The Sacrifice of Darkness by
"When I was a young girl, my husband's father flew an air machine into the sun. Since then, the days have been dark, the nights bright." Roxane Gay, Tracy Lynne Oliver ,and Rebecca Kirby adapt Gay's New York Times bestselling short story "We Are the Sacrifice of Darkness" as a full-length graphic novel, expanding an unforgettable world where a tragic event forever bathes the world in darkness. Follow one woman's powerful journey through this new landscape as she discovers love, family, and the true light in a world seemingly robbed of any. As she challenges notions of identity, guilt, and survival she'll find that no matter the darkness, there remains sources of hope that can pierce the veil.
Juneteenth: the story behind the celebration by
Juneteenth has been touted as a national day celebrating the end of slavery. Observances from coast to coast have turned this event into part of the national conversation about race, slavery, and how Americans understand, acknowledge, and explain what has been called the national "original sin." But, why Juneteenth? Where did this celebration--which promises to become a national holiday--come from? What is the origin story? What are the facts, and legends, around this important day in the nation's history? This is the first scholarly book to delve into the history behind Juneteenth. Using decades of research in archives around the nation, this book helps separate myth from reality and tells the story behind the celebration in a way that provides new understanding and appreciation for the event. This book will captivate people interested in the history of emancipation and African American history but also those interested in Civil War and Texas history. As the United States continues to wrestle with race relations and the meaning of full equality, Juneteenth promises to become an important expression of that equality--an Independence Day celebration in its own right, a couple of weeks in advance of the traditional July 4th Holiday. This book will be a welcome addition to classrooms, book clubs and general readers interested in this once obscure regional event now destined for the national spotlight.
Black Queer Freedom by
Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomical injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists' work throughout the black diaspora. GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces--specifically prisons and hospitals--and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.
The Freedom Principle: experiments in art and music, 1965 to now by
On the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s, African American artists and musicians grappled with new language and forms inspired by the black nationalist turn in the Civil Rights movement. The Freedom Principle, which accompanies an exhibition on the topic at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, traces their history and shows how it continues to inform contemporary artists around the world. The book coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a still-flourishing organization of Chicago musicians who challenge jazz's boundaries. Combining archival materials such as brochures, photographs, sheet music, and record covers with contemporary art work that respond to the 1960s Black Arts Movement, The Freedom Principle explores this tradition of cultural expression from, as one AACM group used to put it, the "ancient to the future." Essays by curators Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete, AACM member and historian George Lewis, art historian Rebecca Zorach, and gallerist John Corbett accompany beautiful reproductions of work by artists such as Muhal Richard Abrams, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Cauleen Smith, Rashid Johnson, Nick Cave, and many more. A roundtable conversation features Beckwith, Roelstraete, curator Hamza Walker, current AACM member and cellist Tomeka Reid, and scholar and curator Romi Crawford, with additional comments from poet and scholar Fred Moten. A chronology and curated playlist of AACM-related recordings are also included. The resulting book offers a rich sense of a global movement, with crucial roots in Chicago, driven by a commitment to experimentation, improvisation, collective action, and the pursuit of freedom.
Rethinking America's Past: voices from the Kinsey African American Art and History Collection by
While visitors to art and history museums may be there to simply enjoy the curated objects, the question of what is included (and excluded) in these collections and who has the power over this process echoes the struggle for inclusion that is so central to the African American experience. Since its inception, the Kinsey African American Art and History Collection® has played an important role in this struggle, seeking out objects that give voice to previously excluded experiences, and providing an alternative to the limits of institutional collections. Among the first scholarly books dedicated to a private African American collection, Rethinking America's Past: Voices from the Kinsey African American Art and History Collection both chronicles the reach of this important cultural collection and contributes to its project by sharing selected objects and stories with a broader audience. Essays range in subject from iconic African American artists, such as Loïs Mailou Jones and Beauford Delaney, to important historical figures such as Frederick Douglas and Martin Luther King, to individuals whose experiences might be lost to history but for the found objects that preserve their stories. Rethinking America's Past demonstrates how the African American story, from slavery through the present, is represented and can be actively remembered through the act of collecting. Rethinking America's Past will appeal to audiences interested in African American history as well as art history, but its real power is in linking the two, showing how important collections are in constructing and repairing historical narratives, and how in the words of editor Tim Gruenewald, "Collecting overlooked aspects of our past and sharing such collections enables a deeper understanding of the present moment, and facilitates a more inclusive and just future."
