Commemorate Black History Month with these 2019 Staff Picks

Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer

Published by Fondazione Prada.
Edited with text by Mario Mainetti, Chiara Costa, Elvira Dyangani Ose. Foreword by Miuccia Prada, Patrizio Bertelli. Text by Richard J. Powell, Deborah Willis, Kellie E. Jones.

Uneasy Dancer brings together over 80 works including installations, assemblages, collages and sculptures by the pioneering Los Angeles artist Betye Saar (born 1926) produced between 1966 and 2016. This handsomely designed volume presents Saar’s work as a copiously illustrated timeline, with numerous documentary images and exhibition details.

“Uneasy Dancer” is an expression Saar has used to define both herself and her artistic practice: “my work moves in a creative spiral with the concepts of passage, crossroads, death and rebirth, along with the underlying elements of race and gender.” Through her use of found objects, personal memorabilia and derogatory images that evoke denied or distorted narratives, Saar developed a powerful social critique that challenges racial and sexist stereotypes deeply rooted in American culture.

PUBLISHER
Fondazione Prada

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 6.5 x 10 in. / 320 pgs / 500 duotone.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 2/28/2017
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Catalog: SPRING 2017 p. 114   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9788887029673 SDNR30
List Price: $55.00 CDN $72.50

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In stock

Black Fire! New Spirits!

Images of a Revolution: Radical Jazz in the USA 1960-75

Published by Soul Jazz Books.
Edited by Stuart Baker.

At the start of the 1960s, jazz entered a unique period of revolution as African-American musicians redefined the art form in the context of the Civil Rights Movement, Afro-centric rhythm and thought and an ideology of black economic empowerment. John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler and others developed a new cosmology of sound that was as revolutionary as the social and political changes that took place in America throughout the decade. From the musical explorations of John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman to the collective and community concerns of Chciago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and the black science fiction of Sun Ra, the new jazz musicians created a musical and cultural landscape from which jazz never looked back. This large-format deluxe hardback book features hundreds of stunning photographs of the new jazz musicians in the USA throughout the 1960s, presented with an introductory essay and biographies on the many artists included in the book.

PUBLISHER
Soul Jazz Books

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 12.5 x 12.5 in. / 192 pgs / 75 color / 125 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 5/31/2014
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Catalog: SPRING 2014 p. 65   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780957260016 TRADE
List Price: $49.95 CDN $67.50

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In stock

Charles White: Black Pope

Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Text by Esther Adler.

The Chicago-born artist Charles White (1918–79) was celebrated during his lifetime for depictions of African-American men, women and children that acquired the name “images of dignity. White’s draftsmanship, his direct address of the social and political concerns of his time, and his commitment to media that gave his art wide circulation established him as a major artist, and one with significant influence both on his contemporaries and on later generations.

Beginning with White’s early days as an artist in the Chicago of the 1930s and ’40s, moving through his time spent developing his craft in New York in the late 1940s and ’50s, and closing with his final decades as a revered figure in Los Angeles, Charles White: Black Pope explores the artist’s practice and strategies through consideration of key works. It devotes particularly close examination to his late masterwork Black Pope (Sandwich Board Man)," in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art. By creating visually compelling, ideologically complex works that engage audiences on many levels, White established himself as a key figure of his time, one whose work continues to resonate today."

Esther Adler is Assistant Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

PUBLISHER
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9 x 10.5 in. / 72 pgs / 35 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 10/24/2017
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Catalog: SPRING 2017 p. 88   

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ISBN 9781633450271 TRADE
List Price: $26.95 CDN $37.00

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Gordon Parks: The New Tide

Early Work 1940–1950

Published by Steidl/Gordon Parks Foundation/National Gallery of Art.
Edited by Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Philip Brookman. Foreword by Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Earl A. Powell III. Introduction by Sarah Lewis. Text by Maurice Berger, Philip Brookman, Richard J. Powell, Deborah Willis.

