This groundbreaking study explores the visual representations of Black culture across the globe throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The African diaspora—a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade and Western colonialism—has generated a wide array of artistic achievements, from blues and reggae to the paintings of the pioneering American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner and the music videos of Solange. This study concentrates on how these works, often created during times of major social upheaval and transformation, use Black culture both as a subject and as context. From musings on “the souls of black folk” in late-nineteenth-century art to questions of racial and cultural identities in performance, media, and computer-assisted arts in the twenty-first century, this book examines the philosophical and social forces that have shaped Black presence in modern and contemporary visual culture. Renowned art historian Richard J. Powell presents Black art drawn from across the African diaspora, with examples from the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe. Black Art features artworks executed in a broad range of media, including film, photography, performance art, conceptual art, advertising, and sculpture. Now updated and expanded, this new edition helps to better understand how the first two decades of the twenty-first century have been a transformative moment in which previous assumptions about race and identity have been irrevocably altered, with art providing a useful lens through which to think about these compelling issues.

Dedicated to the work of contemporary Black artists from around the world, this book is an exuberant introduction to artists from Africa and of African descent for young readers. Written by award-winning Black children’s author Sharna Jackson, this engaging book introduces young readers to twenty-six contemporary artists from Africa and of the African diaspora, working in everything from painting, sculpture, and drawing to ceramics, installation art, and sound art. These include prominent American artists Kerry James Marshall, Faith Ringgold, portraitist to Michelle Obama Amy Sherald, and Kehinde Wiley; British Turner Prize–winning painters Lubaina Himid and Chris Ofili; renowned South African visual activist and photographer Zanele Muholi; Nigerian sound artist Emeka Ogboh; Sudanese painter Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq; Kenyan-British ceramicist Magdalene Odundo; Afrofuturist-inspired performance artist Harold Offeh; and moving image artist Larry Achiampong, among others. Sharna Jackson’s experience as an award-winning children’s author combined with the curatorial expertise of Dr. Zoe´ Whitley, co-curator of the groundbreaking exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” make this an essential introduction to Black artists working today. This volume will serve as revelation to a new generation of aspiring young artists.

This landmark book shows how five African civilizations—Yoruba, Kongo, Ejagham, Mande and Cross River—have informed and are reflected in the aesthetic, social and metaphysical traditions (music, sculpture, textiles, architecture, religion, idiogrammatic writing) of black people in the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, Mexico, Brazil and other places in the New World.

EBONY is the flagship magazine of Johnson Publishing. Founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, it still maintains the highest global circulation of any African American-focused magazine.

World is Africa brings together more than 30 important texts by Eddie Chambers, who for several decades has been an original and a critical voice within the field of African diaspora art history. The texts range from book chapters and catalogue essays, to shorter texts. Chambers focuses on contemporary artists and their practices, from a range of international locations, who for the most part are identified with the African diaspora. None of the texts are available online and none have been available outside of the original publication in which they first appeared. The volume contains several new pieces of writing, including a consideration of the art world 'fetishization' of the 1980s, as the manifestation of a reluctance to accept the majority of Black British artists as valid individual practitioners, choosing instead to shackle them to exhibitions that took place three decades ago. Another new text re-examines the 'map paintings' of Frank Bowling, the Guyana-born artist who was the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2019. The third introduces the little-known record sleeve illustrations of Charles White, the American artist who was the subject of a major retrospective in 2018 at major galleries across the US. Among the other new texts is a critical reflection on the patronage the Greater London Council extended to Black artists in 1980s London. World is Africa makes a valuable contribution to the emerging discipline of black British art history, the field of African diaspora studies and African diaspora art history.

EBONY is the flagship magazine of Johnson Publishing. Founded in 1945 by John H. Johnson, it still maintains the highest global circulation of any African American-focused magazine.

During the 1960s and 1970s, a cadre of poets, playwrights, visual artists, musicians, and other visionaries came together to create a renaissance in African American literature and art. This charged chapter in the history of African American culture—which came to be known as the Black Arts Movement—has remained largely neglected by subsequent generations of critics. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement includes essays that reexamine well-known figures such as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Betye Saar, Jeff Donaldson, and Haki Madhubuti. In addition, the anthology expands the scope of the movement by offering essays that explore the racial and sexual politics of the era, links with other period cultural movements, the arts in prison, the role of Black colleges and universities, gender politics and the rise of feminism, color fetishism, photography, music, and more. An invigorating look at a movement that has long begged for reexamination, this collection lucidly interprets the complex debates that surround this tumultuous era and demonstrates that the celebration of this movement need not be separated from its critique.