Krannert Art Museum Reading Room
(via Siobhan McKissic)
Untitled
2023, Digital Collage
Touch Screen
2021. Digital collage.
Courtesy of the artist © Jen Everett
Featured Readings from Ricker Library
The following is a selection of materials featured in the exhibition from the Ricker Library of Architecture and Art.
Blackspace by
Black artists of the avant-garde have always defined the future. Blackspace: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture is the culmination of six years of multidisciplinary research by trans poet and curator Anaïs Duplan about the aesthetic strategies used by experimental artists of color since the 1960s to pursue liberatory possibility. Through a series of lyric essays, interviews with contemporary artists and writers of color, and ekphrastic poetry, Duplan deconstructs how creative people frame their relationships to the word, "liberation." With a focus on creatives who use digital media and language-as-technology--luminaries like Actress, Juliana Huxtable, Lawrence Andrews, Tony Cokes, Sondra Perry, and Nathaniel Mackey--Duplan offers three lenses for thinking about liberation: the personal, the social, and the existential. Arguing that true freedom is impossible without considering all three, the book culminates with a personal essay meditating on the author's own journey of gender transition while writing the book. Anaïs Duplan is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. He is the founding curator for the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based in Iowa City. He has worked as an adjunct poetry professor at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and St. Joseph's College. He was a 2017-2019 joint Public Programs Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Call Number: 704.0396073 D926blISBN: 9781939568328Publication Date: 2020-10-06
Glitch Feminism by
A New York Times Best Art Book of 2020 A new manifesto for cyberfeminism: finding liberation in the glitch between body, gender, and technology The divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists. We are connected all the time. How do we find out who we are in this digital era? Where do we create the space to explore our identity? How can we come together in solidarity? A glitch is normally thought of as an error, a faulty overlaying, but, as Legacy Russell shows, liberation can be found within the fissures between gender, technology, and the body. The glitch offers an opportunity for us to perform and transform ourselves in an infinite variety of identities. In Glitch Feminism, Russell makes a series of radical demands through memoir, art, and critical theory, as well as the work of contemporary artists--including Juliana Huxtable, Sondra Perry, boychild, Victoria Sin, and Kia LaBeija--who have travelled through the glitch in their work. Timely and provocative, Glitch Feminism shows how error can lead to revolution.
Call Number: 704.042 R911glISBN: 9781786632661Publication Date: 2020-09-29
A Black Gaze by
Examining the work of contemporary Black artists who are dismantling the white gaze and demanding that we see--and see Blackness in particular--anew. In A Black Gaze, Tina Campt examines Black contemporary artists who are shifting the very nature of our interactions with the visual through their creation and curation of a distinctively Black gaze. Their work--from Deana Lawson's disarmingly intimate portraits to Arthur Jafa's videos of the everyday beauty and grit of the Black experience, from Kahlil Joseph's films and Dawoud Bey's photographs to the embodied and multimedia artistic practice of Okwui Okpokwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson--requires viewers to do more than simply look; it solicits visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity. Campt shows that this new way of seeing shifts viewers from the passive optics of looking at to the active struggle of looking with, through, and alongside the suffering--and joy--of Black life in the present. The artists whose work Campt explores challenge the fundamental disparity that defines the dominant viewing practice- the notion that Blackness is the elsewhere (or nowhere) of whiteness. These artists create images that flow, that resuscitate and revalue the historical and contemporary archive of Black life in radical ways. Writing with rigor and passion, Campt describes the creativity, ingenuity, cunning, and courage that is the modus operandi of a Black gaze.
