Diversity & Inclusivity Resources at The Ringling Art Library

Held: No. 2,5,6,7

'Black but Human' is the first study to focus on the visual representations of African slaves and ex-slaves in Spain during the Hapsburg dynasty. The Afro-Hispanic proverb 'Black but Human' is the main thread of the six chapters and serves as a lens through which to explore the ways in which acertain visual representation of slavery both embodies and reproduces hegemonic visions of enslaved and liberated Africans, and at the same time provides material for critical and emancipatory practices by Afro-Hispanics themselves.The African presence in the Iberian Peninsula between the late fifteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century was as a result of the institutionalization of the local and transatlantic slave trades. In addition to the Moors, Berbers and Turks born as slaves, there were approximately twomillion enslaved people in the kingdoms of Castile, Aragon and Portugal. The 'Black but Human' topos that emerges from the African work songs and poems written by Afro-Hispanics encodes the multi-layered processes through which a black emancipatory subject emerges and a 'black nation' forges acollective resistance. It is visually articulated by Afro-Hispanic and Spanish artists in religious paintings and in the genres of self-portraiture and portraiture. This extraordinary imagery coexists with the stereotypical representations of African slaves and ex-slaves by Spanish sculptors,engravers, jewellers, and painters mainly in the religious visual form and by European draftsmen and miniaturists, in their landscape drawings and sketches for costume books.

In her solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society in 2017, Tenderheaded, Jennifer Packer established herself as one of the most compelling painters of her generation. The exhibition, a selection of portraits and paintings of funerary bouquets, based in observation, improvisation and memory, rigorously engaged with art history at the same time as it maintained a personal response to how black bodies navigate within the present political landscape. Packer's portraiture foregrounds the autonomy and integrity of her sitting subjects, embodying questions of representation, visibility, and desire. Her paintings of funerary bouquets, meanwhile, provide a personal space in which to address themes of trauma and loss. Packer, whose practice is marked by both its restraint and tenderness, favors the emotive capacity of painting as a form of resistance to fixed identity. The first monograph devoted to the paintings of this important emerging artist, this catalog will address her multiple bodies of work. Tenderheaded includes documentation of the exhibition, an introduction by Solveig Øvstebø, a conversation between Packer and the acclaimed Chicago-based painter Kerry James Marshall, as well as art historical essays and poetry responding to Packer's work.

The African diaspora--a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade and Western colonialism--generated a wide array of artistic achievements in the past century, from blues to reggae, from the paintings of Henry Ossawa Tanner to the video installations of Keith Piper. Richard Powell's study concentrates on the works of art themselves and on how these works, created during a time of major social upheaval and transformation, use black culture as both subject and context.From musings on the "the souls of black folk" in early twentieth-century painting, sculpture, and photography to questions of racial and cultural identities in performance, media, and computer-assisted arts in the 1990s, the book draws on the works of hundreds of artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Lois Mailou Jones, Wifredo Lam, Jacob Lawrence, Spike Lee, Archibald Motley, Jr., Faith Ringgold, and Gerard Sekoto.This revised edition includes expanded coverage of video art and a new chapter that discusses work by a number of artists who have newly risen to prominence, such as Chris Ofili, Kara Walker, and Renée Cox. Biographies of more than 170 key artists provide a unique art-historical reference.Placing its emphasis on black cultural themes rather than on black racial identity, this groundbreaking book is an important exploration of the visual representations of black culture throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

Presenting an important opportunity to assess how black figures have been portrayed in British art, Black Victorians is a fascinating survey of a subject that has been given little coverage to date. It is essential reading for anyone seeking a fresh perspective on a well-documented period of British history. Prize: 'Creating the Performance' award from the Progress Trust in recognition of its role in promoting the understanding of Black history and for work with the Black community through the exhibition.

