CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/2/2024

Celebrating the centennial of James Baldwin

On the occasion of the 100th birthday of James Baldwin, we present a few spreads from God Made My Face a collective portrait of the singular American writer and truth-teller edited by Hilton Als and presenting artworks and essays by some of the greatest, and most relevant, voices of our time—including Diane Arbus, Beauford Delaney, Alice Neel, Kara Walker, Teju Cole, Barry Jenkins and Darryl Pinckney, to name a few. Jamaica Kincaid writes, “When we make art, we don’t know how it will work out, what it will mean. The writing, the novels, the essays: He did them in a place and in a time, in a country, that has no real love of certain people and certain things and no real love of literature, no real love of Black people doing anything, really, that can’t be appropriated. We must remember that there are a great many things that African Americans have done, making something out of the despair and the horror of the mess they found themselves in, and that they’ve been simply lifted up out of their culture. The blind faith he had in just saying these things, writing these things, doing, living this life and not knowing how it would go. Would it be remembered? Would it vanish? He got inspiration, it seems to me, from the essential life that was going on in the country at the time, the essential life of America, which is something Americans would like to forget. The essential existence of America is the African American. Toni Morrison said that Baldwin was her brother and her ancestor, and that’s what he is for all of us.”