American artist Michael Richards (1963–2001) was born in Brooklyn and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. Integral to a generation of Black artists emerging in the 1990s, Richards’ work gestures toward reprieve from social injustices, often in the context of the historic and ongoing oppression of Black people. Richards’ exploration of freedom and escape centered on themes of flight and aviation, which he engaged with through the legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen, Greek mythology, Christianity and African and African American folklore. His nascent career was cut short on September 11, 2001 when he was killed while working in his Lower Manhattan Cultural . . . .go to book page >>

Published on the occasion of her standout solo exhibition at the Queens Museum, Point Reflection is the first major volume devoted to the work of New York–based artist Aki Sasamoto (born 1980). Conceived as an artist’s book, Point Reflection centers on Sasamoto’s major installation Sink or Float, first presented at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Building on the artist’s idiosyncratic research into snail shell chirality—the direction in which the shell coils—as a cypher for thinking through questions of change, aging, (non)normativity, vulnerability and natural processes, Point Reflection brings together the diagrammatic visions, narrative experimentation, structured improvisations and stream-of-consciousness monologues characteristic of . . . .go to book page >>