07: Art Historian Samantha Noël on In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe
In light of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement after the death of George Floyd, one book that brings me solace as I think about the inexplicable prevalence of premature Black death and the enduring resolve of Black life is Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. This heartfelt yet powerful text offers a close look at the “wake” in all of its iterations as it has manifested in the lives of Black people in the Americas across time and space. For Sharpe, to be in the wake is to continuously be aware of slavery’s unfolding presence in the lives of Black people, beginning not only with the trans-Atlantic slave trade but also staying awake to keep watch with the dead during wakes, and, more importantly, developing particular kinds of enduring consciousness (as in being woke) as forms of resistance.
Sharpe’s enquiry into this study begins on a personal level as she discusses the loss of loved ones in her family, but then connects them to the loss of other Black lives that succumb to the afterlives of slavery -- or the term systemic racism that is widely used in popular culture these days. These afterlives of slavery consist of everything from incarceration, limited access to healthcare and education, to the crises of black maternal health and inequities in living wages. Throughout the book, Sharpe examines visual, literary and quotidian representations of Black life that exalt the primacy of being in the wake which ultimately reminds us of the enduring spirit of Black life.
– Samantha Noël
Samantha A. Noël is an Associate Professor of Art History at Wayne State University. She received her B.A. in Fine Art from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University. Her research interests revolve around the history of art, visual culture and performance of the Black Diaspora. She has published on black modern and contemporary art and performance in journals such as Small Axe, Third Text and Art Journal. Noël’s current book, Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2021), examines black modernism in the early twentieth century, particularly how tropicality functioned as a unifying element in African Diasporic art and performance.
06: Asmaa Walton and the Black Art Library on Children’s Books
My name is Asmaa Walton and I’m the founder of the Black Art Library. I recently created a list of all the children’s books I have been collecting for the library so I could share it with teachers, parents, and really anyone who was interested. Children’s books have been some of my favorite to collect because I’m drawn to the illustrations!
All of the books are about Black artists or were created by Black artists. Every book I added to the list was wonderful but I will give some short reviews on a few of them!
Bronzeville Boys and Girls
By Gwendolyn Brooks and illustrated by Faith Ringgold
Ages 7-10
This book is honestly great for not only kids but kids at heart! I loved reading it so much. It is a collection of poems that tells the stories of different boys and girls in Bronzeville. This illustrations are by Faith Ringgold and they are fantastic.
Jacob Lawrence: In the City
By Susan Goldman Rubin
Ages 2-4
This one is a board book for younger children and it is one of the only board books I’ve come across about a Black artist so I think it’s very special. Jacob Lawrence’s paintings illustrate a bustling city for the young readers.
American Struggle: Teens Respond to Jacob Lawrence
Edited by Chul R. Kim
This is one that I didn’t put on the list because it’s one of the few YA books that I have. In this book multiple teens share their perspectives on the timeless work of Jacob Lawrence. This is a really unique book to me but it is not often that we’re able to hear from teens about how art speaks to them.
Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat
Ages 6-9
By Javaka Steptoe
The illustrations in this book are so beautiful. It takes us through a young Jean-Michel’s journey to becoming an artist and we’re introduce to members of his family and the roles they played in introducing him to art. It’s a great story.
– Asmaa Walton
Asmaa Walton is a Detroit native and the founder of the Black Art Library. The Black Art Library is a collection of books she began curating on Black visual arts in early 2020. The goal is to turn this collection of books to a non-lending library in Detroit to be an educational resource for the Black community and beyond.
Asmaa has an MA in Arts Politics from New York University and a BFA in Arts Education from Michigan State University. She is currently finishing up as the 2019-20 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow at the St. Louis Art Museum.
04: Navigating an endless stream of things to learn from and of
I began the year reading Lydia Davis's shorts, then Merve Emre's Once and Future Feminist. By March I was only panic-reading the news. Then I tried to digest the pandemic by reading Paul Preciado's "Learning From the Virus,” but also digging back to Virginia Woolf's "On Being Ill," and other seminal texts on illness, ailments, and culture.
At the time George Floyd was murdered, I was in Chicago with my partner, probably reading about a bored celebrity in their mansion or watching Breaking Bad. The world changed overnight. Perhaps because everyone was tired of being either inside or essential; perhaps because Black and Brown people were disproportionately affected by the pandemic; perhaps because of all of the other events that had transpired in the past 400 years, it felt like a time for action.
Shortly after the protests began there was a flood of organized documents, reading lists, and spreadsheets. The endless bounty of knowledge omitted from American pedagogy could fill, well, a library. There are so many things on my reading list now: books I'm upset I wasn't given in my youth, books I'm ashamed I didn't know about. And to be clear, my reading list isn't exclusively about race. There is so much to learn about the world, but the lens through which I intake these things is always going to be through what I have learned in the American school system—a system predicated on race.
I'm trying to read, listen, and act in equal measures in order to interrogate my own spheres of references and knowledge. Because it's been so hard to sit down to read a book, I am starting with the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the NYT. I am a maximalist, and this project has it all: podcasts, long-form journalism, extensive criticism, poetry, compact phone-legibility, and more. It's such a robust bank of information about the insidious genesis of contemporary racist structures and systems. At once poetic and disruptive, it provides deep learning for thirsty allies. It's hard to review a compendium of works in medias res, but I can safely guess that there is no conclusion to the 1619 Project at this time. What happens next? I think we're trying to answer that right now.
I've definitely gone past 30 seconds. 4.5/5 stars—half a point deducted because it is not a book and this is a book review column. But, anything Ted Cruz decries as propaganda is probably going to be excellent.
–Tizziana Baldenebro
Tizziana Baldenebro is a Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). Her practice emphasizes critical research and documentation, privileging historically undervalued and underrepresented artists and designers. Tizziana received a Masters of Architecture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.
02: On The Artist As Curator (An Anthology) edited by Elena Filipovic
From Pressed Coffee 02
I like books where I don’t have to start at page one, and finish hundreds of pages (and weeks!) later. The Artist As Curator (An Anthology) has been my go-to quarantine read, with 22 scholarly essays about exhibitions that changed the way people view and think about art and, equally important, how and why it is shown. The important connecting thread between each of the spotlighted, ground-breaking exhibitions: they were all curated by artists. The editor, Elena Filipovic, wrote in her introduction,
Many artist-curated exhibitions—perhaps the most striking and influential of the genre—are the result of artists treating the exhibition as an artistic medium in its own right, an articulation of form. In the process, they often disown or dismantle the very idea of the “exhibition” as it is conventionally thought, putting its genre, category, format, or protocols at stake and thus entirely shifting the terms of what an exhibition could be.
Questioning and shifting the form of exhibitions feels particularly pertinent today, and these historic examples of artist-initiated projects are important research (and inspiration!) for contemporary innovation—the best kind of which usually doesn’t come from within institutions.
– Isabella Achenbach
Isabella Achenbach (IA) is based in Detroit, MI and works as an independent visual arts curator while holding a position as the curatorial affairs manager at Cranbrook Art Museum.