Published to accompany the critically acclaimed traveling exhibition currently on view at the National Gallery of Art (en route to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum and Addison Gallery through 2020), The New Tide: Early Works 1940-1950 brings together photographs and publications made during the first and most formative decade of Gordon Parks' 65-year career. Reviewed in The New York Times, AnOther Magazine, PDN and The Globe and Mail, among other venues, it is one of Teju Cole's Best Photo Books of 2018 for The New York Times: "In great detail, we are taken through Parks’ first decade of independent work, and see how he evolved from portraiture and fashion to the social documentary for which he became widely celebrated. It’s a pleasure to see how, even in the early work, Parks’s eye is unerring… The catalog is as accomplished for the photographs it reprints as it is for its many fine essays on Parks, including those by Maurice Berger, Sarah Lewis, Deborah Willis and Philip Brookman, which contextualize Parks with the writers who mattered to him, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright among them."

PUBLISHER
Steidl/Gordon Parks Foundation/National Gallery of Art

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 9.75 x 11.5 in. / 304 pgs / 42 color / 126 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 11/20/2018
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Catalog: FALL 2018 p. 16   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9783958294943 TRADE
List Price: $48.00 CDN $65.00

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Out of stock

Jack Whitten: Odyssey

Sculpture 1963–2017

Published by Gregory R. Miller & Co..
Text by Katy Siegel, Kelly Baum, Jack Whitten, Richard Shiff, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Kellie Jones. Interview with Courtney Martin.

What a book! This art-historical must-have was published to accompany the revelatory 2018 traveling exhibition of Jack Whitten's previously un-shown and unpublished sculptural work at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was reviewed everywhere from The New York Times, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books to Bookforum, where Albert Mobilio writes, "Whitten repurposed traditional forms with the same ease that marked his movement between modes of visual representation."

PUBLISHER
Gregory R. Miller & Co.

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.5 x 11.5 in. / 192 pgs / 161 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 6/12/2018
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Catalog: FALL 2018 p. 43   

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ISBN 9781941366172 TRADE
List Price: $55.00 CDN $72.50 GBP £50.00

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In stock

Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series

Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Edited by Leah Dickerman, Elsa Smithgall. Text by Elizabeth Alexander, Rita Dove, Nikky Finney, Terrance Hayes, Tyehimba Jess, Yusef Komunyakaa, Patricia Spears Jones, Natasha Trethewey, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Crystal Williams, Kevin Young.

Lawrence's landmark series on African American migration in context

In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then just 23 years old, made a series of 60 small tempera paintings on the Great Migration, the decades-long mass movement of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North that began in 1915–16. The child of migrant parents, Lawrence worked partly from his own experience and partly from long research in his neighborhood library. The result was an epic narrative of the collective history of his people. Moving from scenes of terror and violence to images of great intimacy, and drawing on film, photography, political cartoons and other sources in popular culture, Lawrence created an innovative format of sequential panels, each image accompanied by a descriptive caption. Within months of its completion, the series entered the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Phillips Memorial Gallery (today The Phillips Collection), Washington, DC, each institution acquiring 30 panels.

The Migration Series is now a landmark in the history of modern art. Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series, now in paperback, grounds Lawrence’s work in the cultural and political debates that shaped his art and demonstrates its relevance for artists and writers today. The series is reproduced in full; short texts accompanying each panel relate them to the history of the Migration and explore Lawrence’s technique and approach. Alongside scholarly essays, the book also includes 11 newly commissioned poems, by Rita Dove, Nikky Finney, Terrance Hayes, Tyehimba Jess, Yusef Komunyakaa, Patricia Spears Jones, Natasha Trethewey, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Crystal Williams and Kevin Young, that respond directly to the series. The distinguished poet Elizabeth Alexander edited and introduces the section.

Leah Dickerman is Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Elsa Smithgall is Curator at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

Jodi Roberts is Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Elizabeth Alexander is Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University. Her most recent book of poetry is Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 (Graywolf Press, 2010).

