Author: Publisher: ISBN: 9788793659353 Category : Languages : en Pages : 204
Book Description
An essential overview of Jafa's sweeping, dynamic and disquieting video portraits of Black American life Though he has worked in film and music for decades, American video artist Arthur Jafa only garnered acclaim in the art world in 2016 for his video work Love is the Message, the Message is Death. Composed of found images and videos, his oeuvre revolves around Black American culture, the history of slavery, and ongoing structural and physical violence against Black Americans. As Jafa put it in his 2003 text "My Black Death": "The central conundrum of black being (the double bind of our ontological existence) lies in the fact that common misery both defines and limits who we are. Such that our efforts to eliminate those forces which constrain also function to dissipate much which gives us our specificity, our uniqueness, our flavor by destroying the binds that define we will cease to be, but this is the good death (boa morte) to be embraced." This essential overview presents Jafa's best-known works, such as Love is the Message, the Message is Deathand its 2018 follow-up piece The White Album, alongside never-before-seen projects and essays by notable scholars. Filmmaker and artist Arthur Jafa(born 1960) grew up in Mississippi, where his lifelong fascination with found imagery manifested in his childhood hobby of assembling binders of photographs culled from various sources. As a cinematographer and director of photography, Jafa has collaborated with Stanley Kubrick, Solange Knowles and Spike Lee, among many others. His work on Julie Dash's 1991 film Daughters of the Dustwon him the Best Cinematography award at Sundance. At the 2019 Venice Biennale, he was awarded the Golden Lion for The White Album. Jafa lives in Los Angeles.
Author: Richard J. Powell Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300245742 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 241
Book Description
A kaleidoscopic survey of black satire in 20th- and 21st-century American art In this groundbreaking study, Richard J. Powell investigates the visual forms of satire produced by black artists in 20th- and 21st-century America. Underscoring the historical use of visual satire as antiracist dissent and introspective critique, Powell argues that it has a distinctly African American lineage. Taking on some of the most controversial works of the past century—in all their complexity, humor, and provocation—Powell raises important questions about the social power of art. Expansive in both historical reach and breadth of media presented, Going There interweaves discussions of such works as the midcentury cartoons of Ollie Harrington, the installations of Kara Walker, the paintings of Robert Colescott, and the movies of Spike Lee. Other artists featured in the book include David Hammons, Arthur Jafa, Beverly McIver, Howardena Pindell, Betye Saar, and Carrie Mae Weems. Thoroughly researched and rich in context, Going There is essential reading in the history of satire, racial politics, and contemporary art.
Author: Jacob Holdt Publisher: ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
From 1971 to 1978 the author, a Dane, hitchiked across more than 100,000 miles of America. This volume, written at the journey's end, contains some 700 of the photographs he took, and describes his odyssey.
Author: Arthur Jafa Publisher: Walther Kanig, Kaln ISBN: 9783960981589 Category : Blacks Languages : en Pages : 848
Book Description
Across three decades the American artist and cinematographer, Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, USA) has developed a dynamic, multidisciplinary practice ranging from films and installations to lecture-performances and happenings that tackle, challenge and question prevailing cultural assumptions about identity and race.Jafa's work is driven by a recurrent question: how might one identify and develop a specifically Black visual aesthetics equal to the 'power, beauty and alienation' of Black music in American culture?Building upon Jafa's image-based practice, this enormous new volume comprises a series of visual sequences that are cut and juxtaposed across its pages. The artist has been collecting and working from a set of source books since the 1990s, seeking to trace and map unwritten histories and narratives relating to black life.Punctuating this visual material is a series of commissioned texts partnered with a rich compendium of essays, short stories and poetry that has informed Jafa's artistic practice and which together form an unprecedented resource.With over 30 contributors including: art critic Dave Hickey, philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler, award-winning British artist John Akomfrah, and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Hilton Als.Published after the exhibition, Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions at Serpentine Galleries, London (8 June - 10 September 2017), and at the Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (11 February - 25 November 2018).
