“What I want to do is code-switch. To have there be layers of history and politics, but also this heady, arty stuff—inside jokes, black humor—that you might have to take a while to research if you want to really get it.”—Sanford Biggers Sanford Biggers (b. 1970) is a Harlem-based artist working in various media including painting, sculpture, video, and performance. He describes his practice as “code-switching”—mixing disparate elements to create layers of meaning—to account for his wide-ranging interests. This catalogue focuses on a series of repurposed quilts (many made in the 19th century) that embodies this interest in mixture. Informed by the significance of quilts to the Underground Railroad, Biggers transforms the quilts into new works using materials such as paint, tar, glitter, and charcoal to add his own layers of codes, whether they be historical, political, or purely artistic. Insightful essays survey Biggers’s career, his art in relation to music, and the history upon which the series draws. Also featured is a short yet powerful graphic essay by an award-winning illustrator that introduces the layered meanings inherent in the art and craft of quilting.

In fall 2018 CAM presented the first museum exhibition to focus on Sanford Biggers's BAM series. The catalog includes a foreword by CAM executive director Lisa Melandri and text by prominent critics and art historians Naomi Beckwith, Christa Clarke, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad. Exhibition: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, USA (07.09.-30.12.2018), Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, USA (28.06.?22.09.2019) and Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford, USA (08.10.-15.12.2019).

Negro Sculpture (1915) was the first critical response to African sculpture, challenging prejudices and misconceptions around this subject. It quickly became a crucial text for the European avant-garde and today remains indispensable to understanding the shift in discussion towards non-European art taking place at the time.

Filled with reproductions of Kehinde Wiley’s bold, colorful, and monumental work, this book encompasses the artist’s various series of paintings as well as his sculptural work—which boldly explore ideas about race, power, and tradition. Celebrated for his classically styled paintings that depict African American men in heroic poses, Kehinde Wiley is among the expanding ranks of prominent black artists—such as Sanford Biggers, Yinka Shonibare, Mickalene Thomas, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye—who are reworking art history and questioning its depictions of people of color. Co-published with the Brooklyn Museum of Art for the major touring retrospective, this volume surveys Wiley’s career from 2001 to the present. It includes early portraits of the men Wiley observed on Harlem’s streets, and which laid the foundation for his acclaimed reworkings of Old Master paintings by Titian, van Dyke, Manet, and others, in which he replaces historical subjects with young African American men in contemporary attire: puffy jackets, sneakers, hoodies, and baseball caps. Also included is a generous selection from Wiley’s ongoing World Stage project; several of his enormous Down paintings; striking male portrait busts in bronze; and examples from the artist’s new series of stained glass windows. Accompanying the illustrations are essays that introduce readers to the arc of Wiley’s career, its critical reception, and ongoing evolution.

Designed for the tourist seeking a fresh, authentic, Roman experience, this intimate, stimulating guide explores Rome's splendid modern architecture, its bustling close-in neighborhoods, and its rivers, magnificent fountains, and aqueducts. Itineraries take the reader to Fascist and occupied Rome of World War II, the nearby Alban Hills, and the Eternal City's lesser-known green spaces. Innovative chapters feature cultural and artistic Rome, including art galleries, jazz clubs, film locations, and rooftop bars--even places that offer a sumptuous (and free) "vernissage" of wine and hors d'oeuvres. With Bill and Dianne as guides-their voices part of the experience-the curious traveler will discover a housing project built under Mussolini; ascend a little-known holy Roman road on the city's outskirts; spend an evening in the out-of-the-way, artsy neighborhood of Pigneto; enjoy a trattoria where only Italians eat; and, among the book's many informative, creative "sidebars," find in one the troubling story of Rome's Jewish community, and in another locate sites in "Angels & Demons." 16 maps, 70 photos, an index, and detailed directions and instructions (including websites) make this "new" Rome easily accessible. For the frugally-minded, at times adventurous (at times armchair) traveler. Foreword by Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni.

Since launching his career at the Village Voice in the early 1980s Greg Tate has been one of the premiere critical voices on contemporary Black music, art, literature, film, and politics. Flyboy 2 provides a panoramic view of the past thirty years of Tate's influential work. Whether interviewing Miles Davis or Ice Cube, reviewing an Azealia Banks mixtape or Suzan-Lori Parks's Topdog/Underdog, discussing visual artist Kara Walker or writer Clarence Major, or analyzing the ties between Afro-futurism, Black feminism, and social movements, Tate's resounding critical insights illustrate how race, gender, and class become manifest in American popular culture. Above all, Tate demonstrates through his signature mix of vernacular poetics and cultural theory and criticism why visionary Black artists, intellectuals, aesthetics, philosophies, and politics matter to twenty-first-century America.

