The definitive monograph on contemporary African American painter Kerry James Marshall, accompanying a major traveling retrospective. This long-awaited volume celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America’s greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition. With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this monumental book features essays by noted curators as well as the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist’s career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism.

The most comprehensive book yet on this inspired, inventive chronicler of the African-American experience Alabama-born, Chicago-based Kerry James Marshall is one of the most exciting artists working today. Critically and commercially acclaimed, the painter is known for his representation of the history of African-American identity in Western art. Conversant with a wide typology of styles, subjects, and techniques, from abstraction to realism and comics, Marshall synthesizes different traditions and genres in his work while seeking to counter stereotypical depictions of black people in society. This is the most comprehensive overview available of his remarkable career.

With a career spanning almost three decades, Kerry James Marshall is well known for his complex and multilayered portrayals of youths, interiors, nudes, housing estate gardens, land- and seascapes, all of which synthesize different traditions and genres while seeking to counter stereotypical representations of black people in society. Working across various mediums, from paintings to comic-style drawings to sculptural installations, photographs, and videos, the artist conflates actual and imagined events from African-American history, integrating a range of stylistic influences to address the limited historiography of black art. Produced on the occasion of Marshall's first exhibition at David Zwirner in London and designed by JNL Design in Chicago, Look See features beautiful reproductions of every painting on view in the show - all of them brand-new compositions - as well as numerous details and preparatory drawings, installation photographs and new scholarship by Robert Storr and Hamza Walker. As suggested by the show's title, these portraits use the etymological differences between looking and seeing as their point of departure, featuring subjects whose dissociated stares seem as defiant as they are mystifying. In keeping with his signature approach, Marshall has painted his figures in strikingly opaque black pigments, both fashioning and abstracting their presences in order to assimilate the limitations and contradictions of style, subject, and chronology inherent in art-historical narratives written from a white, Western perspective. Taken all together, the range of materials included in Look See constitutes a vibrant and comprehensive portrait of Marshall's original and ever-evolving practice.

Contemporary artists Robert Colescott (1925-2009), Kerry James Marshall (b. 1955), and Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971) are distinguished by their attention to a history of representation, which they re-visit and revise to reflect on individual and collective Black experience. Equally engaged with social and political histories, and the history of art, Colescott, Marshall, and Thomas have created works that at times poignantly and satirically critique dominant narratives and posit alternatives. By considering these artists together, this thought-provoking book expands our understanding of contemporary history painting, a genre first defined during the 17th century and known for didactic paintings that often depicted Biblical or mythological subjects, and expressed the tastes and narratives of a ruling class. Colescott, Marshall, and Thomas marry appreciation of these traditional forms of representation to a deep understanding of contemporary American culture to create insightful works that disrupt historic narratives and read canonic art history against the grain. Published in association with the Seattle Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Seattle Art Museum (02/15/18-05/13/18)

An exploration of a formative chapter in Basquiat's brief career through the lens of his identity and the role of cultural activism in New York City during the early years of the 1980s Jean-Michel Basquiat painted Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) in 1983 to commemorate the death of a young, black artist who died from injuries sustained while in police custody after being arrested for allegedly tagging a New York City subway station. Published to accompany a focused exhibition of Basquiat's response to anti-black racism and police brutality, this catalogue explores a chapter in the artist's career through both the lens of his identity and the Lower East Side as a nexus of activism in the early 1980s. With an introduction by Chaédria LaBouvier, Nancy Spector, and Joan Young, and an essay by Johanna F. Almiron are supplemented by commentary from artists, activists, and other cultural figures who were part of this episode in the city's history, which invokes today's urgent conversations about state-sanctioned racism. Ephemera related to Stewart's death, including newspaper clippings and protest posters, and samples of artwork from Stewart's estate are also featured along with paintings and prints made by other artists from Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, David Hammons, in response to Stewart's death.

More than any other decade, the sixties capture our collective cultural imagination. And while many Americans can immediately imagine the sound of Martin Luther King Jr. declaring “I have a dream!” or envision hippies placing flowers in gun barrels, the revolutionary sixties resonates around the world: China’s communist government inaugurated a new cultural era, African nations won independence from colonial rule, and students across Europe took to the streets, calling for an end to capitalism, imperialism, and the Vietnam War. In this innovative work, James Meyer turns to art criticism, theory, memoir, and fiction to examine the fascination with the long sixties and contemporary expressions of these cultural memories across the globe. Meyer draws on a diverse range of cultural objects that reimagine this revolutionary era stretching from the 1950s to the 1970s, including reenactments of civil rights, antiwar, and feminist marches, paintings, sculptures, photographs, novels, and films. Many of these works were created by artists and writers born during the long Sixties who were driven to understand a monumental era that they missed. These cases show us that the past becomes significant only in relation to our present, and our remembered history never perfectly replicates time past. This, Meyer argues, is precisely what makes our contemporary attachment to the past so important: it provides us a critical opportunity to examine our own relationship to history, memory, and nostalgia.

Endless Enigma: Eight Centuries of Fantastic Art explores the ways in which artists have sought to explain their world in terms of an alternate reality, drawn from imagination, the subconscious, poetry, nature, myth, and religion. Endless Enigma takes as its point of departure Alfred H. Barr Jr.’s legendary 1936 exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, which not only introduced these movements to the American public, but also placed them in a historical and cultural context by situating them with artists from earlier centuries. Presenting works from the twelfth century to the present day, this catalogue is organized into six themes—Monsters & Demons, Dreams & Temptation, Fragmented Body, Unconscious Gesture, Super Nature, and Sense of Place. Works included range from medieval gargoyles to twentieth-century works by Louise Bourgeois, Sigmar Polke, and Pablo Picasso as well as contemporary works by Michaël Borremans, Marcel Dzama, and Raymond Pettibon. Masterworks from the likes of Piero di Cosimo, Francisco de Goya, and Titian are considered alongside those by William Blake and Odilon Redon. Time folds and temporal barriers collapse when Damiano Cappelli meets Edvard Munch, and Salvator Rosa encounters Luc Tuymans and Lisa Yuskavage. Salvador Dalí, Sherrie Levine, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Kerry James Marshall—eight centuries intersect and, as such, this wide-ranging catalogue examines affinities in intention and imagery between works executed across a broad span of time. Organized in collaboration with Nicholas Hall, a specialist in the field of Old Masters and nineteenth-century art, this fully illustrated catalogue is published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner, New York, in 2018. It includes new scholarship by Dawn Ades, Olivier Berggruen, and J. Patrice Marandel.