FLC Staff Picks Blog

Celebrating Black Lives, History, and Art

In celebration of Black History Month and the African American Read-In, please check out our special exhibit of biographies, histories, and art books. You'll find a bunch of books to keep you reading well beyond your bedtime.

Under autobiographies and biographies, we celebrate the contributions of Angela Davis, Carter G. Woodson, Sgt. Isaac Woodard (in Unexampled Courage), Ta-Nehisi Coates, Coretta Scott King, Rosa Parks, Gertrude "Ma" Rainey, Emmett Till, Langston Hughes, Edna Lewis, James Baldwin, Malcolm X,  Condoleezza Rice, and tributes such as to My Grandmother's Hands, the Hidden Figures, and The Invisibles gracing the pages of now known tributes.

In histories, we include books about the history and politics of the Black Panther party, the underground and overground railroad, stories of self-emancipation, and interviews with formerly enslaved African Americans; as well as many deep investigations and revelations such as: A Black women's history of the United States ... and ... Stamped from the beginning:  the definitive history of racist ideas in America ... and ...  Stony the road:  Reconstruction, white supremacy, and the rise of Jim Crow ... and ... The hidden history:  African American cemeteries in Central Virginia ...and ... Chocolate cities: the Black map of American Life ... and, gripping true crime in Truevine: two brothers, a kidnapping, and a mother's quest: A true story of the Jim Crow South.

Topping off the exhibit are texts celebrating African American poetry, theatre, religion, leadership, and in particular, ART.  (See some of the art selections below).

note: Follow the title links to get a full description or to the "place a hold". We'll pull it for you!

Class Pictures by Dawoud Bey (Photographer)

Call Number: 779 B573cℓ, 2007

For the past 15 years, Dawoud Bey has been making striking, large-scale color portraits of students at high schools across the United States. Depicting teenagers from a wide economic, social and ethnic spectrum--and intensely attentive to their poses and gestures--he has created a highly diverse group portrait of a generation that intentionally challenges teenage stereotypes. Bey spends two to three weeks in each school, taking formal portraits of individual students, each made in a classroom during one 45-minute period. At the start of the sitting, each subject writes a brief autobiographical statement. By turns poignant, funny or harrowing, these revealing words are an integral part of the project, and the subject's statement accompanies each photograph in the book. Together, the words and images in "Class Pictures" offer unusually respectful and perceptive portraits that establish Dawoud Bey as one of the best portraitists at work today.

 

 

Julie Mehretu: Drawings

Call Number: 741.973 M498ju, 2007

A recent recipient of the highly prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” Mehretu has captivated her audience with her large-scale wall installations that include a dizzying array of signs, symbols, and motifs worked into compositions that take as their point of departure architectural renderings and sketches. While known primarily as a painter, it is the artist’s drawings that drive her work; she produces scores of major drawings a year. Concerned with how individuals come to understand their place in the world–both metaphorically and physically–through their identification with different communities or their experience of different places, Mehretu has created a body of work that is as dynamic as the subjects with which she is engaged.

 

Julie Mehretu: Black City

Call Number: ND 237 .M44 A4 2006
Life has taken Julie Mehretu from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to New York the long way. Now the New York Times writes that her canvases--multilayered, futuristic visual worlds where historical and fictional landscapes meet--"make history painting important again." Each one pulls from diverse sources, noteworthy among them Japanese manga, Chinese landscape art, Ethiopian illuminated books, Baroque engraving in the style of Dürer, graffiti and the geometric abstractions of Kazimir Malevich and Vasily Kandinsky. And they are often structured on architectural drawing, which appeals to Mehretu "because there is no way that you could make architecture that doesn't work."

