Bob Thompson

Bob Thompson (1937-1966) was a figurative expressionist painter active in literary, musical, and artistic circles in New York and Europe from the late 1950s until his death in 1966. In the first book devoted solely to Thompson, the life and work of this pivotal figure in modern American art history and African American culture receive the attention they deserve. Judith Wilson situates Bob Thompson within the context of both contemporary artistic production and cultural trends of the fifties and sixties. She uses interviews, Thompson's diary entries and letters to his family, and his work to give a thoughtful and thorough interpretation of his art and persona. She traces Thompson's development—psychologically, socially, and artistically—effectively portraying his first encounters with art and bohemian culture and his intensely active period in Europe shortly before his death in Rome at the age of 29. Bob Thompson's life intersects several important currents in recent American culture, and his work reveals an unfinished quest for communal identity, says Wilson. His use of postmodern techniques of appropriation and pastiche embraced both the Western tradition and cultural resources specific to the African American experience. The publication of Bob Thompson recognizes the important role of the artist in the vanguard of twentieth-century American art.

Arts & Photography

GOLDEN, Thelma

History & Criticism

University of California Press

Photo-based artist and filmmaker Lorna Simpson is considered one of the key representatives of Black-American visual culture. Emerging in the 1980s, Lorna Simpson was in 1993 the first African-American woman ever to show in the Venice Biennale and to have a solo exhibition in the 'Projects' series of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. She is also one of very few Black-American artists ever to have exhibited at Documenta, in 1987 and 2002. 
Simpson's well-known fragmented photographs combining images with fragments of text create mysterious, quiet works that reflect the silence of a portion of society - African-American women - rarely if ever represented in art. 
Curator of Simpson's Autumn 2002 exhibition at the Studio Museum, Harlem, New York, Thelma Golden talks about the artist's shift from her signature photographic work to her recent, more filmic and sculptural art. In her Survey critic and scholar Kellie Jones places the work in the context of the history of African-American culture as well as the recent history of self-portraiture in art through photography and performance. Curator of Simpson's film presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2002, Chrissie Iles analyses in her Focus the artist's filmworks including a new work to be screened at Documenta 11 (2002). The artist's fragmentary usage of speech is paralleled in her Artist's Choice, an extract from Top Dog/UnderDog by contemporary African-American playwright Suzan Lori Parks, and reflected in her Artist's Writings.

Lorna Simpson (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Jones, Kellie

Iles, Chrissie

Phaidon Press

Carrie Mae Weems brings together for the first time five of this American photographer's most accomplished and powerful groups of work: the Sea Islands Series (1991-92), the Africa Series (1993-95), From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995-96), Who What Where When (1998), and Ritual &amp; Revolution (1998). These series, composed mainly of photography and text, highlight the themes that have dominated Weems's work over the course of her twenty-year career: identity, race, gender, class, the legacy of slavery, and the African diaspora.

Carrie Mae Weems: Recent Work, 1992-1998

Piche, Thomas

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

George Braziller

The companion volume to a new PBS television series on the contemporary visual arts explores the work of some of the leading artists working in America today and examines such issues as how artists address sexual or racial identity in their work and the impact of transnationalism and cyberspace on creativity.

Art: 21 - Art in the 21st Century

STORR, Robert

Harry N.Abrams, Inc.

Published to accompany a travelling exhibition of his work, this volume is devoted to the photomontages of Romare Bearden (1914-1988), and considers their relation both to the rest of his oeuvre and to African-American art and culture. Bearden began creating these works in 1963 by incorporating images from magazines and other sources into montages and then photostatically enlarging them. These "projections", as he called them, marked his turn from pure abstraction to the medium of collage, which grew out of his concern with civil-rights issues. The catalogue reproduces in colour all 25 photomontages, and complements them with essays. It also includes previously unpublished poems by Bearden and an interview with his friend and collaborator, Albert Murray.

Romare Bearden in Black-And-White

Gelburd, Gail

Biographies & Memoirs

An authoritative guide to one of the world's most important collections of African-American art, with works by artists from Romare Bearden to Kehinde Wiley. The artists featured in Black Refractions, including Kerry James Marshall, Faith Ringgold, Nari Ward, Norman Lewis, Wangechi Mutu, and Lorna Simpson, are drawn from the renowned collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Through exhibitions, public programs, artist residencies, and bold acquisitions, this pioneering institution has served as a nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally, and internationally since its founding in 1968. Rather than aim to construct a single history of "black art," Black Refractions emphasizes a plurality of narratives and approaches, traced through 125 works in all media from the 1930s to the present. An essay by Connie Choi and entries by Eliza A. Butler, Akili Tommasino, Taylor Aldridge, Larry Ossei Mensah, Daniela Fifi , and other luminaries contextualize the works and provide detailed commentary. A dialogue between Thelma Golden, Connie Choi, and Kellie Jones draws out themes and challenges in collecting and exhibiting modern and contemporary art by artists of African descent. More than a document of a particular institution's trailblazing path, or catalytic role in the development of American appreciation for art of the African diaspora, this volume is a compendium of a vital art tradition.

Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem

Choi, Connie H.

Rizzoli Electa

Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art

History

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF ART.

1998, oversize trade paperback edition, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. 200 pages. Magnificent title of a skilled painter, born in Kentucky in 1937. This influential, talented man is described well in a lengthy essay, followed by gorgeous, full-color plates. Printed on heavy stock. Wonderful item.

Whitney Museum

Published for Jordan Casteel's major New Museum show, Within Reach surveys her paintings exploring the nuances of Black subjectivity In her large-scale oil paintings, New York-based artist Jordan Casteel (born 1989) takes up questions of Black subjectivity and representation by examining the gestures, spaces and forms of nonverbal communication that underpin portraiture. "There is a certain amount of mindfulness that it requires ... to be present with someone in a moment." she explains. "I've always had an inclination towards seeing people who might be easily be unseen." Published for Casteel's first solo museum exhibition in New York, this volume brings together 40 large-scale paintings from throughout her career, including works from the celebrated series Visible Man (2013-14) and Nights in Harlem (2017), along with recent cropped "subway paintings" and portraits of her students at Rutgers University-Newark. Whether depicting former classmates from Yale, nude and in serene repose; street vendors near her home in Harlem; anonymous New Yorkers huddled on the subway; or her own students, posed largely in domestic interiors among their personal belongings, she explores how both public and private spheres can serve as frames for an inner life. This generously illustrated, oversized publication honors the larger-than-life scale of the artist's work. It is the first comprehensive monographic publication on Casteel's work and includes texts by Dawoud Bey, Amanda Hunt and Lauren Haynes, and conversations conducted with the artist by Massimiliano Gioni and Thelma Golden.

Jordan Casteel: Within Reach

Bey, Dawoud

Haynes, Lauren

Hunt, Amanda

Individual Artists

New Museum

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