Special Collections
Barbara Jones-Hogu : resist, relate, unite : January 11 - March 25, 2018 : DePaul Art Museum by Call Number: NE539.3.A35 J66 2018
In the Company of Black by Call Number: TR681.A34 M345 2017
Ma(s)king her : Black Feminist futures by Call Number: SMFA Library: N7433.35.U6 H66 2017
Films
Broad daylight and other times : selected works of Kevin Jerome Everson by Call Number: DVD-719 BRO
Daughters of the Dust by Call Number: Streaming through Kanopy
É minha cara = That's my face by Call Number: DVD-401 THA
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm : two takes by Call Number: PN1997 .S9635 2006
Tongues Untied by Call Number: Streaming through Kanopy
Guide was originally made for Black Legacy Month, February 2021
SMFA Library books
Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer by
A richly illustrated look at how travel influenced the work of renowned contemporary artist Betye Saar Betye Saar (b. 1926) is an artist whose assemblages tell visual stories and convey powerful political messages. A leading figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, she works with found objects--many of which she gathers on her extensive travels--to explore themes like symbolic mysticism, feminism, racism, and Eurocentric chauvinism. Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer sheds new light on Saar's unique creative process, her trips around the world, and the diverse ways in which her artworks engage with global histories of travel and forced migration. It presents how the artist's work conjures the transporting experience of a voyage to a faraway place. This beautifully illustrated book draws on original, in-depth interviews with Saar and the companions who accompanied the artist in her travels across four continents over several decades. Essays by leading scholars contextualize Saar's journeys within her broader life and career, as well as how her practice fits into broader traditions--such as scrapbooking--in African American visual culture. In addition to providing this context, this book explores how Saar's assemblage practice both echoes and provides a critical counterpoint to the collecting practices of Gilded Age American art collectors like Isabella Stewart Gardner. Featuring a wealth of previously unpublished material--including almost thirty travel sketchbooks and two dozen finished assemblages--Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer provides a fresh look at a groundbreaking American artist while offering a timely social history of the impact of travel on the African American experience. Distributed for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Exhibition Schedule Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston February 16-May 21, 2023
Call Number: SMFA: N6537.S2 B48 2023
Beverly Mciver by
This survey exhibition captures the arc and continued ascent of contemporary artist Beverly McIver. This exhibition catalog accompanies a survey exhibition of contemporary artist and painter Beverly McIver. Curated by Kim Boganey, this exhibition represents the diversity of McIver's thematic approach to painting over her career. From early self-portraits in clown makeup to more recent works featuring her father, dolls, Beverly's experiences during COVID-19 and portraits of others, Full Circle illuminates the arc of Beverly McIver's artistic career while also touching on her personal journey. McIver's self-portraits explore expressions of individuality, stereotypes, and ways of masking identity; portraits of family provide glimpses into intimate moments, in good times as well as in illness and death. The show includes McIver's portraits of other artists and notable figures, recent work resulting from a year in Rome with American Academy's Rome Prize, and new work in which McIver explores the juxtaposition of color, patterns, and the human figure. Full Circle also features works that reflect on McIver's collaborations with other artists, as well as her impact on the next generation of artists. The complementary exhibition, In Good Company, includes artists who have mentored McIver, such as Faith Ringgold and Richard Mayhew, as well as those who have studied under her. This catalog includes a conversation with Beverly McIver by exhibition curator Kim Boganey, as well as two essays: one by leading Black feminist writer Michele Wallace, daughter of Beverly's graduate school mentor Faith Ringgold, and another by distinguished scholar of African American art history Richard Powell. Published in association with the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art Exhibition dates: Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art February 12--September 4, 2022 Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art December 8, 2022-March 26, 2023 The Gibbes Museum April 28-August 4, 2023
Call Number: SMFA: ND1329.M345 A4 2022
Black American Portraits by
A celebratory visual chronicle of the many ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves Spanning over two centuries from around 1800 to the present day, Black American Portraitschronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes. Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, curated by David C. Driskell at LACMA 45 years ago, this book is a companion to the exhibition of the same name that reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters and spaces. This selection of approximately 140 works from LACMA's permanent collection highlights emancipation, scenes from the Harlem Renaissance, portraits from the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, multiculturalism of the 1990s and the spirit of Black Lives Matter. Countering a visual culture that often demonizes Blackness and fetishizes the spectacle of Black pain, these images center love, abundance, family, community and exuberance. Black American Portraitsdepicts Black figures in a range of mediums such as painting, drawing, prints, photography, sculpture, mixed media and time-based media. In addition to work by artists of African descent, Black American Portraitsincludes several works by artists of other backgrounds who have exemplified a thoughtfulness about, sensitivity toward and commitment to Black artists, communities, histories and subjects. Artists include: Alvin Baltrop, Edward Biberman, Bisa Butler, Jordan Casteel, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Bruce Davidson, Stan Douglas, rafa esparza, Shepard Fairey, Charles Gaines, Sargent Claude Johnson, Deana Lawson, Kerry James Marshall, Alice Neel, Lorraine O'Grady, Catherine Opie, Amy Sherald, Ming Smith, Henry Taylor, Tourmaline, Mickalene Thomas, James Van Der Zee, Carrie Mae Weems, Charles White, Kehinde Wiley and Deborah Willis.