To Conserve a Legacy: American art from historically Black colleges and universities by
This text documents a sampling of paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures owned by Clark Atlanta University, Fisk University, Hampton University, Howard University, North Carolina Central University and Tuskegee University.
The Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Party in American Visual Culture by
This book examines a range of visual expressions of Black Power across American art and popular culture from 1965 through 1972. It begins with case studies of artist groups, including Spiral, OBAC and AfriCOBRA, who began questioning Western aesthetic traditions and created work that honored leaders, affirmed African American culture, and embraced an African lineage. Also showcased is an Oakland Museum exhibition of 1968 called "New Perspectives in Black Art," as a way to consider if Black Panther Party activities in the neighborhood might have impacted local artists' work. The concluding chapters concentrate on the relationship between selected Black Panther Party members and visual culture, focusing on how they were covered by the mainstream press, and how they self-represented to promote Party doctrine and agendas.
Black is the Color by
"Faced with racist caricatures, African American painters decided to present a different image of their community than the one imposed by the degrading stereotypes of a brutally racist society. Ignored and marginalized, they had to wait a century before they finally won recognition. This film tells the story of how African American artists took back their image, from the abolition of slavery to the present day."
The Lie and How We Told It by
Parrish's emotionally loaded, painted graphic novel is is a visual tour de force, always in the service of the author's themes: navigating queer desire, masculinity, fear, and the ever-in-flux state of friendships.
A Self-Defense Study Guide for Trans Women and Gender Non-Conforming / Nonbinary Amab Folks by
A Self-Defense Study Guide for Trans Women and Gender Non-Conforming / Nonbinary AMAB Folks offers strategies based in lived experience, ranging from using body language and creating safety in numbers, to training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu moves. The zine includes chapters on how to handle people who have legal or financial power over you, cis women gropers, and menfolk bullies, along with instruction on how to back each other up as a group and how to pause a make-out. Trans women, AMAB nonbinary, and AMAB gender-nonconforming people need self-defense that reflects the specific kinds of threats we get. This study guide is one resource for expanding your toolkit to keep on living in this world.
Just Friends by
During one summer in her teens, Erika's mother pressured her into going to a local overnight camp. Despite her reservations, Erika ended up meeting a girl named Emi... and Emi didn't let Erika's anti-social front prevent them from forming a special bond. Now in their 30s, Erika and Emi reminisce about that fateful summer and consider what could have been.
Gender Queer: a Memoir (eBook) by
2020 ALA Alex Award Winner 2020 Stonewall -- Israel Fishman Non-fiction Award Honor Book In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity--what it means and how to think about it--for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere. "It's also a great resource for those who identify as nonbinary or asexual as well as for those who know someone who identifies that way and wish to better understand." -- SLJ (starred review)
At 30, I Realized I Had No Gender: Life Lessons From a 50-Year-Old After Two Decades of Self-Discovery by
At age 30, Shou Arai came to a realization; they had no gender. Now they were faced with a question they'd never really considered: how to age in a society where everything is so strongly segregated between two genders? This autobiographical manga explores Japanese culture surrounding gender, transgender issues, and the day to day obstacles faced by gender minorities and members of the LGBTQIA+ community with a lighthearted, comedic attitude.
Art and Queer Culture by
Art and Queer Culture is a comprehensive and definitive survey of artworks that have constructed, contested or otherwise responded to alternative forms of sexuality. Not a book exclusively about artists who identify themselves as gay or lesbian, Art and Queer Culture instead traces the shifting possibilities and constraints of sexual identity that have provided visual artists with a rich creative resource over the last 125 years.
A Queer Little History of Art by
The last century has seen a dramatic shift in gender and sexual identities for both men and women, reflected in artistic experimentation as artists have sought to challenge social conventions and push the boundaries of what has been deemed acceptable. The result is a wealth of deeply emotive and powerful art intended to express a range of desires and experiences but also to question, criticize, and provoke dialogue. This generously illustrated book showcases the breadth and depth of queer art from around the world since 1900, exploring identity, eroticism, relationships, hidden desires, love, and gender, revealing how experiences have also been shaped by class and ethnicity, and how art itself has played a key role in changing attitudes and crystalizing identities in different historic and contemporary contexts.