Rita Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1987) and a former United States Poet Laureate (1993–95). Her most recent book of poetry is Sonata Mulattica (W. W. Norton, 2009).

Nikky Finney is John H. Bennett, Jr. Endowed Professor of Creative Writing and Southern Letters, the University of South Carolina. She is a winner of the National Book Award for Poetry for her book Head Off & Split (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011).Terrance Hayes is Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a MacArthur Fellow (2014) and a winner of the National Book Award for Poetry for his book Lighthead (Penguin, 2010).Tyehimba Jess is Assistant Professor of English at the College of Staten Island in City University of New York. He is a winner of the National Poetry Series for his book leadbelly (Wave Books, 2005).

Yusef Komunyakaa is Global Distinguished Professor of English at New York University. He is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1994). His most recent book of poetry is The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012).

Patricia Spears Jones is a poet based in New York. Her most recent book of poetry is Living in the Love Economy(Overpass Books, 2014).

Natasha Trethewey is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing, Emory University. She is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2007) and a former United States Poet Laureate (2012–14). Her most recent book of poetry is Thrall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Cornell University. Her most recent book of poetry is Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

Crystal Williams is Associate Vice President, Chief Diversity Officer and Professor of English at Bates College. Her most recent book of poetry is Detroit as Barn (Lost Horse Press, 2014).

Kevin Young is Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Previously, he was the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and Curator of Literary Collections and Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. His most recent book of poetry is Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014).

PUBLISHER
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 9.5 x 12 in. / 192 pgs / 77 color / 25 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 2/28/2017
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Catalog: FALL 2017 p. 15   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781633450400 TRADE
List Price: $35.00 CDN $47.50

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In stock

Jamel Shabazz: Sights in the City, New York Street Photographs

Published by Damiani.
Introduction by Marla Hamburg Kennedy. Interview by Cheryl Dunn.

During the summer of 1980, under the direction of his photographer father, Jamel Shabazz armed himself with a Canon AE1 SLR camera and began to photograph the landscape of his native New York City. Photographing in the streets put Shabazz right in the heart of all of the action; he carried his camera everywhere he went, from Harlem to Times Square, the Lower East Side to downtown Brooklyn, always set and at the ready. Like a fisherman seeking a fruitful catch, Shabazz ventured into locations full of life and uncertainty in hopes of capturing a unique moment. Consisting of 120 color and black-and-white photographs taken between 1985 and the 2000s, most of which have never been published, Sights in the City is the testament of Shabazz’s visual journey.

New York–based Jamel Shabazz (born 1960) is a documentary, fashion and street photographer. Since first picking up the camera nearly 40 years ago he has authored seven monographs (including the popular volume Back in the Days) and exhibited worldwide; his work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, The Smithsonian and the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

PUBLISHER
Damiani

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 11.5 x 9.15 in. / 160 pgs / 70 color / 50 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 4/25/2017
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Catalog: SPRING 2017 p. 28   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9788862085229 TRADE
List Price: $50.00 CDN $67.50

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In stock

Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968

Published by Damiani.
Edited by Steven Kasher. Text by Jill Freedman, John Edwin Mason, Aaron Bryant.

This 50th-anniversary edition of Jill Freedman’s 1970 photo book documenting the climax of Dr. Martin Luther King's 1968 Poor People's Campaign—set in Resurrection City, a six-week, 3,000-person protest encampment on the Washington Mall—is "a masterpiece," according to Kirkus. "Her black-and-white prints are honest and stirring portraits of the ordinary people at the heart of this historic uprising," Rebecca Bengal writes in Vulture. "The reissue is timely. Inequity is starker than ever." —Holland Cotter, The New York Times.

PUBLISHER
Damiani

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.75 x 12 in. / 176 pgs / 141 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 3/27/2018
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Catalog: SPRING 2018 p. 39   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9788862085830 TRADE
List Price: $45.00 CDN $60.00

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Mickalene Thomas: I Can’t See You Without Me

Published by Wexner Center for the Arts.
Foreword by Sherri Geldin. Text by Nicole R. Fleetwood, Michael Goodson, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Antwaun Sargent.