Call Number: 704.0396073 C158blISBN: 9780262546058Publication Date: 2023-03-21
Imagining Everyday Life by
Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography surveys the expansive field of vernacular photography, the vast archive of utilitarian images created for bureaucratic structures, commercial usage and personal commemoration, as opposed to elite aesthetic purposes. As a crucial extension of its ongoing investigation of vernacular photography, The Walther Collection has collaborated with key scholars and critical thinkers in the history of photography, women's studies, queer theory, Africana studies and curatorial practice to interrogate vernacular's theoretical limits, as well as to conduct case studies of a striking array of objects and images, many from the collection's holdings. From identification portraits of California migrant workers, physique photographs that circulated underground in queer communities, to one-of-a-kind commemorative military albums from Louisiana to Vietnam, these richly illustrated essays treat a breadth of material formats, social uses and shared communities, offering new ways to consider photography in relation to our political affiliations, personal agency and daily rituals. By reconsidering the multiple contexts and meanings of often-overlooked photographic practices, Imagining Everyday Life is a groundbreaking contribution- articulating the vital debates and complexities within an energizing new field. It is critical in thinking about vernacular photography and the history of photography to recuperate or salvage objects whose backstories have often been lost or curtailed. These vernacular photographs are documents of social histories that would not otherwise be explored; they are key historical artifacts of suppressed or oppressed lives, and studying them is a way to reanimate their histories. Brian Wallis Co-published with The Walther Collection, New York
Call Number: 779.0973 Im17ISBN: 9783958296275Publication Date: 2020-07-14
What Matters Most: Photographs of Black Life by
This powerful collection highlights the importance of snapshots in Black American life: as tools to challenge stereotypes, and as a way to document family and culture Thoughtfully illustrated, this volume highlights a selection of photographs of African American family life between the 1970s and the early 2000s--pictures that were lost by their original owners and then found by the artist Zun Lee on a street in Detroit in 2012, marking the beginning of the Fade Resistance collection of more than 4,000 Polaroids. Lee describes the collection as an important record of Black visual self-representation and a means to "reflect the way Black people saw themselves on their terms--without the intention of being seen, or judged, by others." To Lee, these powerful photographs are an expression of "Black life mattering." These vivid images chronicle milestones such as weddings, birthdays and graduations, as well as quiet daily moments, offering contemporary views long ignored or erased by mainstream culture. Together, these works highlight the role snapshots have played in Black life, as tools to challenge stereotypical portrayals and as a means to memorialize family, culture and heritage. Topics such as self-representation, visual history and the social power of photographs are addressed in critical texts by Sophie Hackett, Stefano Harney, Zun Lee and Fred Moten, and an original contribution by celebrated poet Dawn Lundy Martin.
Call Number: 305.8960973 W556ISBN: 9781942884941Publication Date: 2023-01-10
Listening to Images by
In Listening to Images Tina M. Campt explores a way of listening closely to photography, engaging with lost archives of historically dismissed photographs of black subjects taken throughout the black diaspora. Engaging with photographs through sound, Campt looks beyond what one usually sees and attunes her senses to the other affective frequencies through which these photographs register. She hears in these photos--which range from late nineteenth-century ethnographic photographs of rural African women and photographs taken in an early twentieth-century Cape Town prison to postwar passport photographs in Birmingham, England and 1960s mug shots of the Freedom Riders--a quiet intensity and quotidian practices of refusal. Originally intended to dehumanize, police, and restrict their subjects, these photographs convey the softly buzzing tension of colonialism, the low hum of resistance and subversion, and the anticipation and performance of a future that has yet to happen. Engaging with discourses of fugitivity, black futurity, and black feminist theory, Campt takes these tools of colonialism and repurposes them, hearing and sharing their moments of refusal, rupture, and imagination.
Call Number: 778.92 C158lISBN: 9780822362555Publication Date: 2017-04-07
On Value by
On Value is a collaboration between Triple Canopy and choreographer/artist Ralph Lemon. The book is a multifarious conversation about the value of artworks and the labor and bodies that make them, especially as defined by institutions with whom artists have often had fraught relationships. In essays, poems, interviews and artworks, 19 contributors consider artworks that resist institutional parameters; how and why performers, choreographers and dancers might go about making art institutions into proper venues for their works; and how race figures into assessments of value. On Value emerges from Value Talks, a series of private conversations organized by Lemon in 2013 and 2014 at MoMA.
