CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/10/2022

'Afro-Atlantic Histories' opens at NGADC

"Dark Rupture (James Baldwin" (1941), by American modernist Beauford Delaney, is reproduced from Afro-Atlantic Histories, published to accompany the critically-acclaimed exhibition opening at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., this week. An absolute must, this monumental, panoramic, 400-page survey spans the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. It's also one of the coolest looking books on our list, period, thanks to vivid graphic design by Paula Tinoco at Estúdio Campo, São Paulo, where the originating museum, MASP, is located. One of Artforum's Best Books of 2021, Afro-Atlantic Histories "raises the stakes of so-called global modernism by boldly setting forth the conditions of an art history that is for, rather than against, a global majority," Joan Kee writes, "a majority with which existing institutional structures have only just begun to reckon."