Search results for ""Author Darby English""

Art historian Darby English is celebrated for working against the grain and plumbing gaps in historical narratives. In this book, he explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of black cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in America, shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, an integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto.1971 takes an insightful look at many black artists' desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their and their advocates' efforts to further that aim through public exhibitions. Amid calls to define a "black aesthetic" or otherwise settle the race question, these experiments with modernist art favored cultural interaction and instability. Contemporary Black Artists in America highlighted abstraction as a stance against normative approaches, while The DeLuxe Show positioned abstraction in a center of urban blight. The power and social importance of these experiments, English argues, came partly from color's special status as a racial metaphor and partly from investigations of color that were underway in formalist American art and criticism. From Frank Bowling to Virginia Jaramillo, Sam Gilliam to Peter Bradley, black modernists and their supporters rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for racial reconciliation. At a time when many debates about identity sought closure, these exhibitions offered openings; when icons and slogans touted simple solutions, they chose difficulty. But above all, as English demonstrates in this provocative book, these exhibitions and artists responded with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding culture's preoccupation with color.

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A passionate, rigorous, and persuasive look at the helpful complexity of art during a time of profound cultural turmoil By turns historical, critical, and personal, this book examines the use of art—and love—as a resource amid the recent wave of shootings by American police of innocent black women and men. Darby English attends to a cluster of artworks created in or for our tumultuous present that address themes of racial violence and representation idiosyncratically, neither offering solutions nor accommodating shallow narratives about difference. In Zoe Leonard’s Tipping Point, English sees an embodiment of love in the face of brutality; in Kerry James Marshall’s untitled 2015 portrait of a black male police officer, a greatly fraught subject treated without apparent judgment; in Pope.L’s Skin Set Drawings, a life project undertaken to challenge codified uses of difference, color, and language; and in a replica of the Lorraine Motel—the site of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968—a monument to the unfinished business of the integrated nonviolent movement for civil rights. For English, the consideration of art is a paradigm of social life, because art is something we must share. Powerful, challenging, and timely, To Describe a Life is an invitation to rethink what life in ongoing crisis is and can be—and, indeed, to discover how art can help.Published in association with the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research

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Larger-than-life biblical figures from a renowned American sculptorAmerican artist Charles Ray (born 1953) has devoted most of the past decade to creating sculptures of figures, animals and inanimate objects, often carved from blocks of metal in a state-of-the-art process that combines skilled handwork with industrial technology. This monograph reflects on the fabrication and installation of Adam and Eve (2023), a major sculpture by Ray that is currently on view at Manhattan West, Brookfield Properties' development adjacent to Moynihan Train Hall and Madison Square Garden. The sculpture, which depicts the biblical figures Adam and Eve in their old age, consists of two large-scale humans rendered in solid stainless steel at nearly 10 feet tall. A significant and highly personal text by art historian Darby English, exploring this work and Ray's illustrious career, is accompanied by extensive photography illustrating the installed sculptures and their cre

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A revealing exploration of Edward Hopper’s inspired relationship to New York City through his paintings, drawings, prints, and never-before-published archival materials This engaging book delves into the iconic relationship between Edward Hopper (1882–1967) and New York City. This comprehensive look at an essential aspect of the revered American artist’s life reveals how Hopper’s experience of New York’s spaces, sensations, and architecture shaped his vision and served as a backdrop for his distillations of the urban experience. During sidewalk strolls and elevated train rides, Hopper sketched the city’s many windowed facades. Exterior views gave way to interior lives, forging one of Hopper’s defining preoccupations: the convergence of public and private. These permeable walls allowed Hopper to evoke the perplexing awareness of being alone in a crowd that is synonymous with modern urban life. Drawing on the vast resources of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the largest repository of Hopper’s work, and the recently acquired gift of the Sanborn Hopper Archive, this book features more than 300 illustrations and fresh insight from authoritative and emerging scholars.Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American ArtExhibition Schedule:Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (October 19, 2022–March 5, 2023)

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