Call Number: SMFA: N7593 .B533 2023
Carrie Mae Weems: the Shape of Things by
Carrie Mae Weems has often confronted the uncomfortable truths of racism and race relations over the course of her nearly forty-year career. In The Shape of Things, she focuses her unflinching gaze at what she describes as the circuslike quality of contemporary American political life. For this new work, Weems created a seven-part film projected onto a Cyclorama-a panoramic-style cylindrical screen that dates to the 19th century-where she addresses the turmoil of current events in the United States and the "long march forward." Drawing upon news and television footage from the Civil Rights era to the present day, elements of some of her previous films such as The Madding Crowd (2017), in which intellectuals such as James Baldwin discuss contemporary politics, and new film projects that bring us into our tumultuous present, the films in The Shape of Things combine documentary directness with poetic rhythm to create an enveloping experience. The films are narrated by Weems, and the layering of her resonant voice with these densely woven images articulate the dangerous and mounting resistance to the "browning of America." Former President Donald J. Trump is the implicit grand master of the American circus, with its associated tea parties, alt-right parades, and big lie assaults, all working furiously to combat the fundamental shifts in power that loom. But as Weems shows in these powerful works, America is irreversibly changed and changing. It can't and won't go back.
Call Number: SMFA: TR647 .W383 2023
Contemporary Black American Ceramic Artists by
The first book to honor the contributions, presence, and experiences of Black artists who are part of the contemporary clay community! Readers will gain a deeper knowledge of 38 of today's top African American artists in clay, the earlier Black artists who paved their paths, and how their work fits into the 21st-century conversation. donald a clark and Chotsani Elaine Dean begin by grounding us in history and context taking us from the colonial era of South Carolina to the Harlem Renaissance to today! Exhibit will travel to multiple museums beginning in Fall 2022: Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, CA), Northern Clay Center (Minneapolis, MN), and several more. Authors are highly respected in the ceramic art field Reflects a diverse group: these makers range from new to the medium to more experienced and produce everything from tableware to sculpture. The book features an introduction and an interview with each artist plus more than 300 stunning photos of their work. Sharing their insights in compelling interviews, today's Black ceramists demonstrate a diversity of studio practices and ways of using clay. Contemporary Black American Ceramic Artists is long overdue!