Call Number: 701.17 On11ISBN: 9780984734665Publication Date: 2016-01-26
Black Aesthetic Season III: Black Interiors by
Literary Nonfiction. California Interest. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Art. Film. Music. BLACK AESTHETIC SEASON III: BLACK INTERIORS is a book exploring the collective depths and singular nuances of Black experience through cinema and visual representation. Edited by nan collymore and The Black Aesthetic Curatorial Collective (Jamal Batts, Ra Malika Imhotep, and Leila Weefur), the book comes on the heels of the third and fourth seasons of film screenings curated by the Bay Area-based Black Aesthetic Collective (TBA), whose mission is to curate a collective understanding of Black visual culture. The final publication in the series, BLACK AESTHETIC SEASON III: BLACK INTERIORS includes personal essay, film criticism, poetry, conceptual and theoretical artwriting, photography and more. It is a book of remembrance and (re)configuration: "Black Lives. Black Aesthetics. Black Troubles. Black Stillness. Black Joy. Black Study. Black Silence. Black Movement. Black Matter. Black Sounds. Black Woes. Black Noise. Black-ography. Welcome to Black Interiors." Contributors include Jamal Batts, Leila Weefur, Ra Malika Imhotep, nan collymore, Arisa White, Michael Boyce Gillespie, Leigh Raiford, Michele May Curry & Ricky Weaver, Renee Royale, See Black Women, Sasha Kelley and Andrew Wilson.
Call Number: 791.43652996073 B5612020ISBN: 9781733276139Publication Date: 2020-04-02
Featured Readings
The following selected readings are featured in the exhibition from outside the Ricker Library of Architecture and Art.
Black Gathering by
In Black Gathering Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological imagination that unsettles Western philosophical ideas of the earth as given to humans. In their aestheticization and conceptualization of gathering, these artists investigate the relationships among art, the environment, home, and forms of Black togetherness. Cervenak argues that by offering a formal and conceptual praxis of gathering, Black artists imagine liberation and alternative ways of being in the world that exist beyond those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and earth as given to enclosure and ownership.
Call Number: PS153.N5 C39 2021ISBN: 9781478013556Publication Date: 2021-09-24
Viewfinders by
An historical survey of the work of Black women photographers presents a selection of photographs from the past one hundred years, and comments on the career of each photographer.
Call Number: Q. 770.92 M867VISBN: 0863161588Publication Date: 1993-10-01
African American Vernacular Photography by
These selections from the Daniel Cowin Collection make up an extraordinary group of images of African Americans in a variety of genres and poses, including formal studio portraits, casual snapshots, images of children, images of uniformed soldiers, wedding portraits and so-called "Southern-views" made for tourist consumption, all dating from 1860 to 1960. While some of the sitters are celebrities of their day, the majority are unnamed Americans posing for their portrait. They attest to photography's ability to both record personal history for private uses and to become a document--to document history in a wider context. The Daniel Cowin Collection, given to ICP in 1990 by its namesake, is made up of about 1600 photographs spanning from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, and spanning that era's range of commercial processes and formats--from postcards to stereographs, cartes-de-visite, tintypes, albumen prints and gelatin silver prints. Together they provide an important window into African American life during the period. African American Vernacular Photography reproduces 70 of Cowin's most exceptional color plates with essays by Brian Wallis, Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator at the International Center of Photography, and Deborah Willis, MacArthur Fellow and author of Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present and, with Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History.
Call Number: Q. 779.996073 Af833ISBN: 9783865212252Publication Date: 2006-03-01
Afro-Fabulations by
Winner, 2019 Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History, given by the American Society for Theatre Research Honorable Mention, 2021 Errol Hill Award, given by the American Society for Theatre Research Argues for a conception of black cultural life that exceeds post-blackness and conditions of loss In Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, cultural critic and historian Tavia Nyong'o surveys the conditions of contemporary black artistic production in the era of post-blackness. Moving fluidly between the insurgent art of the 1960's and the intersectional activism of the present day, Afro-Fabulations challenges genealogies of blackness that ignore its creative capacity to exceed conditions of traumatic loss, social death, and archival erasure. If black survival in an anti-black world often feels like a race against time, Afro-Fabulations looks to the modes of memory and imagination through which a queer and black polytemporality is invented and sustained. Moving past the antirelational debates in queer theory, Nyong'o posits queerness as "angular sociality," drawing upon queer of color critique in order to name the gate and rhythm of black social life as it moves in and out of step with itself. He takes up a broad range of sites of analysis, from speculative fiction to performance art, from artificial intelligence to Blaxploitation cinema. Reading the archive of violence and trauma against the grain, Afro-Fabulations summons the poetic powers of queer world-making that have always been immanent to the fight and play of black life.
