Description
Book SynopsisThe 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
Trade Review"...[A] welcome new volume . . . . [and] a Herculean effort of naming and contextualizing an array of vital and frequently overlooked practices and methods. Its power as an intellectual project and teaching resource is to work inductively, sidestepping theory and allowing artists’ words to elaborate the specificity of art making as a form of individual exploration and collective intervention." * caa.reviews - College Art Association *
". . . a timely contribution to the field of Black diasporic art history. . . . Celeste-Marie Bernier offers respite from seemingly interminable institutional tendencies that continue to limit Black British and African American art to particular curatorial and art-historical jurisdictions. Whereas the former is often expediently defined within the historical parameters of the 1980s, the latter is rarely viewed in relation to other art histories, not least those of the United States.
Stick to the Skin challenges these conventions and pathologies, bringing as it does a comparative study of the work of over fifty artists spanning half a century. . . . we can be grateful to Bernier who, as a UK-based academic, has taken it upon herself to produce a very tangible and substantial study on contemporary Black visual arts practice." * Burlington Magazine *
"Throughout, Bernier examines how art can dismantle, disrupt and challenge the status quo. It can be a form of radical protest, used to confront racism and white privilege in a world that continues to be threatened by outsiders and “others”. This remarkable book makes very clear how and why this is important, more so today than ever." * Times Higher Ed *
Table of ContentsFOREWORD 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
