

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 7.75 x 10.25 in. / 112 pgs / illustrated throughout.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 9/30/2014
Out of stock indefinitely

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Catalog: SPRING 2013 p. 113   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780984177646 TRADE
List Price: $40.00 CDN $54.00 GBP £35.00

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