Butch Heroes by
Portraits and texts recover lost queer history- the lives of people who didn't conform to gender norms, from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries."A serious-and seriously successful-queer history recovery project." -Publishers WeeklyKatherina Hetzeldorfer, tried "for a crime that didn't have a name" (same sex sexual relations) and sentenced to death by drowning in 1477; Charles aka Mary Hamilton, publicly whipped for impersonating a man in eighteenth-century England; Clara, aka "Big Ben," over whom two jealous women fought in 1926 New York- these are just three of the lives that the artist Ria Brodell has reclaimed for queer history in Butch Heroes. Brodell offers a series of twenty-eight portraits of forgotten but heroic figures, each accompanied by a brief biographical note. They are individuals who were assigned female at birth but whose gender presentation was more masculine than feminine, who did not want to enter into heterosexual marriage, and who often faced dire punishment for being themselves. Brodell's detailed and witty paintings are modeled on Catholic holy cards, slyly subverting a religious template. The portraits and the texts offer intriguing hints of lost lives- cats lounge in the background of domestic settings; one of the figures is said to have been employed variously as "a prophet, a soldier, or a textile worker"; another casually holds a lit cigarette. Brodell did extensive research for each portrait, piecing together a life from historical accounts, maps, journals, paintings, drawings, and photographs, finding the heroic in the forgotten.
Living Inside the Grid by
A grid is an abstract, simple mathematical structure ordered by ninety-degree angles and regularly spaced columns and rows. A grid is also the cities we live and work in, the buildings that tower over us, the electricity and fiber-optic networks that sustain our energy and information needs. We do, as the title of this thematic catalogue suggests, "live inside the grid." The pervasive grid-based visual and information systems that have come to increasingly define contemporary life are explored here by 24 international artists, for whom the grid is something very different than the motif it was for 20th century artists. Artists include Absalon, Jennifer Bolande, Jose Damasceno, Do-Ho Su, Luisa Lambri, Langlands & Bell, Mark Lombardi, Rita McBride, N55 and Danica Phelps. Organized around three critical positions, Living Inside the Grid considers the grid in architecture and urban space; interlocking cultural, linguistic and economic grids; and soft grids.
The World According to the Newest and Most Exact Observations: mapping art and science by
Catalogue accompanies the exhibition The World According to the Newest and Most Exact Observations: Mapping Art and Science, March 3 - June 3, 2001 "This catalogue documents an exhibition that focuses on the human body and political geography of northeastern North America through maps, atlases, and scientific models from the 16th century to the present."--p. [7] Exhibition organized by Susan Bender and Ian Berry
The Map as Art: contemporary artists explore cartography by
Maps can be simple tools, comfortable in their familiar form. Or they can lead to different destinations: places turned upside down or inside out, territories riddled with marks understood only by their maker, realms connected more to the interior mind than to the exterior world. These are the places of artists' maps, that happy combination of information and illusion that flourishes in basement studios and downtown galleries alike. It is little surprise that, in an era of globalized politics, culture, and ecology, contemporary artists are drawn to maps to express their visions. Using paint, salt, souvenir tea towels, or their own bodies, map artists explore a world free of geographical constraints. Katharine Harmon knows this territory. As the author of our best-selling bookYou Are Here, she has inspired legions of new devotees of imaginative maps. InThe Map as Art, Harmon collects 360 colorful, map-related artistic visions by well-known artistssuch as Ed Ruscha, Julian Schnabel, Olafur Eliasson, Maira Kalman, William Kentridge, and Vik Munizand many more less-familiar artists for whom maps are the inspiration for creating art. Essays by Gayle Clemans bring an in-depth look into the artists' maps of Joyce Kozloff, Landon Mackenzie, Ingrid Calame, Guillermo Kuitca, and Maya Lin. Together, the beautiful reproductions and telling commentary make this anessential volume for anyone open to exploring new paths.