Call Number: SMFA: NK4210.B53 C428 2022
The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century by
A sweeping survey of hip hop's resounding impact on contemporary art and culture across the past 20-plus years Accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition originating at the Baltimore Museum of Art, this book captures the extraordinary influence of hip hop, which has driven innovations in music, visual and performing arts, fashion, and technology and grown into a global phenomenon since its emergence in the 1970s. It features approximately 70 objects by both established and emerging artists, design houses, streetwear icons and musicians working in a wide range of mediums to demonstrate hip hop's proliferation from the street to the runway, the studio to the museum gallery, and countless sites in between. The exhibition also explores how hip hop has and continues to challenge structures of power, dominant cultural narratives, and political and social systems of oppression. This fully illustrated monograph documents the exhibition and contains texts and interviews from more than 30 artists and scholars. Artists include: Nina Chanel Abney, Dionne Alexander, Maxwell Alexandre, Devin Allen, Alvaro Barrington, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Grace Wales Bonner, Mark Bradford, Jordan Casteel, Willy Chavarria, Caitlin Cherry, Troy Chew II, William Cordova, Carl Jones, Stan Douglas, John Edmonds, Gajin Fujita, Monica Ikegwu, Shabez Jamal, Kahlil Joseph, Nia June, LA II, Deana Lawson, Eric N. Mack, Emmanuel Massillon, Julie Mehretu, Murjoni Merriweather, Jayson Musson, Rashaad Newsome, Yvonne Osei, Zéh Palito, Gordon Parks, Adam Pendleton, Robert Pruitt, Rammellzee, Sheila Rashid, Rozeal, Joyce J. Scott, Tschabalala Self, Tariku Shiferaw, Devan Shimoyama, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, Abbey Williams, Pharrell Williams and Wilmer Wilson IV. Authors include: Ebony Haynes, Todd Boyd, Lester Spence, Jordana Moore Saggese, Greg Tate, Misa Hylton, Elena Romero, Ekow Eshun, Devin Allen, Michael Holman, Simone White, Salome Asega, Alphonse Pierre, David A.M. Goldberg and Tahir Hemphill, Jacolby Satterwhite, Wendel Patrick, Simon Reynolds, Seph Rodney, Jesse McCarthy, Danez Smith, Noriko Manabe, Lindsay Knight and Charity Marsh, Shaheem Sanchez, Jeffrey Q. McCune, Jr., Sekou Cooke, Jessica N. Pabón-Colón, Martha Cooper, Skeme, Alex de Mora and Lawrence Burney.
Call Number: SMFA: NX460.5.H57 C85 2023
Emeka Ogboh: This Too Shall Pass by
Emeka Ogboh's sound installation THIS TOO SHALL PASS offers a possible response to the crisis-ridden year 2020. Text in English and German.
Call Number: SMFA: N7399.N53 O332 2022
Faith Ringgold by
The most comprehensive survey to date of the work of Faith Ringgold, whose groundbreaking art and political activism span more than sixty years - featuring a stellar line-up of contributors and an unprecedented collection of images Faith Ringgold is a critically acclaimed American artist whose unique methods of visual storytelling have documented and advanced art historical, feminist, and civil-rights movements for more than half a century. Accompanying a major retrospective at the New Museum, New York, this expansive survey covers work from all periods of her career, including her early civil rights-era figurative paintings, her graphic political protest posters, and her signature experimental story quilts.
Call Number: SMFA: N6537.R55 A4 2022
Fighters for Freedom by
* Accompanies major exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, 8 March-8 September 2024, Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami FL, 28 September 2024-5 January 2025, Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC, 6 September-29 November 2025, and Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, OH, 20 June 20-13 September 2026, with other venues to be confirmed * Engaging imagery intended for general audiences and young people with an interest in African American history, art, and social justice William H. Johnson painted his Fighters for Freedom series in the mid-1940s as a tribute to African American activists, scientists, teachers, and performers as well as international heads of state working to bring peace to the world. He celebrated their accomplishments even as he acknowledged the realities of racism, violence, and oppression they faced and overcame. Some of his Fighters?--?Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver, Marian Anderson, and Mohandas Gandhi?--?are familiar historical figures; others are less well-known individuals whose determination and sacrifice have been eclipsed over time. Johnson elevates their lives visually, offering historical insights and fresh perspectives. Through their stories he suggests that the pursuit of freedom is an ongoing, interconnected struggle, with moments of both triumph and tragedy, and he invites us to reflect on our own struggles for justice today. In Fighters for Freedom Johnson reminds us that individual achievement and commitment to social justice are at the heart of the American story.
