In our special 2021 edition celebrating the seventeenth month, researcher Leigh Raiford spoken with Hyperallergic Editor Hrag Vartanian talks about the multifaceted potential of photography, especially that of black artists. “It never fulfills just one function,” she explained. “It’s a document, it’s a performance, it’s surveillance, it’s violence; it is speculation and fabrication, it is aspiration, it is comfort. We’ve collected six photography and art books that offer entry points into the history of this growing network of black American art, with an emphasis on the changing role of the camera as a medium of self-determination, opacity and expression. Discover these titles through the Black-Owned Bookstores near you, including Adanne in Brooklyn, Marcus Books in Oakland, and Black Pearl Books in Austin. Happy reading and happy June!
The New Black West: Photographs of the Only Black Rodeo on Tour in the United States by Gabriela Hasbun
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeothe only touring black rodeo in the country. Photographer Gabriela Hasbun The New Black West is an ode to the organization and community it has cultivated over the years, crossing generations and geographies to celebrate black cowboy culture and with a foreword from the Bay Area rodeo coordinator, Jeff Douvel. Tender snapshots of parents kissing their children, a cowgirl and her horse, and a rodeo announcer waving the African-American flag by artist David Hammons are among a multitude of photographs that give a insight into the spirit of black western rodeo, long appropriated by traditional white narratives. of the American South.
Read the report | Buy in bookstore | Chronicle books, 2022
Art on my mind: visual politics by bell hooks
The legacy of the late critic and scholar bell hooks occupies an important place in all creative disciplines, and the visual arts are no exception. Although celebrated for her Love song to the nation trilogy (1999-2001) and theorization of white-supremacist-capitalist patriarchy, Hooks’s 1995 Art in my mind merges his academic interests with a focus on black American artists. She brings the practice of artists such as Alison Saar, Emma Amos, and Margo Humphrey into conversation with her political and aesthetic interests, often revealing as much about herself as about the artists themselves. His introduction sets out the explicitly political issues of his collection of essays and invites us into his conception of “the radical place that art occupies in the struggle for freedom and the way in which the experience of art can improve our understanding of what it means to live as a free man.” subjects in an unfree world.
Buy in bookstore | The new press, 1995
The Black Panther Party: a graphic novel story by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson and Comrade Sisters: The Women of the Black Panther Party by Ericka Huggins and Stephen Shames
The Black Panther Party’s multifaceted approach to community organizing embodied the phrase in the truest sense of the word, spanning protest, childhood, education, and free food programs. Comic book artists David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson chronologize the Party’s history in a brilliantly illustrated graphic novel, beginning with its precursors in the civil rights movement and continuing through its decline in the late 1980s .
Meanwhile, Party leader Ericka Huggins tells the story of women in the organization in Comrades sisterswhich combines his reflections with the introspective photos of Stephen Shames. Read together, these two books complement each other by demystifying the radical politics and imagination of this often mythologized activist group.
Buy Black Panther Festival And Comrades sisters in bookstore | Ten Speed Press, 2021 and ACC Art Books, 2022
Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery by Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer
In a 2018 interview with Hyperallergiccurator and photographer Deborah Willis discussed the creation of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University, a corollary of her earlier work and her collaboration with historian Barbara Krauthamer on the publication Consider emancipation. This in-depth study brings together more than 150 images from the years before the abolition of slavery in the 1930s, opening the cracks of the archives to shine a light on Black Americans, documenting their freedom, community and self-esteem through photographic lens.
Buy in bookstore | Temple University Press, 2012
Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographersedited by Brian Piper
Rooted in a 2022-2023 exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art, Called on camera builds on previous work – including that of Willis and Krauthamer – to flesh out the world of black American studio photography to the present day. Portraits of familiar names like James Van Der Zee sit alongside those of little-known artists, including New Orleans portrait photographer Florestine Perrault Collins. Essays contextualizing the richness of the images accompany precisely reproduced photos, which guide us on a journey through the religious gatherings and sporting games of everyday life, as well as key figures in black American history , including Eartha Kitt (teaching a dance class), Booker T. Washington. (posed on his favorite horse, Dexter) and Frederick Douglass (seated next to his grandson).
Buy in bookstore | New Orleans Museum of Art, 2023