"Black Male is the catalog for what was a major and somewhat controversial exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In her introductory essay, curator Golden explains that she used "five historic signposts" to guide her study of the evolution of images of African American men in the years following the civil rights movement. The first was the aggressive and rampantly sexual look of the black power era, followed by blaxploitation films, the tragic "endangered" status of black men in America, the rise of rap and hip-hop, and the "video-imaging" of such high-profile tragedies as the Rodney King incident, the Clarence Thomas hearings, Magic Johnson's AIDS confession, and O. J. Simpson's arrest and indictment. Golden and her contributors, including Henry Louis Gates Jr., Ed Guerrero, Bell Hooks, and Andrew Ross, discuss the irony and danger of stereotypes; the implications of various perceptions of black masculinity; black men in films; and iconographic public figures from Malcolm X to Michael Jordan. The artworks themselves include paintings, photographs, sculptures, and movie stills by such artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Leon Golub, Spike Lee, Robert Mapplethorpe, Gordon Parks, Alison Saar, and Lorna Simpson. While this catalog is long on commentary and short on art, it is, without a doubt, stimulating and important."

Harlem has captivated the imagination of writers, artists, intellectuals, and politicians around the world since the early decades of this century. Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance examines the cultural reawakening of Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s as a key moment in twentieth-century art history, one that transcended regional and racial boundaries. Published to coincide with the exhibition that opens in England and travels to the United States, this catalog reflects the Harlem Renaissance's impressive range of art forms--literature, music, dance, theater, painting, sculpture, photography, film, and graphic design. The participants included not only artists based in New York, but also those from other parts of the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe. Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey present selected works that focus on six themes: Representing "The New Negro;" Another Modernism; Blues, Jazz, and the Performative Paradigm; The Cult of the Primitive; Africa: Inheritance and Seizure; and Jacob Lawrence's Toussaint L'Ouverture series. The visual arts from 1919 to 1938 included in the book suggest the extraordinary vibrancy of the time when Harlem was a metaphor for modernity. In spite of the importance of the Harlem Renaissance to early twentieth-century American culture and to the artistic climate of "Jazz Age" Paris and Weimar Berlin, few art exhibitions have been devoted exclusively to the subject. Rhapsodies in Black will be welcomed for its unique presentation of this creative time.

Explorations of contemporary art have focused on issues of identity and race for some time. Few, however, have sought to investigate these themes by juxtaposing historical and contemporary frameworks. Black Womanhood examines an especially charged icon--the black female body--and contemporary artists' interventions upon historical images of black women as exotic Others, erotic fantasies, and supermaternal Mammies. This book presents icons of the black female body as seen from three separate but intersecting perspectives: the traditional African, the colonial, and the contemporary global. The display and contemplation of such iconic images addresses complex and often competing forces of self-presentation and the representation of others. Peeling back layers of social, cultural, and political realities, Black Womanhood explores how historic icons inform contemporary artistic responses to the black female body through an examination of themes such as beauty, fertility and sexuality, maternity, and women's roles and power in society. More than 200 historical and contemporary images accompany written contributions by artists, curators and scholars. This compelling volume makes a valuable contribution to ongoing discussions of race, gender, and sexuality by promoting a deeper understanding of past and present readings of black womanhood, both in Africa and in the West.

The exhibition Sanford Biggers: Sweet Funk-An Introspective features eight importtant installations by the artist, giving a focused overview of his work in that art form, as well as presenting a number of related works.

African-American Art offers a current and comprehensive history that contextualizes black artists within the framework of American art as a whole. This compelling chronological survey explores issues of racial identity and representation while emphasizing aesthetics and visual analysis,helping students develop an understanding and appreciation of African-American art informed by - but not entirely defined by - racial identity.

