06: Ian Matchett on Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village by William H. Hinton

The whole people became politicized, became conscious, became active, and finally did indeed become capable of transforming their world, and, in that process, of still further transforming themselves.

When times are difficult we often look to the past for inspiration. Too often, however, these accounts share only the big moments and do little to inform us about the day-to-day action and work of changing the world. We learn that impossible feats were attempted, and at times even accomplished, but we rarely get a sense of what it looks like when people take history into their hands.

Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village is a history that explores one of those massive feats: Land Reform in 1940’s China. William Hinton was teaching English at a local school when communist forces defeated the nationalists who had upheld the centuries old landlord system. He sought to document the communist led process of land reform by joining in the lives and labor of the local town of Longbow. However, instead of giving us an appraisal of party policy, or the debate around Mao’s leadership, Hinton shares the specific process that this single 1,000-person village undertook in order to first break the landlord system, and then slowly redistribute land and labor. It is a narrative of struggle, but at the profoundly human level. The party cadre are flawed people, just like the villagers they are working alongside. The reader sees the process of trying to host public meetings, holding community accountable, motivating, reprimanding, weighing solutions and problems—in short, the work of transforming an ideal into a lived reality.

It was not Mao who made land reform in this small town, it was the relationship between cadre and the people: through debate, argument, revenge, failure, collaboration and struggle. They succeeded not because they were perfect people, but because they committed to a way of relating to each other and a common goal. Through this process they changed both themselves and their world. Here change becomes not a personal journey to enlightenment, but a radical, collective, dialectical process. 

In 2025, confronted as we are with contradiction and uncertainty, narratives like this offer us a window into our own potential. We are reminded of the ways that working people have already changed the world so many times and stood up to so many challenges. Is it so hard to imagine we can do so again?  

Every revolution creates new words. The Chinese Revolution created a whole new vocabulary. A most important word in this vocabulary was fanshen. Literally, it means “to turn the body,” or “to turn over.” To China's hundreds of millions of landless and land-poor peasants it meant to stand up, to throw off the landlord yoke, to gain land, stock, implements, and houses. But it meant much more than this. …It meant to enter a new world. That is why this book is called Fanshen. It is the story of how the peasants of Long Bow Village built a new world.

– Ian, October 2025

Ian Matchett is a queer socialist midwestern painter based in Detroit, Michigan since 2014. He attended University of Michigan and received degrees in Political Science and Studio Art. His work is primarily focused on the humanity and drives of political organizers and working people. It explores what motivates someone to join a cause, and see themselves in collective history; and how understandings of leadership, memory, and perception can shape that engagement. His work draws inspiration from the social realist tradition and his experiences as a community organizer. He is currently the Director of Swords into Plowshares Gallery, and an Adjunct Professor at the College for Creative Studies.

05: megan major on The Wall by Marlen haushofer

I wouldn’t say my relationship with reading is fraught, but it isn’t as consistent as I'd like it to be. The same could be said about my relationship with writing. Both nourish me; both expand my thoughts, widen my perspectives, and help me live outside of myself. So, why then, am I so determined to put them off? Why insist on dwelling in darkness, haunted by ghosts long due to be expelled? Maybe my relationships with reading and writing are fraught after all.  

With today’s mounting anxieties, it’s easy to get trapped in hopelessness and helplessness. It’s tempting to disengage but the more we try to ignore our problems, the more they return in unmanageable ways. I constantly have to remind myself that immersing ourselves in the art of others, as well as in our own, is a way to nurture spirituality and imagine how life might be lived better. That practice gives me hope for the future, even when the present feels so fucking bleak.  

I keep returning to Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, a book I read earlier this year. I didn’t even give it 5 stars, yet over time, it’s proved its lasting impact on me.  Written in the 1960’s, the novel follows a woman who wakes up one morning to find herself cut off from the outside world by an invisible wall. Everything on the other side of the wall appears frozen in time and she must find ways to survive in her new isolated reality. She becomes the caretaker of several animals, lives off the land, and keeps a journal without the expectation that anyone will ever read it.  

Her story is a reminder that survival is not purely physical but spiritual as well. Even in isolation, meaning can be made through care, attention, and imagination. Unlike her, we can lean on community and don’t have to move forward alone.  

I don’t know if art can change the world, but I use it as a tool to help improve my own

– Megan, October 2025

Megan Major is a Detroit-based artist and co-organizer of the Detroit Art Book Fair, an annual event that brings together independent publishers and artists to share their work with the public. Working primarily with photography and the artist book, her practice reflects on memory, transformation, and the quiet tensions between preservation and decay. While most of her books are photo-based, A Book of Images incorporates her own writing, extending her exploration of how the visual and the verbal can coexist as parallel forms of memory.

Through the Detroit Art Book Fair, Megan helps cultivate space for artists and small presses. She is dedicated to expanding access to independent publishing and creative exchange. Her recent contribution to Nox Library’s 30-Second Review series reflects her belief in art as a means of endurance and imagination, a way to nurture connection even in times of fragmentation.

04: 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.

03: 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

View the Black Art Library’s list of Children’s books here.

Donate to the Black Art Library here!

02: 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. 

01: Isabella Achenbach On The Artist As Curator (An Anthology) edited by Elena Filipovic

From Pressed Coffee 02