Product Description 
A colossal, panoramic, much-needed appraisal of the visual cultures of Afro-Atlantic territories across six centuries 
Afro-Atlantic Histories brings together a selection of more than 400 works and documents by more than 200 artists from the 16th to the 21st centuries that express and analyze the ebbs and flows between Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe. The book is motivated by the desire and need to draw parallels, frictions and dialogues around the visual cultures of Afro-Atlantic territories―their experiences, creations, worshiping and philosophy. The so-called Black Atlantic, to use the term coined by Paul Gilroy, is geography lacking precise borders, a fluid field where African experiences invade and occupy other nations, territories and cultures.The plural and polyphonic quality of “histórias” is also of note; unlike the English “histories,” the word in Portuguese carries a double meaning that encompasses both fiction and nonfiction, personal, political, economic and cultural, as well as mythological narratives.The book features more than 400 works from Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean, as well as Europe, from the 16th to the 21st century. These are organized in eight thematic groupings: Maps and Margins; Emancipations; Everyday Lives; Rites and Rhythms; Routes and Trances; Portraits; Afro Atlantic Modernisms; Resistances and Activism.Artists include: Nina Chanel Abney, Emma Amos, Benny Andrews, Emanoel Araujo, Maria Auxiliadora, Romare Bearden, John Biggers, Paul Cézanne, Victoria Santa Cruz, Beauford Delaney, Aaron Douglas, Melvin Edwards, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Ben Enwonwu, Ellen Gallagher, Theodore Géricault, Barkley Hendricks, William Henry Jones, Loïs Mailou Jones, Titus Kaphar, Wifredo Lam, Norman Lewis, Ibrahim Mahama, Edna Manley, Archibald Motley, Abdias Nascimento, Gilberto de la Nuez, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Dalton Paula, Rosana Paulino, Howardena Pindell, Heitor dos Prazeres, Joshua Reynolds, Faith Ringgold, Gerard Sekoto, Alma Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Rubem Valentim, Kara Walker and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. 
 Review 
If you want to educate yourself on this vast history, spanning centuries and involving millions of people, then this art book is for you -- Charlotte Stace ― 
Daily Art Magazine

Afro-Atlantic Histories

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

DelMonico Books

A compendious celebration of the exuberant, multilayered paintings and prints of Beatriz MilhazesThis is the most comprehensive book to date on Beatriz Milhazes, featuring many previously unpublished paintings and prints. Milhazes, a pivotal figure in contemporary art and the history of abstraction, works with a complex repertoire of images associated with different motifs, origins and sources. She works mainly in painting, printmaking and collage, but also in drawing, sculpture, artist's books and textiles, among other mediums. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, geometry and free form, her compositions are intricate, dense, multicolored and literally full of layers--of colors, paints, papers and meanings. Milhazes' sources are diverse and varied: from modernism to the Baroque, from folk art or arte popular to pop culture, from fashion to jewelry, from architecture to abstraction, from the history of art to nature. Her work encompasses multiple references, including the artists Hilma af Klint, Sonia Delaunay, Bridget Riley, Henri Matisse, Tarsila do Amaral and Piet Mondrian. Beatriz Milhazes: Avenida Paulista includes more than 170 works made since 1989, a turning point in Milhazes' career. It was in that year that she developed the technique she calls "monotransfer," in which she paints on a sheet of transparent plastic and then decals or transfers the painted and dry element to the canvas. The book provides a unique opportunity to discover her diverse, complex, multifaceted and singular work. Beatriz Milhazes was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1960. Her works can be found in the collections of the Guggenheim, MASP, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Tate and the Centre Pompidou, among others. Milhazes lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

Beatriz Milhazes: Avenida Paulista

A radical reconception of Degas’ sculpture through the lens of gender, labor and more, with new photography of the works 
This substantial new monograph on the work of Edgar Degas (1834–1917), one of the most significant artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, is a decisive contribution to the literature on the French Impressionist artist. An innovative and groundbreaking book, with underlying discussions related to “dance, politics and society,” it pays special attention to issues of gender, identity, labor, race and the representation of women. Degas worked in various mediums, and, at the end of his life, left around 6,000 works, including 2,000 related to the world of dance and ballet. The contradictions and ambiguities of his art, especially the way he straddles both tradition and modernity, reaffirm both his uniqueness and significance in the history of Western art. 
Degas: Dance, Politics and Society includes ten essays, never before published, by experts around the world, and also features a visual essay of black-and-white photographs of the bronze sculptures, including Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, by the Brazilian artist Sofia Borges. Through her camera, Borges reinterprets and conceives new images of Degas' most cherished and classic sculptures. Borges’ extraordinary photographs reveal, transform and revisit Degas’ works in an innovative and radical manner.

Degas: Dance, Politics and Society

Between Afrofuturism, fantasy and postcolonialism: the most comprehensive monograph to date on the fantastical worlds of Wangechi MutuWangechi Mutu takes viewers on journeys of material, psychological and sociopolitical transformation; this volume explores her most recent groundbreaking work. Over the past two decades, Mutu has created chimerical constellations of powerful female characters, hybrid beings and fantastical landscapes. With a rare understanding of the need for powerful new mythologies beyond simple binaries and stereotypes, Mutu breaches common distinctions between human, animal, plant and machine. An artist who calls both Nairobi and New York City home, Mutu moves voraciously between cultural traditions to challenge colonialist, racist and sexist worldviews with her visionary projection of an alternate universe informed by Afrofuturism, posthumanism and feminism. This dazzling book accompanies a presentation of Mutu's new work on view at the Legion, along with a greater selection from her landmark oeuvre. It is the most comprehensive book on the artist to date.

Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening?