African-American art has made an increasingly vital contribution to the art of the United States from the time of its origins in early-eighteenth-century slave communities. Folk and decorative arts such as ceramics, furniture, and quilts are discussed alongside fine art -- sculpture, painting,and photography -- produced by African Americans, both enslaved and free, throughout the nineteenth century. Twentieth-century developments are given full coverage, particularly the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, the Era of Civil Rights and Black Nationalism through the 1960s and 1970s, and theemergence of new black artists and theorists in the 1980s and 1990s.New evidence has provided an exciting myriad of perspectives about African-American art, confirming that it represents the culture and society from which it emerges. Professor Patton explores significant issues such as the relationship of art and politics, the influence of galleries and museums,the growth of black universities, critical theory, the impact of artists'' collectives, and the assortment of art practices since the 1960s. African-American Art shows that in its cultural diversity and synthesis of cultures it mirrors those in American society as a whole.`African-American Art should be read by teachers, students, and writers, and on the shelves of every library. Professor Patton begins this impressive book with the slave ships that brought Africans to this country and gives evidence of the fine metalworking, carving, carpentry, basketry, weaving,and clay building skills passed from Africa through the works of valued but nameless slave-artisans. She tells how we learned accidentally about a few named artists like the slave, Scipio Moorhead, who in 1773 engraved the only surviving image of poet, Phyllis Wheatley. She describes theportraitists, furniture makers and highly skilled artisans. Sharon Patton follows a path leading from great African formal styles, which, mixed with the powerful expressive force of struggle and opposition, led to distinctive new ideasfrom the quilts of Harriet Powers in the late 1800s to thepaintings of Jean Michel Basquiat in the 1980s. She helps the reader to think and search for the evidence of the art-making skills that not only survived the Middle Passage, but the many erasings of the auction block and racism''s lack, little and denial. In a fine survey of contemporaryAfrican-American art and ideascomplete with words from the artists themselvesPatton takes us first through its foundations and the through the movements, people and ideas that surrounded and generated this art. An art historian, curator, and scholar, Patton has produced a volume which, like noother, can be used both as an unusual reference book and a good read on an important part of American art. The illustrations are a special treat.''Emma Amos, Artist Professor of Art, Rutgers University`For a long period of time there has been an acknowledged need for a comprehensive text that integrates the full range of African American artistry, the building crafts, slave craftsmanship, the decorative and the fine arts tradition into one scholarly document. Professor Patton has brought thoseelements of history into her text that are often omitted in the available texts on the subject of African-American art and much of what she has written is primary information not previously recorded outside the context of social history.The cultural context in which Professor Patton has written accounts of the artistry of African-American artists and craftsmen from the period of American slavery to the present is illuminating, analytically sound, and well documented. She has brought to the attention of the reader a number oftopics such as ''Art Institutions and the Artist''s Groups'' that have not been thoroughly discussed in previous texts on the subject. A subject such as ''The Plantation House'', the place where many decorative arts originated in the slave society is a welcomed addition to Professor Patton''s historicaloverview.''David Driskell, Artist Distinguished University Professor of Art, University of Maryland`Sharon Patton has written a much needed text which surveys the broad scope of the history of African-American art from slavery to the present. She has followed a different tack, tracing art themes and their development throughout the history, rather than the influences of specific artists orperiods. Thus, she shows how ideas such as crafts, formal painting and sculpture, or architecture, co-existed with equal importance to the culture from the times of the Colonies. In so doing, she breaks down the barrier between folk and formal art, and articulates an interrelationship of bothconcepts to African-American people and their culture. Her book expands the framework for the visual arts in the United States in the last two centuries.''Professor Keith Morrison, Dean, College of Creative Arts, San Francisco State University

Samella Lewis has brought African American Art and Artists fully up to date in this revised and expanded edition. The book now looks at the works and lives of artists from the eighteenth century to the present, including new work in traditional media as well as in installation art, mixed media, and digital/computer art. Mary Jane Hewitt, an author, curator, and longtime friend of Samella Lewis's, has written an introduction to the new edition. Generously and handsomely illustrated, the book continues to reveal the rich legacy of work by African American artists, whose art is now included in the permanent collections of national and international museums as well as in major private collections.

