CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/27/2019

Landmark '30 Americans' has had a profound effect

Today, 30 Americans, the Rubell Family Collection's landmark show of works by African-American artists, opens at its seventeenth venue, The Barnes, in Philadelphia. We are proud to have distributed the exhibition catalog, now in its fourth, expanded edition, since its first printing in 2009, and we cannot recommend highly enough curator Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw's recent essay on The 30 Americans Effect, which makes a compelling case for how this one, visionary traveling exhibition has changed museums today. Featured image, Sacrifice #2: It Has to Last (after Yoshitoshi's "Drowsy: the appearance of a harlot of the Meiji era" (2007), is by Rozeal. "Along with looking at woodblock prints, I viewed photos of geisha napping, with their heads propped up by their own arms," she writes. "What I enjoyed about these images was how similar this method of sleeping was to the way black women can sleep after coming home from the beauty parlor. I have done so myself; having a fresh perm/relaxer in my hair, not wanting it to lose its 'bone straightness.'"