African American

Where We Stand: Class Matters

Where We Stand is a powerful new book by one of America's most admired critics and writers. For years we have turned to bell hooks-feminist, social thinker, memoirist, teacher-for her deeply felt ideas on women, race, culture, sexuality, and more recently on love and children. Now Bell Hooks talks about class-the 'elephant in the room'-the subject we all know is central to our culture and its problems but that hasn't been given the attention it so desperately needs.
Why is it that the face of poverty in America is a black face, even though most of the thirty-six million poor in America are white? How do fantasies of wealth's power help keep the poor poor? What do black teens want, and how do they learn to want it? Are wealthy black Americans any more aware of class issues than wealthy whites? Why do we need so much money, after all?
Bell Hooks talks about these subjects in her own style. Drawing on both her roots in Kentucky and her adventures with Manhattan coop boards, Where We Standis a successful black woman's reflection-personal, straight forward, and rigorously honest-on how our dilemmas of class and race are intertwined, and how we can find ways to think beyond them.

The Quilts of Gee's Bend: Masterpieces from a Lost Place

Martin Puryear

Martin Puryear's sculpture has received increasing acclaim in the years since 1989, when he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant and the grand prize at the São Paulo Bienal, where he was the sole United States representative. Prepared to accompany a 1991 exhibition of his work at the Art Institute of Chicago, this cleanly designed and generously formatted catalog reflects the powerful simplicity of Puryear's work. Between two informative essays by Robert Starr and Neal Benezra, then curator of 20th-century painting and sculpture at the Art Institute, is a generous plate section reproducing more than 30 of Puryear's major works from 1974 to 1990. His sculpture is both meticulously crafted and completely unbound, evoking the most elemental forms of nature and landscape.

Over the last 30 years, Martin Puryear has created a body of work that defies categorization, creating sculpture that examines identity, culture and history. Departing from the impersonal and machined aesthetic of Minimalism, Puryear's work combines Modernist abstraction with the traditions of crafts and woodworking, in shapes informed by the natural and by ordinary objects, made with materials such as tar, wood, stone and wire. It is quiet but deliberately associative, encompassing wide-reaching cultural and intellectual experiences and drawing on a huge and varied reserve of images, ideas and information. As a high school and college student, the artist studied ornithology, falconry and archery, and in the 1960s he volunteered with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, where he schooled himself in the region's indigenous crafts; these are only a few of the influences and methods that have embedded themselves in his work. And the sources of his works are no less varied than the possible and open-ended interpretations: "I think there are a number of levels at which my work can be dealt with and appreciated," Puryear said in a 1978 interview. "It gives me pleasure to feel there's a level that doesn't require knowledge of, or immersion in, the aesthetic of a given time or place."This volume is published on the occasion of the artist's Fall 2007 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, which travels from New York to Fort Worth, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. It follows Puryear's development from his first solo show in 1977 to new works that are presented here for the first time and contains essays by John Elderfield, Michael Auping and Elizabeth Reede, and a conversation with the artist by Richard Powell.

Gee's Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt

Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love

Kara Walker is among the most complex and prolific American artists of her generation. Over the past decade, she has gained international recognition for her room-sized tableaux, which depict historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence and subjugation and are made using the paradoxically genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the antebellum American South, Walker's compositions play off of stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses and slave men, women and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation. Over the years, the artist has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression and liberation. Her scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Deploying an acidic sense of humor, Walker examines the dialectics of pleasure and danger, guilt and fulfillment, desire and fear, race and class. This landmark publication, which is sure to win international design awards, accompanies Walker's first major American museum survey. It features critical essays by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr and Kevin Young, as well as an illustrated lexicon of recurring themes and motifs in the artist's most influential installations by Yasmil Raymond, more than 200 full-color images, an extensive exhibition history and bibliography, and a 36-page insert by the artist.

Street Talk: Da Official Guide to Hip-Hop & Urban Slanguage (Dictionary)

700 pages with 10,000 entries, this unique dictionary simplifies the complex hip-hop slang vernacular.

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

This is the story of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in the South—and the brutality used to enforce it.

It is the story of how the nation’s press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century.

Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—first black reporters, then liberal southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act.

We watch the black press move bravely into the front row of the confrontation, only to be attacked and kept away from the action. Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down school segregation and the South’s mobilization against it, we see a growing number of white reporters venture South to cover the Emmett Till murder trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the integration of the University of Alabama.

We witness some southern editors joining the call for massive resistance and working with segregationist organizations to thwart compliance. But we also see a handful of other southern editors write forcefully and daringly for obedience to federal mandates, signaling to the nation that moderate forces were prepared to push the region into the mainstream.