Call Number: PS338.N4 O25 2019ISBN: 9781479856275Publication Date: 2018-11-27
A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging by Call Number: 813 B73323YbISBN: 0385258658Publication Date: 2001
Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being by
In Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, Kevin Quashie imagines a Black world in which one encounters Black being as it is rather than only as it exists in the shadow of anti-Black violence. As such, he makes a case for Black aliveness even in the face of the persistence of death in Black life and Black study. Centrally, Quashie theorizes aliveness through the aesthetics of poetry, reading poetic inhabitance in Black feminist literary texts by Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley, among others, showing how their philosophical and creative thinking constitutes worldmaking. This worldmaking conceptualizes Blackness as capacious, relational beyond the normative terms of recognition--Blackness as a condition of oneness. Reading for poetic aliveness, then, becomes a means of exploring Black being rather than nonbeing and animates the ethical question "how to be." In this way, Quashie offers a Black feminist philosophy of being, which is nothing less than a philosophy of the becoming of the Black world.
Call Number: BH301.B53 Q37 2021ISBN: 9781478011873Publication Date: 2021-02-26
The Black Unicorn by
Rich continues: "Refusing to be circumscribed by any simple identity, Audre Lorde writes as a Black woman, a mother, a daughter, a Lesbian, a feminist, a visionary; poems of elemental wildness and healing, nightmare and lucidity. Her rhythms and accents have the timelessness of a poetry which extends beyond white Western politics, beyond the anger and wisdom of Black America, beyond the North American earth, to Abomey and the Dahomeyan Amazons. These are poems nourished in an oral tradition, which also blaze and pulse on the page, beneath the reader's eye."
Call Number: 811 L8842BISBN: 9780393312379Publication Date: 1995-08-17
Information Activism by
For decades, lesbian feminists across the United States and Canada have created information to build movements and survive in a world that doesn't want them. In Information Activism Cait McKinney traces how these women developed communication networks, databases, and digital archives that formed the foundation for their work. Often learning on the fly and using everything from index cards to computers, these activists brought people and their visions of justice together to organize, store, and provide access to information. Focusing on the transition from paper to digital-based archival techniques from the 1970s to the present, McKinney shows how media technologies animate the collective and unspectacular labor that sustains social movements, including their antiracist and trans-inclusive endeavors. By bringing sexuality studies to bear on media history, McKinney demonstrates how groups with precarious access to control over information create their own innovative and resourceful techniques for generating and sharing knowledge.
Call Number: HQ75.5 .M44 2020ISBN: 9781478008286Publication Date: 2020-08-07
Nomenclature by
Spanning almost four decades, Dionne Brand's poetry has given rise to whole new grammars and vocabularies. With a profound alertness that is attuned to this world and open to some other, possibly future, time and place, Brand's ongoing labors of witness and imagination speak directly to where and how we live and reach beyond those worlds, their enclosures, and their violences. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems begins with a new long poem, the titular Nomenclature for the Time Being, in which Dionne Brand's diaspora consciousness dismantles our quotidian disasters. In addition to this searing new work, Nomenclature collects eight volumes of Brand's poetry published between 1982 and 2010 and includes a critical introduction by the literary scholar and theorist Christina Sharpe. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems features the searching and centering cantos of Primitive Offensive; the sharp musical conversations of Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia; and the documentary losses of revolutions in Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, in which "The street was empty/with all of us standing there." No Language Is Neutral reads language, coloniality, and sexuality as a nexus. Land to Light On writes intimacies and disaffections with nation, while in thirsty a cold-eyed flâneur surveys the workings of the city. In Inventory, written during the Gulf Wars, the poet is "the wars' last and late night witness," her job is not to soothe but to "revise and revise this bristling list/hourly." Ossuaries' futurist speaker rounds out the collection and threads multiple temporal worlds--past, present, and future. This masterwork displays Dionne Brand's ongoing body of thought--trenchant, lyrical, absonant, discordant, and meaning-making. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems is classic and living, a record of one of the great writers of our age.
Call Number: PR9199.3.B683 N664 2022ISBN: 9781478016625Publication Date: 2022-10-18
The Fae Richards Photo Archive by
This book is part of Zoe Leonard and Cheryl Dunye's film project "The Watermelon Woman" (1996) for the Whitney Biennial. The staged photos used as documentation for the film are presented here as an intimate photo album.