This is an accessible, reader-friendly introduction to 20th-century, African-American art, illustrated with works from the Smithsonian American Art Museum and published to accompany a touring exhibition. African-American art, and the works represented in this catalogue range from pioneer works created early in the century to important pieces from the Harlem Renaissance, to modern and contemporary selections. Full-page colour reproductions of paintings, sculpture and photography from artists such as Romare Bearden, Roy DeCarava, Faith Ringgold, John Biggers and Gordon Parks provide an introduction to this area of art.

Creating Their Own Image marks the first comprehensive history of African-American women artists, from slavery to the present day. Using an analysis of stereotypes of Africans and African-Americans in western art and culture as a springboard, Lisa E. Farrington here richly details hundreds ofimportant works--many of which deliberately challenge these same identity myths, of the carnal Jezebel, the asexual Mammy, the imperious Matriarch--in crafting a portrait of artistic creativity unprecedented in its scope and ambition. In these lavishly illustrated pages, some of which feature imagesnever before published, we learn of the efforts of Elizabeth Keckley, fashion designer to Mary Todd Lincoln; the acclaimed sculptor Edmonia Lewis, internationally renowned for her neoclassical works in marble; and the artist Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and her innovative teaching techniques. We meet Laura Wheeler Waring who portrayed women of color as members of a socially elite class in stark contrast to the prevalent images of compliant maids, impoverished malcontents, and exotics "others" that proliferated in the inter-war period. We read of the painter Barbara Jones-Hogu's collaboration onthe famed Wall of Respect, even as we view a rare photograph of Hogu in the process of painting the mural. Farrington expertly guides us through the fertile period of the Harlem Renaissance and the "New Negro Movement," which produced an entirely new crop of artists who consciously imbued their workwith a social and political agenda, and through the tumultuous, explosive years of the civil rights movement. Drawing on revealing interviews with numerous contemporary artists, such as Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, Nanette Carter, Camille Billops, Xenobia Bailey, and many others, the second half ofCreating Their Own Image probes more recent stylistic developments, such as abstraction, conceptualism, and post-modernism, never losing sight of the struggles and challenges that have consistently influenced this body of work. Weaving together an expansive collection of artists, styles, andperiods, Farrington argues that for centuries African-American women artists have created an alternative vision of how women of color can, are, and might be represented in American culture. From utilitarian objects such as quilts and baskets to a wide array of fine arts, Creating Their Own Imageserves up compelling evidence of the fundamental human need to convey one's life, one's emotions, one's experiences, on a canvas of one's own making.

Transatlantic Dialogueopens an exciting cultural dialogue at the crossroads where Western and African art traditions intersect. Despite diversity of media, technique, and form, these contemporary African and African American art works and the artists who created them are united by a rich network of connections, exchanges, and associations generated from both shores of the Middle Passage. Collected in this book are 24 color reproductions of the art of seven African artists: Skunder Boghossian, Sokari Douglas Camp, Rashid Diab, Amir Nour, Moyo Ogundipe, Moyo Okediji, and Ouattara-and seven African American artists: Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Biggers, Jeff Donaldson, Yvonne Edwards-Tucker, Winnie Owens-Hart, Charles Searles, and Al Smith. Paintings, mixed media, sculptures, and ceramics reflect issues of identity while expressing beauty, pulsating rhythms, and a sense of improvisation among bursts of colour and quieter, more contemplative moments. American artist and scholar Michael D. Harris and Nigerian artist and scholar Moyo Okediji construct a dialogue in companion essays that explore departures and arrivals, connections and distinctions between contemporary African and African American artists. Although the influence of African art on African American artists has received considerable attention, this book is among the first to discuss the influence of African American art on African artists, an exchange that continues to produce art that is both culturally unique and aesthetically rich. Michael D. Harris is assistant professor of African and African American art history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Moyo Okediji is assistant professor of art at the University of Denver and assistant curator at the Denver Art Museum.

