A timely consideration of African-American artists' rich engagement with the history of art from the twentieth century, this book is the winner of the James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award for African American Art History. Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition presents works by African American artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries together with works by the early-twentieth-century European artists with whom they engaged. Black artists have investigated, interrogated, invaded, entangled, annihilated, or immersed themselves in the aesthetics, symbolism, and ethos of European art for more than a century. The powerful push and pull of this relationship constitutes a distinct tradition for many African American artists who source the master narratives of art history to critique, embrace, or claim their own space. This groundbreaking catalog--accompanying a major exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.--explores the connections and frictions around modernism in the works of artists such as Romare Bearden, Pablo Picasso, Faith Ringgold, Renee Cox, Robert Colescott, Norman Lewis, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems and Henri Matisse. The volume explores how blackness has often been conceived from the standpoint of these international and intergenerational connections and presents the divergent and complex works born of these important dialogues.

Using humor as the common denominator, a multicultural cast of YA authors steps up to the mic to share stories touching on race. Listen in as ten YA authors — some familiar, some new — use their own brand of humor to share their stories about growing up between cultures. Henry Choi Lee discovers that pretending to be a tai chi master or a sought-after wiz at math wins him friends for a while — until it comically backfires. A biracial girl is amused when her dad clears seats for his family on a crowded subway in under a minute flat, simply by sitting quietly in between two uptight white women. Edited by acclaimed author and speaker Mitali Perkins, this collection of fiction and nonfiction uses a mix of styles as diverse as their authors, from laugh-out-loud funny to wry, ironic, or poingnant, in prose, poetry, and comic form.

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.

This nuanced reassessment transforms our understanding of Horace Pippin, casting the artist and his celebrated paintings as more complex than has previously been recognized

Dematerialization examines the intertwined experimental practices and critical discourses of art and industrial design in Argentina, Mexico, and Chile in the 1960s and 1970s. Provocative in nature, this book investigates the way that artists, critics, and designers considered the relationship between the crisis of the modernist concept of artistic medium and the radical social transformation brought about by the accelerated capitalist development of the preceding decades. Beginning with Oscar Masotta’s sui generis definition of the term, Karen Benezra proposes dematerialization as a concept that allows us to see how disputes over the materiality of the art and design object functioned in order to address questions concerning the role of appearance, myth, and ideology in the dynamic logic structuring social relations in contemporary discussions of aesthetics, artistic collectivism, and industrial design. Dematerialization brings new insights to the fields of contemporary art history, critical theory, and Latin American cultural studies.

In Margo Humphrey, Adrienne L. Childs explores the career of one of the most inspiring artists and printmakers of our time. Best known for her "sophisticated naïve" style, Margo Humphrey (b. 1942) transforms personal experiences into narratives that speak to the human spirit. Bold colors and flat planes intertwine using the artist's unique iconography to address issues of race, gender, spirituality, and relationships. Part autobiography and part fantasy, Humphrey's work alludes to the correlation between the temporal and the spiritual as they coexist in her world. Humphrey employs visual metaphors to channel her experience growing up as an African American woman. Everyday objects become recurring symbols in her prints: zebras embody the strength of her heritage; a plate of yams represents nourishment or survival. Whether celebrating her childhood or confronting her personal fears, Humphrey's artwork navigates her life story to convey hope, possibility, and love. Margo Humphrey presents more than forty-five color plates, from the artist's early abstract art through her groundbreaking lithographs in the figurative narrative style. The text by Adrienne L. Childs considers the memories and events that inspired Humphrey's powerful oeuvre, and the foreword by David C. Driskell places Humphrey in the forefront of contemporary printmaking. Since Humphrey's first solo exhibition in 1965, her art has been exhibited and collected worldwide, and it now resides in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Humphrey has lectured and taught across the world and is a tenured professor of art at the University of Maryland, College Park.

From the author of How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”—Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children. In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation. In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home. Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.