Named a Best Art Book of 2017 by the New York Times and Artforum In South of Pico Kellie Jones explores how the artists in Los Angeles's black communities during the 1960s and 1970s created a vibrant, productive, and engaged activist arts scene in the face of structural racism. Emphasizing the importance of African American migration, as well as L.A.'s housing and employment politics, Jones shows how the work of black Angeleno artists such as Betye Saar, Charles White, Noah Purifoy, and Senga Nengudi spoke to the dislocation of migration, L.A.'s urban renewal, and restrictions on black mobility. Jones characterizes their works as modern migration narratives that look to the past to consider real and imagined futures. She also attends to these artists' relationships with gallery and museum culture and the establishment of black-owned arts spaces. With South of Pico, Jones expands the understanding of the histories of black arts and creativity in Los Angeles and beyond.

As the accompanying publication to the largest exhibition of contemporary art ever assembled in the U.S., the Prospect.1 New Orleans catalogue is one of the most sought-after art books of 2008-09. Featuring new illustrated essays on New Orleans and its place in twenty-first century America by Prospect.1 organizer Dan Cameron, art historian Barbara Bloemink, journalist Lolis Eric Elie and curator Claire Tancons, the book also includes a fully illustrated section on each of the 81 participating artists, who include William Kentridge, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Fred Tomaselli, Cai Guo Qiang, Sanford Biggers, Tony Fitzpatrick, Amy Sillman, Malick Sidibe, Clare E. Rojas and Monica Bonvicini, among many others. Locating contemporary art in the cauldron that is New Orleans adds a new dimension to the book and its visuals: It's an incisive statement on art making and humanity today. Dan Cameron, the Director and Curator of Prospect.1 New Orleans, is an international New York-based curator who was inspired to organize an exhibition in New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Cameron has been a frequent visitor to New Orleans since the late 1980s, and he organized the 1995 New Orleans Triennial for the New Orleans Museum of Art. In May 2007 Cameron took on the position of Visual Arts Director at the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), one of the leading venues for new art in the South, and a principal venue for Prospect.1 New Orleans.

The Artists' and Writers' Cookbook is a collection of personal, food-related stories with recipes from 76 contemporary artists and writers. Inspired by a book from 1961, The (original) Artists' & Writers' Cookbook included recipes from the likes of Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Marianne Moore, and Harper Lee. This new, vibrantly illustrated version includes stories and recipes from Anthony Doerr, Leanne Shapton, Joyce Carol Oates, John Currin and Rachel Feinstein, Ed Ruscha, Neil Gaiman, Edwidge Danticat, Aimee Bender, Gregory Crewdson, James Franco, Francesca Lia Block, Swoon, Nelson DeMille, Rick Moody and Laurel Nakadate, Nikki Giovanni, T.C. Boyle, Lev Grossman, Roz Chast, Heidi Julavits, Marina Abramović, Curtis Sittenfeld, Julia Alvarez, and many others. In The Artists' and Writers' Cookbook,Anthony Doerr lures us out into the wild to find huckleberries andhappiness. Neil Gaiman makes a perfectly eerie cheese omelet while Ed Ruschaassociates his cactus omelet with "a time of doom." Yiyun Li eats rations inBeijing while Edwidge Danticat prepares a soup to celebrate freedom. NelsonDeMille reminisces about a meal he ate 40 years ago when serving in Vietnam;Kamrooz Aram recalls childhood "picnics" in his basement in Tehran during airraids. Sanford Biggers updates a soul food classic-"something tasty to lessenthe bitter taste of consistent, systematic oppression." Paul Muldoon and AimeeBender conjure food-related apocalyptic visions. Marina Abramović shares adish best consumed on top of a volcano, Elissa Schappell dreams of playing SergeGainsbourg records to snails, and Padgett Powell tastes a dish that reverses timeand space. Daniel Wallace woos with an eggplant sandwich. Francesca Lia Blocktells us how to fall in love. The essays are at turns comedic and heart-wrenching, personal and apocalyptic, with recipes that are enchanting to read and recreate. One part cookbook and one part intimate self-portrait, The Artists' and Writers' Cookbook is a portal into the kitchens and personal lives of an unmatched collection of contemporary artists and writers.