"Black women's heads of hair are galaxies unto themselves, solar systems, moonscapes, volcanic interiors." --Elizabeth Alexander, from the Introduction Using advertising photographs of black women (and men) drawn from vintage issues of Ebony and Jet magazines, the exquisite and thought-provoking collages of world-renowned artist Lorna Simpson explore the richly nuanced language of hair. Surreal coiffures made from colorful ink washes, striking geological formations from old textbooks, and other unexpected forms and objects adorn the models to mesmerizingly beautiful effect. Featuring 160 artworks, an artist's statement, and an introduction by poet, author, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, this volume celebrates the irresistible power of Simpson's visual vernacular.

Reflections in Black, the first comprehensive history of black photographers, is Deborah Willis's long-awaited, groundbreaking assemblage of photographs of African American life from 1840 to the present. Willis, a curator of photography at the Smithsonian Institution, has selected nearly 600 stunning images that give us rich, hugely moving glimpses of black life, from slavery to the Great Migrations, from rare antebellum portraits to 1990s middle-class families. Featuring the work of undisputed masters such as James Presley Ball, C. M. Battey, James VanDerZee, Morgan and Marvin Smith, Gordon Parks, Moneta Sleet, Jr., and Carrie Mae Weems, among hundreds of others, Reflections in Black is, most powerfully, a refutation of the gross caricature of the many mainstream photographers who have continually emphasized poverty over family, despair over hope. Recalling Roman Vishniac's Vanished World in terms of its documentary importance, and Brian Lanker's I Dream a World in terms of its exceptional beauty, Reflections in Black is not only an exceptional gift book for any occasion but also a work so significant that it has the power to reconfigure our conception of American history itself. It demands to be included in every American family's library as the record of an essential part of our heritage. Publication will coincide and tie in with a major exhibition at The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, which will then travel to Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Albany, New York; Corpus Christi, Texas; and other cities.

After an introduction from the artist about the migration of blacks from the rural areas in the South to the urban, industrialized North, there follows a collection of paintings that capture images of these events. A brief text connects the pictures, which were painted in the early 1940s. These are powerful images showing the difficulties of the journey as well as the strong support of families & friends. Many audiences will want to examine this visual history. A poem, "Migration" by Walter Dean Myers, follows the illustrations.

In The Urban Scene, Carmenita Higginbotham offers a significant and innovative reassessment of the ways in which race is deployed and read in interwar American art. By focusing on the works of urban realist Reginald Marsh and his contemporaries, Higginbotham explores how black figures acted as substantive cultural and visual markers in American art and embodied complex concerns about the presence of African Americans in urban centers. The book breaks from previous scholarship that insists interwar American art employed racial types primarily to emphasize the inferiority of blacks. Instead, it reframes the interchange between Marsh's pictorial language and prevailing representations of race in American art and visual culture to explore negotiations over urban space and constructions of national identity in American Scene painting. The Urban Scene is significant for its consideration of the intricate ways in which dominant culture adopts and disseminates black representation and how aesthetic and representational strategies operate within broader social and political tactics to regulate urban blacks.

Few American artists today are creating work as striking and politically charged as Carrie Mae Weems. Carrie Mae Weems: Strategies of Engagement explores a unique body of aesthetically powerful work that is particularly relevant in the context of current debates about social justice. In addition to acclaimed series by Weems dealing with historical archives, this catalogue for an exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College also features new photographs that address police violence. Strategies of Engagement highlights Weems's relationship with her viewers, which is at once pedagogical, confrontational, and collaborative, thus encouraging ongoing debates about power and resistance, history and identity. Intellectually and ethically challenging, the works in Strategies of Engagement are also imbued with melancholy seriousness, playful wit, and unexpected flashes of hope, grace, and beauty. Essays by a diverse collection of scholars analyze Weems's use of performance and masquerade to reanimate lost histories and others focus on her transformative interventions in documentary photography and archives. The volume is rounded out by a panel discussion with Weems about the relationship between the arts and social change.

"A biography of the African American painter who used his art to tell stories about the lives of individual Blacks and historical events important in the lives of his people."