 

Julie Mehretu: a Universal History of Everything and Nothing

Call Number: ND 237 .M44 A4 2017

The paintings of Julie Mehretu captured the spirit of our fragile, new century. Monumentally scaled and visually explosive, they resonated with a perception of the world irrevocably impacted by an accelerated consciousness of the simultaneity of events in time and place and the intersecting flows of economies, geopolitics, and people that were their engine. With new photography documenting Julie Mehretu's (born 1970) studio process, plus details and large-scale reproductions of paintings and drawings, and essays by renowned authors, this book documents her richly layered visual universe.

 

Whitfield Lovell: Kin

Call Number: N 6537 .L68 K56 2016

Accompanying a major exhibition, this book provides a comprehensive look at this MacArthur Fellows award-winning artist's ongoing exploration of the African-American experience. Whitfield Lovell: Kin centers on a sumptuously reproduced portfolio of the artist's Kin series, in which images of anonymous African-Americans are paired with found objects evoking their personalities and experiences. Tangible presences that powerfully connect with the viewer, Lovell's works invoke issues of cultural heritage and personal identity as they imaginatively reflect the lives of forgotten Americans. Also included are the artist's large-scale installations and works from the 1990s until the present.

 

Hard Truths: The art of Thornton Dial

Call Number: 709.2 D536h, 2011

This book surveys the career of one of our most original contemporary artists, whose epic work tackles the most compelling social and political issues of our time. Born in poverty in Alabama, Dial has lived his entire life in the American South, and his art, informed by decades of struggle as a black working-class man, reveals a unique perspective on America's most difficult and pervasive challenges, such as its long history of race and class conflict, the war in Iraq, and the 9/11 tragedy. This monograph includes reproductions of 70 of Dial's large-scale paintings, drawings and found object sculptures spanning twenty years of his artistic career.

 

Kara Walker:  pictures from another time

Call Number: NC 910.5 .W35 A4 2002

Arguably the most controversial young African-American artist working today, Kara Walker creates vivid and shocking evocations, rooted in stereotypes, of an antebellum world that comments on the system of slavery and its continuing legacy in the American consciousness. In her choice of black cut-paper silhouettes, Walker takes a medium that was extremely fashionable in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as part of the neoclassical revival, when the silhouetted images on ancient Greek and Roman vases were emulated on such goods as Wedgwood ware. The silhouette was a parlor art practiced by genteel ladies and gentlemen, who created portraits, landscapes, and decorative motifs. There were also traveling silhouettists who took their craft around the country. The 18th- and 19th-century silhouette was also associated with the pseudo-science of physiognomy, which held that one could analyze psychological and racial types by studying profiles. Adopting the antiquated medium of the silhouette, Walker has turned it into a powerful force to evoke the complexities of the system of slavery, exploring themes of exploitation, accommodation, and complicity on the part of both the powerful and the oppressed. Pictures From Another Time is the first major publication on the work of this extraordinary artist.

 

Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress

Call Number: NC 910.5 .W35 A4 2007

“This collection of Walker's astonishing tableaux dramatizes black-white interactions via horrifically accurate imaginings of one-on-one encounters–encounters that, in their microcosms of exploitation and mutual dependency, seem to speak directly to current forms of black-white relations.” –Publishers Weekly

 

After the Deluge by Kara Walker

Call Number: N 6537 .W239 A35 2007

Since she first came to the attention of the art world nearly ten years ago, Kara Walker has become one of the most important artists of her generation. Championed by the art world for her fearless embrace of challenging subject matter, Walker has created a body of work that looks unflinchingly at racial inequality in the United States. Known for her bold images using the traditional silhouette, Walker upends the genteel, Victorian origins of the medium by graphically portraying scenes from the antebellum South to explore the politics of slavery, race, and gender. Inspired by the tragedy that beset the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, Walker has created a volume exploring the interconnectedness of the subject of the sea, race, and poverty by juxtaposing examples of her work and historical works from the 19th century. This unique and important book capitalizes on Walker's deftness at graphic and visceral storytelling, affording the reader a deeply intimate experience of the difficult themes the artist explores.

 

note: unless otherwise stated, descriptions were edited from publisher information.