CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/8/2021

Superb 400-page 'Afro-Atlantic Histories' is NEW from DelMonico Books and Museo de Arte de São Paolo

"Gene" (1970), by Jamaican artist and religious leader Mallica "Kapo" Reynolds (1911–1989), is reproduced from Afro-Atlantic Histories, published to accompany the exhibition currently on view at MFA Houston, en route to the NGADC and LACMA in 2022 and 2023. In addition to being one of our Staff Pick Holiday Gift Books of 2021, this monumental, panoramic, 400-page survey spanning the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries is 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. This is also one of Artforum's Best Books of 2021, an honor we don’t take lightly. Joan Kee writes, "Borrowing from Paul Gilroy’s construct of a 'Black Atlantic' while also recognizing slavery’s afterlives, 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—a majority with which existing institutional structures have only just begun to reckon."