Call Number: TR647 .L464 1996ISBN: 9780963109583Publication Date: 1997-06-02
With Other Eyes by
With Other Eyes demonstrates how feminist, postcolonial, and antiracist concerns can successfully be incorporated into the study of art. Featured collection: The Fae Richards Photo Archive by Zoe Leonard & Cheryl Dunye
Call Number: 704 W772ISBN: 0816632227Publication Date: 1999-09-15
Maroon Choreography by
In Maroon Choreography fahima ife speculates on the long (im)material, ecological, and aesthetic afterlives of black fugitivity. In three long-form poems and a lyrical essay, they examine black fugitivity as an ongoing phenomenon we know little about beyond what history tells us. As both poet and scholar, ife unsettles the history and idea of black fugitivity, troubling senses of historic knowing while moving inside the continuing afterlives of those people who disappeared themselves into rural spaces beyond the reach of slavery. At the same time, they interrogate how writing itself can be a fugitive practice and a means to find a way out of ongoing containment, indebtedness, surveillance, and ecological ruin. Offering a philosophical performance in black study, ife prompts us to consider how we--in our study, in our mutual refusal, in our belatedness, in our habitual assemblage--linger beside the unknown. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient
Call Number: PS3609.F35 M37 2021ISBN: 9781478013341Publication Date: 2021-08-27
To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness by
A genre-bending exploration of poetry, photography, and human migration--another revelatory visual expedition from the National Book Award-winning poet who changed the way we see art, the museum, and the Black female figure. * Winner of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry "Lewis pushes the limits of language and image, composing lines alongside a cache of hundreds of photographs found under her late grandmother's bed only days before the house was slated to be razed." --Kevin Young, The New Yorker Twenty-five years ago, after her maternal grandmother's death, Robin Coste Lewis discovered a stunning collection of photographs in an old suitcase under her bed, filled with everything from sepia tintypes to Technicolor Polaroids. Lewis's family had survived one of the largest migrations in human history, when six million Americans fled the South, attempting to escape from white supremacy and white terrorism. But these photographs of daily twentieth-century Black life revealed a concealed, interior history. The poetry Lewis joins to these vivid images stands forth as an inspiring alternative to the usual ways we frame the old stories of "race" and "migration," placing them within a much vaster span of time and history. In what she calls "a film for the hands" and "an origin myth for the future," Lewis reverses our expectations of both poetry and photography: "Black pages, black space, black time--the Big Black Bang." From glamorous outings to graduations, birth announcements, baseball leagues, and back-porch delight, Lewis creates a lyrical documentary about Black intimacy. Instead of colonial nostalgia, she offers us "an exalted Black privacy." What emerges is a dynamic reframing of what it means to be human and alive, with Blackness at its center. "I am trying / to make the gods / happy," she writes amid these portraits of her ancestors. "I am trying to make the dead / clap and shout."
Call Number: PS3612.E98 T69 2022ISBN: 9781524732585Publication Date: 2022-12-06
Darrel Ellis by
The first monograph on Darrel Ellis' expressive transformations of photographic memory.Known for his experimental approach to painting and photography, New York-based mixed-media artist Darrel Ellis (1958-92) explored the psychic terrain between surface, memory and lyric self-representation. Working in part from his late father's photographs, Ellis projected, deconstructed and reimaged his family history, creating uncanny portraits marked by voids and warps. His commitment to the self-portrait was no less inspired, particularly after his experiences of being photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe and Peter Hujar. Ellis was on the cusp of major recognition when his life was cut short by AIDS in 1992, at the age of 33.This monograph provides the most comprehensive account of the artist to date, including 80 plates that chart his development from figurative painting to photographic experimentation and his later preoccupation with self-portraiture. A richly illustrated chronology, featuring never before seen excerpts from the artist's journals, and an examination of Ellis's unique photographic process provide new insights into Ellis's life and artwork.
Call Number: Q. N6537.E439 D37 2021ISBN: 9781732641556Publication Date: 2021-10-26
The Black Interior by
With a poet's precision and an intellectually adventurous spirit, Elizabeth Alexander explores a wide spectrum of contemporary African American artistic life through literature, paintings, popular media, and films, and discusses its place in current culture. InThe Black Interior, she examines the vital roles of such heavyweight literary figures as Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Rita Dove, as well as lesser known, yet vibrant, new creative voices. She offers a reconsideration of "afro-outré" painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, the concept of "race-pride" in Jet magazine, and her take on Denzel Washington's career as a complex black male icon in a post-affirmative action era. Also available is Alexander's much heralded essay on Rodney King, Emmett Till, and the collective memory of racial violence. Alexander, who has been a professor at the University of Chicago and Smith College, and recently at Yale University, has taught and lectured on African American art and culture across the country and abroad for nearly two decades. InThe Black Interior, she directs her scrupulous poet's eye to the urgent cultural issues of the day. This lively collection is a crucial volume for understanding current thinking on race, art, and culture in America.