Call Number: SMFA: ND1329.J65 A64 2024
Frank Stewart's Nexus by
The first complete monograph and retrospective on the sixty-year career of Frank Stewart, photographer of an astonishing range of intimate and empathetic images of Black life, music, and culture. Frank Stewart's Nexus presents an overview of the career of this noted photographer, who since the 1960s has captured spontaneous and sensitive portrayals of African American culture in many forms, including art, food, dance, and music--especially jazz. Best known for his work as senior photographer for Jazz at Lincoln Center, Stewart produced energetic street scenes and profound landscapes on his worldwide travels with the orchestra. The intimate and subtle relations between and among people are at the heart of Stewart's art, whether shot at a Manhattan jazz concert, in the studio of artist Romare Bearden, or during a sacred rite in an African village. This sweeping survey of 103 images, with an artist interview and texts by multiple critical voices, illuminates the evolution of a remarkable career. Exhibition Itinerary: The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.: June 10-September 2, 2023 Artis-Naples, The Baker Museum, Naples, FL: October 14, 2023-January 7, 2024 Telfair Museums, Savannah, GA: February 9 - May 12, 2024
Call Number: SMFA: TR647 .S818 2023
Gordon Parks : Pittsburgh Grease Plant, 1944/1946 by
By 1944, Gordon Parks had established himself as a photographer who freely navigated the fields of press and commercial photography, with an unparalleled humanist perspective. That year, Roy Stryker--the former Farm Security Administration official who was now heading the public relations department for the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey)--commissioned Parks to travel to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to document the Penola, Inc. Grease Plant. Employing his signature style, Parks spent two years chronicling the plant's industry--critical to Pittsburgh's history and character--by photographing its workers. The resulting photographs, dramatically staged and lit and striking in their composition, showed the range of activities engaged in by Black and white workers, divided as they were by roles, race and class. The images were used as marketing materials and made available to local and national newspapers, as well as corporate magazines and newsletters. However, they served as much more than documentation of industry, enduring as an exploration of labor and its social and economic ramifications in World War II America by one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Featuring more than 100 photographs, many previously unpublished, this is the first book to focus exclusively on Parks' photographs for the Standard Oil Company, illuminating an important chapter in his career prior to his landmark career as a staff photographer for Life.
Call Number: SMFA: TR647 .P375 2022
LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity by
Published in conjunction with the first comprehensive museum survey dedicated to the artist, LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity presents the full range of her practice and includes rarely seen and brand-new bodies of work. For more than two decades, the artist-activist LaToya Ruby Frazier has used photography, text, moving images, and performance to revive and preserve forgotten narratives of labor, gender, and race in the postindustrial era. Frazier has cultivated a practice that builds on the legacy of the social documentary tradition of the 1930s, the photo-conceptual forays of the 1960s and 1970s, and the work of socially conscious writers like Upton Sinclair, James Baldwin, and bell hooks. Monuments of Solidarity celebrates the creativity and collaboration that persist in the face of industrialization and deindustrialization, racial and environmental injustice, gender disparities, unequal access to health care and clean water, and the erosion or denial of fundamental human rights. A form of Black feminist world-building, Frazier's nontraditional "monuments" demand recognition of the crucial role that women and people of color have played, and continue to play, in histories of labor and the working class. Published in conjunction with the first comprehensive museum survey dedicated to the artist, LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity presents the full range of her practice and includes both rarely seen and brand-new bodies of work. An illuminating overview essay by the exhibition's curator, Roxana Marcoci, is accompanied by a manifesto by the artist and a suite of focused essays by other curators and scholars.
Call Number: SMFA
Nick Cave: Forothermore by
With a wealth of images and commentary, this is the essential career survey of Cave's socially responsive art The definitive volume on the ever-evolving and shape-shifting work of the Chicago-based artist, Nick Cave: Forothermore highlights the way Cave's practice has shifted and continues to shift in response to our history and current moment of cultural crisis. Including several new, never-before-seen works, the book shows an artist at the height of his power. Addressing topics ranging from art history to social justice, Nick Cave: Forothermore includes essays from Naomi Beckwith, Romi Crawford, Antwaun Sargent, Malik Gaines, Krista Thompson and Meida Teresa McNeal. Punctuating these contributions are interviews with the artist exploring his life, work and teaching practice, as well as a roundtable discussion between Cave and dancer Damita Jo Freeman, musician Nona Hendryx and publisher Linda Johnson Rice on Cave's art and influences, as well as pivotal cultural phenomena from Soul Train to Ebony magazine. Nick Cave: Forothermore reveals the way art, music, fashion and performance can help us envision a more just future. Nick Cave (born 1959) is an artist and educator working between the visual and performing arts through a wide range of mediums, including sculpture, installation, video, sound and performance. Cave is well known for his Soundsuits, sculptural forms based on the scale of his body, initially created in direct response to the police beating of Rodney King in 1991. Cave has had major exhibitions at MASS MoCA (2016), Cranbrook Art Museum (2015), Saint Louis Art Museum (2014-15), ICA Boston (2014), Denver Art Museum (2013), Seattle Art Museum (2011) and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2009), among others. Cave lives and works in Chicago.