Presenting paintings of some of the artist's key models and muses, I Can't See You Without Me illuminates the work of Brooklyn painter Mickalene Thomas (born 1971). Culling from art history and popular culture, Thomas creates scintillating portraits that deconstruct the highly charged connections between sitter, artist and viewer. Whether depicted as classically composed 19th-century odalisques, Afro-adorned vixens of blaxploitation films or as a powerful maternal figure yearning for social mobility, the recurring models in Thomas' compositions (almost exclusively women of color) convey a spirit of strength and self-confidence. Across this archetypal array, it is both their contradictions and kinships that make the black female body such fertile terrain for the artist's ongoing investigations. By casting herself, her late mother and other formidable women in her life as models, muses and collaborators, Thomas particularizes her distinctive oeuvre of portraiture. Focused yet expansive, the catalog both reasserts and further contextualizes issues of identity, sexuality and agency in Thomas' work that have only become more nuanced and palpable over time.

PUBLISHER
Wexner Center for the Arts

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 8.5 x 11 in. / 128 pgs / 40 color.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 11/20/2018
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Catalog: FALL 2018 p. 54   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781881390572 TRADE
List Price: $39.95 CDN $53.95 GBP £35.00

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Muhammad Ali: Fighter's Heaven 1974

Photographs by Peter Angelo Simon

Published by Reel Art Press.
Foreword by D.A. Pennebaker.

The legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, captured unguarded in this previously unpublished photo-essay

PUBLISHER
Reel Art Press

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 8.5 x 11 in. / 176 pgs / 105 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 8/23/2016
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Catalog: FALL 2016 p. 26   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781909526389 TRADE
List Price: $49.95 CDN $67.50

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Separate Cinema: The First 100 Years of Black Poster Art

Published by Reel Art Press.
Edited by John Duke Kisch, Tony Nourmand. Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Text by John Duke Kisch, Peter Doggett. Afterword by Spike Lee.

This magnificent volume is a celebration of the first 100 years of black film poster art. A visual feast, these images recount the diverse and historic journey of the black film industry from the earliest days of Hollywood to the present day, accompanied by insightful accompanying text, a foreword by black history authority and renowned academic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and an afterword by Hollywood director Spike Lee. These posters have meaning for young and old alike, and possess the power to transcend ethnicity. They capture the spirit and energy of an earlier time, reminding people of the pioneers of the past, those courageous and daring African American filmmakers, entertainers and artists whose dreams and struggles paved the way for future generations. The wealth of imagery on these pages is taken from the Separate Cinema Archive, maintained by archive director John Kisch. The most extensive private holdings of African-American film memorabilia in the world, it contains over 35,000 authentic movie posters and photographs from over 30 countries. This stunning coffee table book represents some of the archive's greatest highlights.

PUBLISHER
Reel Art Press

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 9.5 x 11.5 in. / 320 pgs / 270 color / 30 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 10/6/2014
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Catalog: FALL 2016 p. 177   

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ISBN 9781909526068 TRADE
List Price: $45.00 CDN $60.00

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Soul of a Nation

Art in the Age of Black Power

Published by D.A.P./Tate.
Edited with text by Mark Godfrey, Zoé Whitley. Contributions by Linda Goode Bryant, Susan E. Cahan, David Driskell, Edmund Barry Gaither, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Samella Lewis.

African American art in the era of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers

In the period of radical change that was 1963–83, young black artists at the beginning of their careers confronted difficult questions about art, politics and racial identity. How to make art that would stand as innovative, original, formally and materially complex, while also making work that reflected their concerns and experience as black Americans?

Soul of a Nation surveys this crucial period in American art history, bringing to light previously neglected histories of 20th-century black artists, including Sam Gilliam, Melvin Edwards, Jack Whitten, William T. Williams, Howardina Pindell, Romare Bearden, David Hammons, Barkley L. Hendricks, Senga Nengudi, Noah Purifoy, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Charles White and Frank Bowling.