Call Number: 305.896073 Al266bISBN: 1555973930Publication Date: 2004-01-01
The Complete Works of Pat Parker by
Poetry. Drama. California Interest. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. "Parker stayed woke to black suffering, violence against black bodies—especially those of black women—to the suffering engendered by multiple, egregious oppressions. With THE COMPLETE WORKS OF PAT PARKER, we are allowed an opportunity to historicize Pat Parker's significance to black women's literary traditions, lesbian erotics, to black queer struggles and black feminism, and to global social justice movements. She was in her time. Now, with this important text, she will be in all time to come." —Alexis De Veaux "As the Black Lives Matter movement calls attention to the grave risks Black people have always faced and as poets and artists wrestle with the question of how to marry the political and the personal in their work, we have never needed Pat Parker's work more. It is absolutely immediate, searing, salving, saving, and necessary." —Kazim Ali "The poetry of Pat Parker reaches out to us anew and shakes our consciousness—fiercely." —Cheryl Clarke
Call Number: PS3566.A6847 A14 2016ISBN: 9781938334221Publication Date: 2016-10-15
Some of Us Did Not Die by
Poet and activist June Jordan wrote her way to the forefront of political analysis, witness and moral summoning for more than half a century. These important new essays, along with work drawn from every phase of her prolific career, document her ongoing leadership and commitment in every conflicted sphere of our second millennium lives: the varieties of supremacist values and policies; the theft of democracy inside the United States; racial and gender inequality, and the arrogance that upholds all forms of justice. In Some of Us Did Not Die, June Jordan calls us to a faithful position of outspoken resistance and hope.
Call Number: 305.800973 J761sISBN: 9780465036929Publication Date: 2002-07-31
Assembling a Black Counter Culture by
In this critical history, DeForrest Brown, Jr "makes techno Black again" by tracing the music's origins in Detroit and beyond In Assembling a Black Counter Culture, writer and musician DeForrest Brown, Jr, provides a history and critical analysis of techno and adjacent electronic music such as house and electro, showing how the genre has been shaped over time by a Black American musical sensibility. Brown revisits Detroit's 1980s techno scene to highlight pioneering groups like the Belleville Three before jumping into the origins of today's international club floor to draw important connections between industrialized labor systems and cultural production. Among the other musicians discussed are Underground Resistance (Mad Mike Banks, Cornelius Harris), Drexciya, Juan Atkins (Cybotron, Model 500), Derrick May, Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, Detroit Escalator Co. (Neil Ollivierra), DJ Stingray/Urban Tribe, Eddie Fowlkies, Terrence Dixon (Population One) and Carl Craig. With references to Theodore Roszak's Making of a Counter Culture, writings by African American autoworker and political activist James Boggs, and the "techno rebels" of Alvin Toffler's Third Wave, Brown approaches techno's unique history from a Black theoretical perspective in an effort to evade and subvert the racist and classist status quo in the mainstream musical-historical record. The result is a compelling case to "make techno Black again." DeForrest Brown, Jr is a New York-based theorist, journalist and curator. He produces digital audio and extended media as Speaker Music and is a representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign.
Call Number: ML3479 .B78 2022ISBN: 9781734489736Publication Date: 2022-08-23
Continued Readings
The following is a selection of further readings from Ricker Library that are related to the exhibition, but not featured.
Fragile Legacies by
Fragile Legacies showcases the fascinating photographs of Chief Solomon Osagie Alonge (1911-1994), Nigeria's premier twentieth-century photographer and the first official photographer to the Royal Court of the Kingdom of Benin. Alonge's historic photographs document the rituals, pageantry, and regalia of the Benin Court for over a half-century, and provide rare insight into the history of Nigeria from an insider's perspective. With important contributions by leading Nigerian writers, this volume examines the transformations of colonialism in Africa, and more specifically Nigeria, within the context of global capitalism in the early to mid-twentieth century.