Call Number: SMFA: N6537.C384 A4 2022
Onyx by
'[a] glimmering monograph, which celebrates the performance and artistry of its dancers.' - Vanity Fair 'This book will serve as a starting point for conversations around the Black female body with Raquel at the forefront of provocative image-making' - Aesthetica 'By focusing on the performers themselves, the series elevates the images from straight reportage to curated and highly intentional... Raquel's captivating imagery portrays the empowerment and inclusivity in strip clubs that society has tended to ignore.'- Creative Review In ONYX, photographer Adrienne Raquel explores the intensity and escapism of the nightclub experience, documenting the power of the performers at Houston's famed Club Onyx. Raquel's photography is usually editorial, with high-power celebrities as her subjects. Her work has broken glass ceilings for Black female photographers. Now, for this passion project commissioned by Fotografiska New York, she has turned her lens towards a community of underrepresented artists in her hometown. At Club Onyx, strippers step on stage displaying their bodies, strength, and seduction, but there's a virtue to this particular space. "They don't get naked" is a common idiom to describe the club's ambiance. Performers there take the word "stripper," and negotiate what that means to them, on their own terms. Raquel captures elements of southern strip culture and the power of these performers with her signature glossy photographic style. From powerful images of the dancers mid-movement to detailed shots and intimate portraits, Raquel's striking images put the divine beauty and compelling energy that enlivens Houston's nightlife on full display. She also takes viewers behind the scenes, giving us a window into the community the dancers have built in the privacy of the locker room. There they prepare for the evening together before moving to the stage, each dancer in her moment. Uniting their star power to conquer one customer at a time, dancers continue into the early morning, performing and collecting bills. ONYX displays the empowerment and inclusivity in strip clubs that society has ignored. As captured by Raquel, the night club experience is revealed with layered meaning - granting the chance for these performers to be seen as elevated as the culture they influence.
Call Number: SMFA: PN1949.S7 R85 2023
Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America by
During the Museum of Modern Art's 90-year history, African American architects and designers have had little to no purchase in its permanent collection and exhibition histories, reflective of larger trends in museum and architectural discourses at large. The exclusion of Black architects and designers from the academic imagination have largely been waylaid in favor of dominant formalist and stylistic concerns. This book, conceived as a field guide to accompany the exhibition at MoMA, examines how contemporary architecture may address the varied contexts of systemic anti-Black racism that have fostered violent histories of discrimination and injustice in the United States. The invited contributors reimagine the legacies of race-based dispossession in ten American cities and how individuals and communities across the United States have mobilized Black cultural spaces, forms, and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance, and refusal. The catalogue will feature a portfolio of new photographs by artist David Hartt.
Call Number: SMFA Library: NA738.N5 R43 2021
Songs of My People by
A historic photo documentary of the world of African Americans, this is a self-portrait seen through the eyes and lenses of a rare assemblage of some of the nation's best black photojournalists.
Call Number: E185.86 .S66 1992
Souls Grown Deep Like the Rivers by
For generations, Black artists from the American South have forged a unique art tradition. Working in near isolation from established practices, they have created masterpieces in clay, driftwood, roots, soil, and recycled and cast-off objects that articulate America's painful past - the inhuman practice of enslavement, the cruel segregationist policies of the Jim Crow era, and institutionalised racism. Their works date from the early twentieth century to today and respond to issues ranging from economic inequality, oppression and social marginalisation, to sexuality, the influence of place, and ancestral memory. Among the sculptures, paintings, reliefs and drawings included here are works by Hawkins Bolden, Thornton Dial, Sam Doyle, Bessie Harvey, Lonnie Holley, Ronald Lockett, Joe Minter, Nellie Mae Rowe, Mary T. Smith, Henry and Georgia Speller, Mose Tolliver, Charles Williams and Purvis Young. Also featured are the celebrated quiltmakers of Gee's Bend, Alabama, among them Mary Lee Bendolph, Marlene Bennett Jones, Loretta Pettway and Martha Jane Pettway.