It was W.E.B. DuBois who paved the way with his essays and his magazine The Crisis, but the Harlem Renaissance was mostly a literary and intellectual movement whose best known figures include Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer. Their work ranged from sonnets to modernist verse to jazz aesthetics and folklore, and their mission was race propaganda and pure art. Adding to their visibility were famous jazz musicians, producers of all-black revues, and bootleggers. Now available in paperback, this richly-illustrated book contains more than 70 black-and-white photographs and drawings. Steven Watson clearly traces the rise and flowering of this movement, evoking its main figures as well as setting the scene--describing Harlem from the Cotton Club to its literary salons, from its white patrons like Carl van Vechten to its most famous entertainers such as Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong among many others. He depicts the social life of working-class speakeasies, rent parties, gay and lesbian nightlife, as well as the celebrated parties at the twin limestone houses owned by hostess A'Lelia Walker. This is an important history of one of America's most influential cultural phenomenons.
"The Harlem Renaissance documents the lives and interactions of the first self-conscious African-American literary constellation and chronicles the brilliant outpouring of such writers as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Countee Cullen, as well as the work of artists Aaron Douglas and Richard Bruce Nugent. Steven Watson also brings to life the world that supported these figures: the forefathers of the New Negro movement, W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke: the flamboyant hostess of Harlem, A'Lelia Walker; such white Negrotarians as Carl Van Vechten and Muriel Draper, who headed Uptown to witness every thing from provocative nightclub revues to extravagant drag balls. The vogue for Harlem was also reflected in the golden age of jazz - one could hear Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong, or Duke Ellington in glittering nightspots." "Street maps, sociograms, and sidebars presenting little-known details, Harlem slang, poems, and song lyrics further evoke this short-lived era. Bringing together these fascinating lives and this legendary neighborhood."--BOOK JACKET.

In the 1920s, Harlem was the capital of Black America and home to an epochal African-American cultural flowering called the Harlem Renaissance. This book presents the work of the most important visual artists of the day, including Meta Warrick Fuller, Aaron Douglas and Palmer Hayden.

Aaron Douglas (1899-1979) is the leading visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance, the first African-American to explore modernism and to reflect African art in his paintings, murals, and illustrations. His work is a vivid record both of his achievement and of the distinctive imprint of the Harlem Renaissance upon American culture. This exploration of Douglas's life and career is filled with reproductions of his art. From previously unavailable source materials, including letters to his wife, Amy Kirschke traces the struggle of this fascinating artist to advance the Harlem Renaissance and to establish its particular imprint.

Hip Hop's Inheritance arguably offers the first book-length treatment of what hip hop culture has, literally, "inherited" from the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts movement, the Feminist Art movement, and 1980s and 1990s postmodern aesthetics. By comparing and contrasting the major motifs of the aforementioned cultural aesthetic traditions with those of hip hop culture, all the while critically exploring the origins and evolution of black popular culture from antebellum America through to "Obama's America," Hip Hop's Inheritance demonstrates that the hip hop generation is not the first generation of young black (and white) folk preoccupied with spirituality and sexuality, race and religion, entertainment and athletics, or ghetto culture and bourgeois culture. Taking interdisciplinarity and intersectionality seriously, Hip Hop's Inheritance employs the epistemologies and methodologies from a wide range of academic and organic intellectual/activist communities in its efforts to advance an intellectual history and critical theory of hip hop culture. Drawing from academic and organic intellectual/activist communities as diverse as African American studies and women's studies, postcolonial studies and sexuality studies, history and philosophy, politics and economics, and sociology and ethnomusicology, Hip Hop's Inheritance calls into question one-dimensional and monodisciplinary interpretations or, rather, misinterpretations, of a multidimensional and multivalent form of popular culture that has increasingly come to include cultural criticism, social commentary, and political analysis.