Call Number: Q. 779.09669 St272fISBN: 9781907804991Publication Date: 2017-07-11
As We See It by
Across photography, sculpture and painting, a new wave of Black artists is challenging persistent tropes in art and wider society to depict a richer portrait of the lives of Black people from all corners of the globe. As We See It brings together 30 image-makers creating visually refreshing narratives on Black cultural identities, and exploring what Blackness brings to the making and viewing of art. How photographers are investigating and representing notions of Black identity in diverse new ways; Includes photographers who are both exploring the history of Black visual identity while also resetting its future; Full of visually refreshing and challenging narratives - including depictions of Black joy and love, as well as queer and non-binary identities, and images that underline photography's role in challenging stereotypical visual identities; Images come from across the world and straddle the worlds of portraiture, documentary, fashion and fine art; Artists included: Prince Gyasi, Nadine Ijewere, Campbell Addy, Chris Facey, Emeka Okereke, Lina Iris Viktor, Braylen Dion, Girma Berta, Kenny Germé, Naima Green, Mikael Owunna, David Nana Opoku Ansah, Lebohang Kganye, Dario Calmese, Melissa Alcena, Davey Adesida, Takeisha Jefferson, Atong Atem, Donavon Smallwood, Henry J. Kamara, Zithelo Bobby Mthombeni, Ronan Mckenzie, Rahima Gambo, Allison Janae Hamilton, Sedrick Chisom, Lunga Ntila, Jodi Minnis, Délio Jasse, Joana Choumali and Emma Prempeh
Call Number: 700.8996 Am66asISBN: 1786279584Publication Date: 2023-02-07
Picturing Black New Orleans by
This book illuminatesthe fascinating story and visual legacy of Florestine Perrault Collins, whodocumented African American life in New Orleans between 1920 and 1949.
Call Number: 779.20976335 An866pISBN: 9780813041872Publication Date: 2012-09-02
An Alternative History of Photography by
As inclusive, dynamic and exciting as the medium itself, this utterly original look at the history of photography integrates the landmark discoveries of recent decades to chart new pathways that encompass overlooked artists, traditions, and techniques. The real history of photography is a vast collection of inter-connected stories stretching from East Asia to West Africa, from New Zealand to Uzbekistan. It parallels acknowledged greats with forgotten masters, and lesser-known works with regional champions. It is a complex interplay of fine art, scientific, anthropological, documentary, and amateur traditions forged by women and men alike. Drawn from the extraordinary Solander Collection, this pioneering, alternative history of photography is based on principles of diversity and democracy, allowing famous works to be seen with fresh eyes, and giving more obscure works the platform they deserve. Images by Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Man Ray, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston are seen alongside those of Helen Stuart and John Lindt, early, self- trained practitioners Lady Augusta Mostyn and Major Francis Greeley, and African studio photographers Sanlé Sory, Michel Kameni, and Malick Sidibé. It contains many rarities and "firsts" and spans photography's early decades with linchpin works by Sir John Herschel, William Henry Fox Talbot, Hippolyte Bayard, and Julia Margaret Cameron. Contemporary in outlook, visually captivating, and with contributions from leading curators and photo historians, this book will prove essential reading for those looking for an introduction to the field, as well as informed readers looking for more complete knowledge.
Call Number: 770.9 P942alISBN: 9783791387826Publication Date: 2022-11-08
Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful by
"From Beyoncé to Barack Obama, it's hard to think of a black figure who does not owe their prominence, in some measure, to the ethos of 'Black is Beautiful'" --Ekow Eshun, Financial Times In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Kwame Brathwaite used his photography to popularize the political slogan "Black Is Beautiful." This monograph--the first ever dedicated to Brathwaite's remarkable career--tells the story of a key, but under-recognized, figure of the second Harlem Renaissance. Inspired by the writings of activist and black nationalist Marcus Garvey, Brathwaite, along with his older brother, Elombe Brath, founded the African Jazz Arts Society and Studios (AJASS) and the Grandassa Models (1962). AJASS was a collective of artists, playwrights, designers, and dancers; Grandassa Models was a modeling troupe for black women, founded to challenge white beauty standards. From stunning studio portraits of the Grandassa Models to behind-the-scenes images of Harlem's artistic community, including Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and Miles Davis, this book offers a long-overdue exploration of Brathwaite's life and work
Call Number: 779.0973 B737kISBN: 9781597114431Publication Date: 2019-05-01
