Full Description
The first comparative history of African American and Black British artists, artworks, and art movements, Stick to the Skin traces the lives and works of over fifty painters, photographers, sculptors, and mixed-media, assemblage, installation, video, and performance artists working in the United States and Britain from 1965 to 2015. The artists featured in this book cut to the heart of hidden histories, untold narratives, and missing memories to tell stories that "stick to the skin" and arrive at a new "Black lexicon of liberation."
Informed by extensive research and invaluable oral testimonies, Celeste-Marie Bernier's remarkable text forcibly asserts the originality and importance of Black artists' work and emphasizes the need to understand Black art as a distinctive category of cultural production. She launches an important intervention into European histories of modern and contemporary art and visual culture as well as into debates within African American studies, African diasporic studies, and Black British studies.
Artists featured:
Larry Achiampong
Hurvin Anderson
Benny Andrews
Rasheed Araeen
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Zarina Bhimji
Sutapa Biswas
Frank Bowling
Sonia Boyce
Vanley Burke
Chila Kumari Burman
Eddie Chambers
Thornton Dial
Godfried Donkor
Kimathi Donkor
Sokari Douglas Camp
Melvin Edwards
Mary Evans
Nicola Frimpong
Joy Gregory
Bessiey Harvey
Mona Hatoum
Lubaina Himid
Lonnie Holley
Gavin Jantjes
Claudette Johnson
Tam Joseph
Roshini Kempadoo
Juginder Lamba
Hew Locke
Steve McQueen
Chris Ofili
Keith Piper
Ingrid Pollard
Thomas J. Price
Noah Purifoy
Faith Ringgold
Donald Rodney
Betye Saar
Joyce J. Scott
Yinka Shonibare
Gurminder Sikand
Marlene Smith
Maud Sulter
Barbara Walker
Kara Walker
Carrie Mae Weems
Deborah Willis
Hank Willis Thomas
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Contents
FOREWORD Lubaina Himid
PREFACE "WE WILL BE / WHO WE WANT / WHERE WE WANT / WITH WHOM WE WANT"
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION "Inside the Invisible"
African American and Black British Artists and Art-Making Traditions
1 "Do Something with It"
The Search for a New Critical Language in African American and Black British Art
2 "I'm Always Ready to Die"
Memorializing Slavery and Narrativizing Freedom
3 "Lifting, Hanging, Burning"
Defiance, Dissidence, and to Destroy Is to Create
4 "Branded, Raped, Beaten"
Acts and Arts of Bearing Witness
5 "How to Paint Suffering"
Anti-Portraiture, Anti-Product, and Anti-Painting
6 "Enter at Your Own Risk"
Artist-as-Trickster-as-Prophet-as-Historianas- Witness-as-Freedom-Fighter-as-Artist
7 "BURIED, HIDDEN, AND DISGUISED"
"Storying" in a State of Shock
8 "A FREAK IN THE BLIZZARD OF THE WHITE MAN'S GAZE"
Black Absent Presences and Present Absences
9 An "Indelible Mark"?
Autobiographies, Archives, and Amnesia
10 "I Was Branded"
Spectacularized Histories, Serial Narratives, and Illicit Iconographies
11 "Power to the Powerless"
Tracing Black Lives in Protest Portraits, History Paintings, and Radical Installations
12 "Hurting to Death"
Struggle, Survival, and Storytelling in Salvaged Objects, Paint, Beads, and Steel
CONCLUSION "Survivors of the Diasporic Journey"
Past, Present, and Future Artists and Art-Making Traditions
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
INDEX