The pace quickens in Little Rock, where reporters test the boundaries of journalistic integrity, then gain momentum as they cover shuttered schools in Virginia, sit-ins in North Carolina, mob-led riots in Mississippi, Freedom Ride buses being set afire, fire hoses and dogs in Birmingham, and long, tense marches through the rural South.

For many journalists, the conditions they found, the fear they felt, and the violence they saw were transforming. Their growing disgust matched the mounting countrywide outrage as The New York Times, Newsweek, NBC News, and other major news organizations, many of them headed by southerners, turned a regional story into a national drama.

Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an unprecedented account of one of the most volatile periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.

Wangechi Mutu: A Shady Promise

"Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body," states Kenyan-born, New York-based artist Wangechi Mutu, the subject of this highly anticipated first monograph. In recent years Mutu's work has become increasingly sought-after in the international art world, making high-profile appearances at the important art fairs and auctions. What makes her interesting, however, is her fierce and contemporary use of the well-worn medium of collage. Mutu deals with female and cultural identity in large-scale figurative pieces constructed from found and drawn imagery. Her figures are freakish and erotic hybrids of the primitive, contemporary and post-human. These sometimes garish, diseased, ravaged and distorted figures are made from seductive or silly materials like glossy fashion magazine pictures, glitter or fun fur. They refer to colonial history, contemporary African politics, the history of art and fashion--in often quite irreverent ways. Mutu's own diverse history--she has studied both anthropology and sculpture, and has lived in Nairobi, Wales, New York and New Haven, where she received her MFA from Yale University in 2001--seems a likely source for her manifold concerns. This volume surveys Mutu's work to date.

Creating Black Americans: African-American History and Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present

Here is a magnificent account of a past rich in beauty and creativity, but also in tragedy and trauma. Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter blends a vivid narrative based on the latest research with a wonderful array of artwork by African American artists, works which add a new depth to our understanding of black history.
Painter offers a history written for a new generation of African Americans, stretching from life in Africa before slavery to today's hip-hop culture. The book describes the staggering number of Africans--over ten million--forcibly transported to the New World, most doomed to brutal servitude in Brazil and the Caribbean. Painter looks at the free black population, numbering close to half a million by 1860 (compared to almost four million slaves), and provides a gripping account of the horrible conditions of slavery itself. The book examines the Civil War, revealing that it only slowly became a war to end slavery, and shows how Reconstruction, after a promising start, was shut down by terrorism by white supremacists. Painter traces how through the long Jim Crow decades, blacks succeeded against enormous odds, creating schools and businesses and laying the foundations of our popular culture. We read about the glorious outburst of artistic creativity of the Harlem Renaissance, the courageous struggles for Civil Rights in the 1960s, the rise and fall of Black Power, the modern hip-hop movement, and two black Secretaries of State. Painter concludes that African Americans today are wealthier and better educated, but the disadvantaged are as vulnerable as ever.
Painter deeply enriches her narrative with a series of striking works of art--more than 150 in total, most in full color--works that profoundly engage with black history and that add a vital dimension to the story, a new form of witness that testifies to the passion and creativity of the African-American experience.
* Among the dozens of artists featured are Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Beauford Delaney, Jacob Lawrence, and Kara Walker
* Filled with sharp portraits of important African Americans, from Olaudah Equiano (one of the first African slaves to leave a record of his captivity) and Toussaint L'Ouverture (who led the Haitian revolution), to Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, to Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X

Jacob Lawrence: Moving Forward

One of the most prominent American painters of the twentieth century, Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) worked in a highly personal manner, creating Modernist views of everyday life as well as epic narratives of American history and historical figures. His work is direct and forceful, in keeping with his lifelong conviction that art could effect social change. At the same time, it is essentially humanistic, exploring the many challenges of African-American life as a means of addressing the universality of the human experience. Jacob Lawrence: Moving Forward, Paintings 1936-1999 celebrates the artist's long and productive career spanning more than 60 years. Beginning with lively street scenes of 1930s Harlem, when the young painter was establishing his artistic viewpoint, it highlights important examples from every decade of his working life, including a tribute to Jackie Robinson--the first African-American to play in the major leagues--and the powerful Hiroshima series, done for a reissue of John Hersey's well-known book on the horrific event. This survey concludes with some of Lawrence's final narratives of labor and leisure in his Builders and Games series of the 1990s. In addition to 58 images of the artist's work, this volume features an appreciation by David C. Driskell, noted artist, curator and art historian, who was a friend of Lawrence's for many decades, and an insightful overview of Lawrence's life and art by Patricia Hills, the distinguished scholar of American art.