Call Number: SMFA: N6520 .S68 2023- Stephen Towns by "This is the catalog publication that will accompany the art exhibition "Stephen Towns: Declaration & Resistance," curated by Kilolo Luckett, for which Towns created thirty-five new figurative paintings and story quilts. The exhibition examines the American dream through the lives of Black Americans from the late eighteenth century to the present. Using labor as a backdrop, Towns highlights the role African Americans have played in building the economy and explores how their resilience, resistance, and perseverance have challenged the United States to truly embrace the tenets of its Declaration of Independence"--Call Number: SMFA: ND237.T599 A4 2023
Unnamed Figures by
Unnamed Figures, Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North. Across seven long-form essays and several object studies, this publication fleshes out the long history of objects by analyzing how Black representations may have been further marginalized or misconstrued by early American art and material culture. Contributing scholars from different academic fields interrogate the socio-political forces that have undermined or obscured Black stories and reconstruct the contours of early African American lived experience by mining evidence from visual, material, literary, and archival sources to uncover narratives of Black endurance, agency, and creativity as evinced in various forms of cultural production. A trans-temporal perspective infuses the book with contemporary relevance as essayists consider images and histories not only within the context of their making but also in terms of their significance to present-day readers. The exhibition "Unnamed Figures, Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North" will be on view at the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) from November 15, 2023, to March 24, 2024, and at Historic Deerfield from May 1, 2024, to August 4, 2024. The exhibition explores African American representation in 125 exceptional works of art and material culture produced in New England and the Mid-Atlantic during the long 18th century. Many of the assembled objects feature African American figures in secondary positions to primary white subjects, whereas others wholly eliminate Black presence from the visual landscape of early America.
Call Number: SMFA: N8217.B535 U66 2023
Wangechi Mutu by
A comprehensive survey of the work of the influential Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu Wangechi Mutu's multidisciplinary practice grapples with contemporary realities while proffering new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis. Her work addresses some of today's most critical questions concerning historical violence and its impact on women, together with our inextricable ties toward one another, our ecosystems, and other life forms. Accompanying a major solo exhibition at the New Museum opening in February 2023, this expansive survey will trace the entirety of Mutu's influential career chronologically, from early sculptural works of the late 1990s to her collage works of the early 2000s and more recent video works, large-scale sculptures, and site-specific interventions. This monograph provides the opportunity to see thematic through-lines and progressions across the entire arc of Mutu's career to date. Her sculptures inaugurated the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Façade Project, and her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate Modern, London, among other major institutions.
Call Number: SMFA: N6537.W2564 A4 2023
Whitfield Lovell by
The most comprehensive survey to date of the contemporary artist Whitfield Lovell, whose poetic and intricately crafted tableaux and installations document and pay tribute to the history and cultural memory of the African American experience. Whitfield Lovell: Passages accompanies a major traveling exhibition of the artist's powerful Conté crayon drawings combined with objects to create assemblages and multisensory installations that focus on aspects of Black history, raising questions about identity, memory, and America's collective heritage. Whitfield Lovell (b. 1959, Bronx), a 2007 MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient and conceptual artist, creates exquisite drawings inspired by his own collection of vintage photographs of unidentified African Americans taken between the Emancipation Proclamation and the civil rights movement. He pairs his meticulously rendered drawings done on paper or salvaged wooden boards with found objects, creating enigmatic assemblages and stand-alone tableaux that are rich with symbolism and ambiguity and evoke personal memories, ancestral connections, and the collective American past. This richly illustrated volume features essays by leading scholars that contextualize Lovell's work through the exploration of compelling elements such as sound and card playing, contemplating memory as method. Exhibition Itinerary (exh is circulated by American Federation of Arts): Boca Raton Museum of Art February 11-May 21, 2023 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts June 17-September 10, 2023 Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts October 13, 2023-January 14, 2024 Cincinnati Art Museum March 1-May 26, 2024 The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC June 29-September 22, 2024 McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX October 26, 2024-January 19, 2025
Call Number: SMFA: N6537.L678 A4 2023