Author: Deana Lawson Publisher: ISBN: 9781912339983 Category : African Americans Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Working closely with her subjects on setting, lighting, and pose, photographer Deana Lawson creates intimate depictions of Black bodies interacting in both public and private spaces. The resulting images are formally rigorous in terms of composition--every detail is meticulous and motivated--as well as suggestive of Lawson's personal connection with those she photographs. In Roxie and Raquel, New Orleans, Louisiana, two women--twin sisters--kneel in the center of a wide bed, facing away from each other, their backs touching. Each raises one arm above her head, gently touching her sister's hand, in a choreographed posture evocative of a stylized sculpture or a ritualistic, dancelike gesture. Both look toward the camera, but their expressions are not identical, and indeed the entire image is a study in similarity and difference.
Author: David Hammons Publisher: Drawing Center ISBN: 9780942324419 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 136
Book Description
On Hammons' seminal series that ingeniously merged print and performance, celebration and critique The first book dedicated to these pivotal early works on paper, David Hammons: Body Prints, 1968-1979 brings together the monoprints and collages in which the artist used the body as both a drawing tool and printing plate to explore performative, unconventional forms of image making. Hammons created the body prints by greasing his own body--or that of another person--with substances including margarine and baby oil, pressing or rolling body parts against paper, and sprinkling the surface with charcoal and powdered pigment. The resulting impressions are intimately direct indexes of faces, skin, and hair that exist somewhere between spectral portraits and physical traces. Hammons' body prints represent the origin of his artistic language, one that has developed over a long and continuing career and that emphasizes both the artifacts and subjects of contemporary Black life in the United States. More than a half century after they were made, these early works on paper exemplify Hammons' celebration of the sacredness of objects touched or made by the Black body, and his biting critique of racial oppression. The 32 body prints highlighted in this volume introduce the major themes of a 50-year career that has become central to the history of postwar American art. The book features a conversation between curator and activist Linda Goode Bryant and artist Senga Nengudi, as well as a photo essay by photographer Bruce W. Talamon, who documented Hammons at work in his Los Angeles studio in 1974. Born in 1943 in Springfield, Illinois, David Hammons moved to Los Angeles in 1963 at the age of 20 and began making his body prints several years later. He studied at Otis Art Institute with Charles White and became part of a younger generation of Black avant-garde artists loosely associated with the Black Arts Movement. He moved to New York in 1978.
Author: Ming Smith Publisher: Aperture ISBN: 9781597114820 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 236
Book Description
Ming Smith's poetic and experimental images are icons of twentieth-century African American life. One of the greatest artist-photographers working today, Smith moved to New York in the 1970s and began to make images charged with startling beauty and spiritual energy. This long-awaited monograph brings together four decades of Smith's work, celebrating her trademark lyricism, distinctively blurred silhouettes, dynamic street scenes, and deep devotion to theater, music, poetry, and dance--from the "Pittsburgh Cycle" plays of August Wilson to the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra. With never-before-seen images, and a range of illuminating essays and interviews, this tribute to Smith's singular vision promises to be an enduring contribution to the history of American photography. Copublished by Aperture and Documentary Arts
Author: Paul Kooiker Publisher: ISBN: 9789490800093 Category : Artists' books Languages : es Pages : 0
Book Description
Durante varios años, Paul Kooiker y Erik Kessels organizaban sesiones en las que compartían los álbumes de fotos más extraños de sus colecciones. Los libros que mostraban rara vez están disponibles en las tiendas normales, pero se recogen en tiendas de segunda mano y anticuarios. La fascinación del grupo por estos libros pictóricos de no ficción proviene de la necesidad de encontrar imágenes que existen al margen de los fotolibros comerciales habituales. Solo en esta área es posible encontrar imágenes con calidad incontrolada. Lo notable de estas publicaciones es que hay una delgada línea entre ser terrible y ser increíble. Esta tensión constante hace que los libros sean interesantes. estos volúmentes caen dentro de ciertas categorías: médicos, de instrucción, científicos, sexo, humor o propaganda. Paul Kooiker y Erik Kessels han hecho una selección de sus mejores libros de este cuestionable nuevo género.