The book features substantial essays from Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley, writing on abstraction and figuration, respectively. It also explores the art-historical and social contexts with subjects ranging from black feminism, AfriCOBRA and other artist-run groups to the role of museums in the debates of the period and visual art’s relation to the Black Arts Movement. Over 170 artworks by these and many other artists of the era are illustrated in full color.

2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the first use of the term “black power” by student activist Stokely Carmichael; it will also be 50 years since the US Supreme Court overturned the prohibition of interracial marriage. At this turning point in the reassessment of African American art history, Soul of a Nation is a vital contribution to this timely subject.

PUBLISHER
D.A.P./Tate

BOOK FORMAT
Hardcover, 8.5 x 10 in. / 256 pgs / 203 color / 33 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 9/26/2017
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Catalog: FALL 2017 p. 3   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9781942884170 TRADE
List Price: $39.95 CDN $53.95

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In stock

Voguing and the House Ballroom Scene of New York City 1989-92

Photographs by Chantal Regnault

Published by Soul Jazz Books.
Edited by Stuart Baker.

Harlem’s gay ball subculture of the late 1980s is superbly documented in this trove of previously unseen photographs.

In 1989, Malcolm McLaren had his only number one hit with a single called "Deep in Vogue." Early the next year, Madonna had one of the biggest hits of her career, with the single "Vogue," and when Jennie Livingston's film Paris Is Burning arrived in cinemas the same year, winning the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, the mainstream got hip to New York City's extraordinary ball culture, from which the film and McLaren and Madonna's songs had arisen. Paris Is Burning documented a gay ballroom scene that emerged in Harlem in the mid-1980s, which drew African American and Latino gay and transgender communities to compete against one another for their dancing skills, the verisimilitude of their drag and their ability to walk on the runway. Photographer Chantal Regnault spent many years recording this scene, from which the dance style known as voguing arose. A visual riot of fashion, polysexuality and subversive style, Voguing and the Gay Balls of New York City is also an extraordinary document on sexuality and race. The wild years of voguing are vividly captured in Regnault's hundreds of amazing, previously unpublished photographs. The book also features interviews with key figures from the movement, essays, flyers and ephemera.

Photographer and documentarist Chantal Regnault was born in France. She left Paris after the 1968 uprisings to live in New York, where she lived for the next 15 years. At the end of the 1980s she became immersed in Harlem's voguing scene. Also around this time, Regnault developed an interest in Haitian voodoo culture and began to divide her time between Haiti and New York. Her widely published photographs have appeared in major magazines and newspapers, including Vanity Fair and The New York Times.

PUBLISHER
Soul Jazz Books

BOOK FORMAT
Flexi, 9 x 11.5 in. / 208 pgs / 40 color / 140 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 12/31/2011
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Catalog: FALL 2011 p. 7   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780955481765 TRADE
List Price: $39.99 CDN $53.95

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In stock

Whitewalling: Art, Race & Protest in 3 Acts

Published by Badlands Unlimited.
By Aruna D'Souza.

Aruna D'Souza takes an unflinching look at art and race in America via three incendiary recent historical examples, 1969-2017, in this timely and widely reviewed reader from Paul Chan's pioneering small press, Badlands Unlimited. Called "a laser beam of a book, unwavering and on target," by The New York Times and "an essential primer in discussions about exclusion, free speech and the power of institutions in the art world and outside it," by Publishers Weekly, this volume has been reviewed, course adopted, sold and passed around just about everywhere that matters.

PUBLISHER
Badlands Unlimited

BOOK FORMAT
Paperback, 6 x 9 in. / 160 pgs.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date 5/22/2018
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Catalog: SPRING 2018 p. 87   

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ISBN 9781943263141 TRADE
List Price: $19.99 CDN $27.95

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In stock