An intimate look at one of the most radical and groundbreaking printmakers of all time, the American Impressionist Mary CassattThis book examines the radical experimentation and innovation of one of the finest and most creative printmakers of the 19th century. A collaborator with the Impressionists Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) made some of her greatest artistic achievements as a printmaker. Her prints reveal the personal and introspective side of an American artist who was at the center of the French art world. Addressing themes of creativity, domesticity, motherhood, fashion, intimacy and privacy, Inside Out: The Prints of Mary Cassatt brings readers into close contact with an artist who used printmaking to consider issues of identity and selfhood in a changing modern world. This publication, which investigates the artist's exploration of the medium over a period of two decades, also features an original pattern design by contemporary designer Frances MacLeod.

Inside Out: The Prints of Mary Cassatt

An epic exploration of the artist internationally renowned for his unique gunpowder artThis is the first publication to synthesize the fundamental concepts and methodological pursuits behind the art of Cai Guo-Qiang (born 1957), since his 2008 Guggenheim retrospective exhibition catalog I Want to Believe. Introduced through a comprehensive map and chronology and encompassing the visual and textual records from over three decades of Cai Guo-Qiang's career, this book showcases the work of an artist renowned for his unique gunpowder art through his Individual's Journey Through Western Art History. In a series of exhibitions at major museums and cultural sites around the world, including the Prado Museum, Uffizi Galleries, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, National Archaeological Museum of Naples and Pompeii Archaeological Park, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Cai has engaged in dialogues with periods of Western art history as presented by the institutions. The series also retraces Cai's expansive journey of homecoming through dialogues with his original passion for painting, the spirit of Chinese culture and his eternal home in the Cosmos. This publication presents the culmination of Cai's Journey with the exhibition Odyssey and Homecoming at the Palace Museum, the first ever by a contemporary artist, coinciding with the 600th anniversary of the Forbidden City.

Cai Guo-Qiang: Odyssey and Homecoming

A multidisciplinary look at the foremost archive of Black American visual culture, as recast by Theaster GatesThis book features essays and other reflections commissioned in response to the Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories, a monumental participatory work by Theaster Gates (born 1973). The Cabinet includes nearly 3,000 framed images of women from the Johnson Publishing Company archive, and highlights from the collection appear in this edited volume. Founded in 1942, Chicago-based Johnson Publishing chronicled the lives of Black Americans for more than seven decades through the magazines Ebony and Jet. Composed from arguably the most important archive of American Black visual culture in the 20th century, Gates' work centers the essential and too often unsung role of women in this history. When the Cabinet was exhibited at the Colby College Museum of Art, 12 women from a wide range of disciplines (including archivists, legal scholars, anthropologists and librarians, as well as curators, visual artists, filmmakers, writers and art historians) were invited to reflect on a work that brings a sisterhood of images to light.

Theaster Gates: Facsimile Cabinet of Women Origin Stories: Reflections

A comprehensive survey of rarely seen collages from the master of abstraction Over the course of more than 50 years, renowned American artist Ellsworth Kelly made approximately 400 postcard collages, some of which served as exploratory musings and others as studies for larger works in other mediums. They range from his first monochrome in 1949 through his last postcard collages of crashing ocean waves, in 2005. Together, these works show an unbounded space of creative freedom and provide an important insight into the way Kelly saw, experienced and translated the world in his art. Many postcards illustrate specific places where he lived or visited, introducing biography and illuminating details that make these pieces unique among his broader artistic production. Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards is the most extensive publication of Kelly's lifelong practice of collaged postcards. Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) was born in Newburgh, New York. In 1948 he moved to France, where he came into contact with a wide range of classical and modern art. He returned to New York in 1954 and two years later had his first exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, organized his first retrospective in 1973. Subsequent exhibitions have been held at museums around the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate in London, Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards

Individual Artists

How do artists challenge us to see the everyday world around us with fresh eyes? How do they make our world strange? A century of defamiliarized art, from Marcel Duchamp to Rachel Harrison 
This substantial volume brings together nearly 250 art works spanning more than 100 years that ask us to reconsider how we look at the world. Brought together by Chara Schreyer over the course of three decades, these works invite us to rethink our perception of the everyday in the wake of Duchamp’s radical reimagination of the art object and the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky’s conception of “making strange.” Whether looking at the idea of “making strange” in the work of Duchamp and O’Keeffe, the legacy of Minimalism and its discontents in the sculptures of Judd and González-Torres, the idea of disaster in America as seen through the eyes of Warhol and Ligon, the uses of language in the works of Weiner and Holzer or the restaging of life through photography from Arbus to Sherman, this catalog reevaluates the relationship between art and the world.

Making Strange: The Chara Schreyer Collection

Art in the space between magic and activism: an introduction to the participatory, multimedia creations of Glenn Kaino 
Published for the Los Angeles–based interdisciplinary artist Glenn Kaino’s (born 1972) largest exhibition to date, In the Light of a Shadow, this book showcases his work and how art can chronicle parallel trajectories of disparate political and geographical contexts, utilizing history to speak about our present, and art to facilitate political action and hope. Kaino has built his career in the space between these two; creating projects that are based on the magic of trust, fair promises and righting the lapses in memory and omissions of history, all while creating beautifully hopeful and immersive installations. 
This Book Is a Promise is organized in a galaxy-like structure, with different aspects of Kaino’s production over the years represented as intertwined constellations. Additionally, the book reads in two directions, Memory and Promise, each with their own cover. The Memory side presents a retrospective survey, while the Promise surveys the MASS MoCA exhibition. Themes explored include equity, visibility, belief, regeneration and space-making. This publication gives context to Kaino’s diverse practice, provides promises for people to follow to live in a better, more humane world and serves as a field guide to being human.

Glenn Kaino: This Book Is a Promise

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