On Kawara : horizontality / verticality by 
Robert Smithson : mapping dislocations by 
The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer by
A generously illustrated volume that documents the career of Jason Rohrer, one of the most heralded art game designers working today.A maker of visually elegant and conceptually intricate games, Jason Rohrer is among the most widely heralded art game designers in the short but vibrant history of the field. His games range from the elegantly simple to others of almost Byzantine complexity. Passage (2007)-acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York-uses game rules and procedurals to create a contemporary memento mori that captures an entire lifetime in five minutes. In Chain World (2011), each subsequent player of the game's single copy modifies the rules of the universe. A Game for Someone (2013) is a board game sealed in a box and buried in the Mojave Desert, with a list of one million potential sites distributed to Rohrer's fan base. (Rohrer estimated that it would take two millennia of constant searching to find the game.) With Chain World and A Game for Someone, Rohrer became the first designer to win the prestigious Game Challenge Design award twice. This book, and the exhibition it accompanies, offers a comprehensive account of the artist's oeuvre. The book documents all seventeen of Rohrer's finished games, as well as sketches, ephemera, and related material, with color images throughout. It includes entries on individual games (with code in footnotes), artist interviews, artist writings, commentary by high scorers, and interpretive texts. Two introductory essays view Rohrer's work in the contexts of game studies and art history. Exhibition The Davis Museum at Wellesley College February-June 2016
Virtual Cities : an atlas & exploration of video game cities by
Spanning decades of digital history, this is the ultimate travel guide and atlas of the gamer imagination. Dimopoulos invites readers to share his vision of dozens of different gaming franchises like never before: discover Dimopoulos's Half-Life 2's City 17, Yakuza 0's Kamurocho, Fallout's New Vegas, Super Mario Odyssey's New Donk City, and many more. Each chapter of this virtual travel guide consists of deep dives into the history and lore of these cities from an in-universe perspective. Illustrated with original color ink drawings and--of course--gorgeous and detailed maps, readers can explore the nostalgic games of their youth as well as modern hits. Sidebars based on the author's research tell behind-the-scenes anecdotes and reveal the real-world stories that inspired these iconic virtual settings. With a combination of stylish original maps, illustrations, and insightful commentary and analysis, this is a must-have for video game devotees, world-building fans, and game design experts.
Map : exploring the world by
300 stunning maps from all periods and from all around the world, exploring and revealing what maps tell us about history and ourselves. Map, Exploring the World brings together more than 300 fascinating maps from the birth of cartography to cutting-edge digital maps of the twenty-fist century. The book's unique arrangement, with the maps organized in complimentary or contrasting pairs, reveals how the history of our attempts to make flat representations of the world has been full of beauty, ingenuity and innovation. Selected by an international panel of curators, academics and collectors, the maps reflect the many reasons people make maps, such as to find their way, to assert ownership, to record human activity, to establish control, to encourage settlement, to plan military campaigns or to show political power. The selection includes the greatest names in cartography, such as James Cook, Gerard Mercator, Matthew Fontaine Maury and Phyllis Pearsall, as well as maps from indigenous cultures around the world, rarely seen maps from lesser known cartographers, and maps of outstanding beauty and surprising individuality from the current generation of map makers. Advisory panel: Lauren Beck, Daniel Crouch, Catherine Dunlop, Daniel Huffman, Kimberly Kowal, P.J. Mode, Peter Nekola, Richard Pflederer, Dennis P. Reinhartz, David Rumsey, Susan Schulten, Patricia Seed and Ruth Watson Additional texts: Mirela Altic, Lauren Beck, John Blake, David Bower, David Buissert, Kris Butler, Mario Cams, John Cloud, Peter Collier, Tim Cooke, Daniel Crouch, Kenneth Field, John Hessler, Jason Hubbard, Daniel Huffman, Laura Beltz Imaoka, Carla Lois, Gregory McIntosh, David B Miller, Rebecca Morrill, Toby Musrave, Peter Nekola, Thomas O'Loughlin, Richard Pflederer, Alex Rayner, Dennis P. Reinhartz, Patricia Seed, Susan Schulten and Ruth Watson
Maps, a visual survey and design guide by 
The Atlas of Atlases : the map maker's vision of the world by 
Lost in NYC : a subway adventure by
Pablo's first day in a New York City school quickly goes off the rails during a field trip to the Empire State Building. Pablo accidentally gets on the wrong train, but with help from a new friend and from the city itself, he soon is on the fast track to becoming a local. This story - which features maps, archival photos, and fascinating facts - will help readers explore the subway without leaving their seats. It brings all the bustle and beauty of NYC to young readers around the world.