Born in 1893 into the only African American family in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, Emmanuel Taylor Gordon (1893-1971) became an internationally famous singer in the 1920s at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. With his musical partner, J. Rosamond Johnson, Gordon was a crucially important figure in popularizing African American spirituals as an art form, giving many listeners their first experience of black spirituals. Despite his fame, Taylor Gordon has been all but forgotten, until now. Michael K. Johnson illuminates Gordon's personal history and his cultural importance to the legacy of the Harlem Renaissance, arguing that during the height of his celebrity, Gordon was one of the most significant African American male vocalists of his era. Gordon's story--working in the White Sulphur Springs brothels as an errand boy, traveling the country in John Ringling's private railway car, performing on vaudeville stages from New York to Vancouver to Los Angeles, performing for royalty in England, becoming a celebrated author with a best-selling 1929 autobiography, and his long bout of mental illness--adds depth to the history of the Harlem Renaissance and makes him one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century. Through detailed documentation of Gordon's career--newspaper articles, reviews, letters, and other archival material--the author demonstrates the scope of Gordon's cultural impact. The result is a detailed account of Taylor's musical education, his career as a vaudeville performer, the remarkable performance history of Johnson and Gordon, his status as an in-demand celebrity singer and author, his time as a radio star, and, finally, his descent into madness. Can't Stand Still brings Taylor Gordon back to the center of the stage.

Human Zoos offers a fascinating, sobering and macabre tour of man's exploitation of man--that is, Western man's exploitation of non-Western men and women--as recorded throughout the early history of photography, from the 1860s to the 1930s and the invention of "humane exhibiting" of nonwhite persons. Freak shows, the circuses of Buffalo Bill and P.T. Barnum and European colonial exhibitions provided the occasions for most of these images, several of which were incorporated into posters, postcards and other ephemera, designed with an improbable jauntiness. Human Zoos traces the evolution of such paradigmatic conceptions as "specimen," "savage" and "native" for the designation of peoples as various as Native Americans, Asians and Africans from all corners of the continent. As horrific and compelling as it is brilliantly researched and compiled, this volume unflinchingly surveys the very recent history of the West's arrogant abuse of those deemed to fall outside its brutal terms of civilization.

In this story about one of the 19th century's most famous Americans, Benjamin Reiss uses P.T. Barnum's Joice Heth hoax to examine the contours of race relations in the antebellum North. Barnum's first exhibit as a showman, Heth was an elderly enslaved woman who was said to be the 161-year-old former nurse of the infant George Washington. Seizing upon the novelty, the newly emerging commercial press turned her act - and especially her death - into one of the first media spectacles in American history.

Hank Willis Thomas: All Things Being Equal presents a survey of the artist's prolific and extraordinary interdisciplinary career, with a particular focus on the work's relationship to the photographic image and to issues of representation and perception. At the core of Hank Willis Thomas's practice, is his ability to parse and critically dissect the flow of images that comprises American culture, and to do so with particular attention to race, gender, and cultural identity. Other powerful themes include the commodification of identity through popular media, sports, and advertising. In the ten years since his first publication, Pitch Blackness , Thomas has established himself as a significant voice in contemporary art, equally at home with collaborative, trans-media projects such as Question Bridge, Philly Block, and For Freedoms as he is with high-profile, international solo exhibitions. This extensive presentation of his work contextualizes the material with incisive essays from Portland Art Museum curators Julia Dolan and Sara Krajewski and art historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, and an in-depth interview between Dr. Kellie Jones and the artist that elaborates on Thomas's influences and inspirations.

In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector's items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones. From the Demonic Threat to the Incarnation of Sainthood, written largely by noted French scholar Jean Devisse, has established itself as a classic in the field of medieval art. It surveys as never before the presence of black people, mainly mythical, in art from the early Christian era to the fourteenth century. The extraordinary transformation of Saint Maurice into a black African saint, the subject of many noble and deeply touching images, is a highlight of this volume. The new introduction by Paul Kaplan provides a fresh perspective on the image of the black in medieval European art and contextualizes the classic essays on the subject.