CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/13/2022

Hot book alert! 'Just Above Midtown' is NEW from MoMA

Featured spreads are from staff favorite new release Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces—the first major excavation of JAM, Linda Goode Bryant's 1974–86 gallery and "laboratory for experimentation" centered around Black artists. Filled with artworks, documentary photographs, archival documents, ephemera, essential timelines, essays, an interview between Linda Goode Bryant and Thelma Golden and statements by the artists, volunteers, collectors and cultural collaborators who made JAM an NYC landmark, this is some serious art history that no legitimate art bookshelf can do without. In her interview with Golden, Goode Bryant sums it up: "Every day, I'm bowled over by the resourcefulness, imagination and creativity of Black folk. And I've always just wanted to be around that, to be part of that, to support that. There's so much that we're faced with that can cause us to doubt ourselves or to think we don't exist except as the flip side of a black-and-white coin. And I just go, 'No, look at our beauty and amazingness. How can you even doubt that?' I feel that these days—and I'm ancient now, so it could be generational—there's a notion that Black exists in the absence of white, and that's bullshit. Black exists in the presence of Blackness. We exist—what we are, who we are, our power—in our presence, not in the absence of white folks."