Ceaseless experimentation is the driving force behind Radcliffe Bailey's extraordinarily diverse body of work. In the past decade alone he has created sculptures, paintings, installations, and works on paper, incorporating everything from coffee to glass to sheet music to tobacco leaves. This volume reproduces more than 70 works, many of which have never been published before, and considers Bailey's work in a major essay and four shorter discussions. In these large- and small-scale pieces Bailey explores ideas of ancestry, race, memory, struggle, and sacrifice, including the artist's own engagement with African sculpture in connection with an investigation into his family's DNA. AUTHOR: Carol Thompson is the Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art at the High Museum of Art. ILLUSTRATIONS 115 colour

Water Graves considers representations of lives lost to water in contemporary poetry, fiction, theory, mixed-media art, video production, and underwater sculptures. From sunken slave ships to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Valérie Loichot investigates the lack of official funeral rites in the Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, waters that constitute both early and contemporary sites of loss for the enslaved, the migrant, the refugee, and the destitute. Unritual, or the privation of ritual, Loichot argues, is a state more absolute than desecration. Desecration implies a previous sacred observance--a temple, a grave, a ceremony. Unritual, by contrast, denies the sacred from the beginning. In coastal Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Miami, Haiti, Martinique, Cancun, and Trinidad and Tobago, the artists and writers featured in Water Graves—an eclectic cast that includes Beyoncé, Radcliffe Bailey, Edwidge Danticat, Édouard Glissant, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jason deCaires Taylor, Édouard Duval-Carrié, Natasha Trethewey, and Kara Walker, among others—are an archipelago connected by a history of the slave trade and environmental vulnerability. In addition to figuring death by drowning in the unritual—whether in the context of the aftermath of slavery or of ecological and human-made catastrophes—their aesthetic creations serve as memorials, dirges, tombstones, and even material supports for the regrowth of life underwater.

In an updated new edition of this classic work, a team of highly respected sociologists, political scientists, economists, criminologists, and legal scholars scrutinize the resilience of racial inequality in twenty-first-century America. Whitewashing Race argues that contemporary racism manifests as discrimination in nearly every realm of American life, and is further perpetuated by failures to address the compounding effects of generations of disinvestment. Police violence, mass incarceration of Black people, employment and housing discrimination, economic deprivation, and gross inequities in health care combine to deeply embed racial inequality in American society and economy. Updated to include the most recent evidence, including contemporary research on the racially disparate effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, this edition of Whitewashing Race analyzes the consequential and ongoing legacy of "disaccumulation" for Black communities and lives. While some progress has been made, the authors argue that real racial justice can be achieved only if we actively attack and undo pervasive structural racism and its legacies.

In Counterlife Christopher Freeburg poses a question to contemporary studies of slavery and its aftereffects: what if freedom, agency, and domination weren't the overarching terms used for thinking about Black life? In pursuit of this question, Freeburg submits that current scholarship is too preoccupied with demonstrating enslaved Africans' acts of political resistance, and instead he considers Black social life beyond such concepts. He examines a rich array of cultural texts that depict slavery—from works by Frederick Douglass, Radcliffe Bailey, and Edward Jones to spirituals, the television cartoon The Boondocks, and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained—to show how enslaved Africans created meaning through artistic creativity, religious practice, and historical awareness both separate from and alongside concerns about freedom. By arguing for the impossibility of tracing slave subjects solely through their pursuits of freedom, Freeburg reminds readers of the arresting power and beauty that the enigmas of Black social life contain.

"Bill Traylor (ca. 1853-1949) is regarded today as one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century. A black man born into slavery in Alabama, he was an eyewitness to history--the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the Great Migration, and the steady rise of African American urban culture in the South. Traylor would not live to see the civil rights movement, but he was among those who laid its foundation. Starting around 1939, Traylor--by then in his late eighties and living on the streets of Montgomery--took up pencil and paintbrush to attest to his existence and point of view. In keeping with this radical step, the paintings and drawings he made are visually striking and politically assertive; they include simple yet powerful distillations of tales and memories as well as spare, vibrantly colored abstractions. When Traylor died, he left behind more than one thousand works of art. In Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, Leslie Umberger considers more than two hundred artworks to provide the most comprehensive and in-depth study of the artist to date; she examines his life, art, and powerful drive to bear witness through the only means he had, pictures. The author draws on a wealth of historical documents--including federal and state census records, birth and death certificates, slave schedules, and interviews with family members-- to clarify the record of Traylor's personal history and family life. The story of his art opens in the late 1930s, when Traylor first received attention for his pencil drawings on found board, and concludes with the posthumous success of his oeuvre"--

In the Black Fantastic assembles art and imagery from across the African diaspora that embraces ideas of the mythic and the speculative. Neither Afrofuturism nor Magic Realism, but inhabiting its own universe, In the Black Fantastic brings to life a cultural movement that conjures otherworldly visions out of the everyday Black experience and beyond looking at how speculative fictions in Black art and culture are boldly reimagining perspectives on race, gender, identity and the body in the 21st century. Transcending time, space and genre to span art, design, fashion architecture, film, literature and popular culture from African myth to future fantasies and beyond, this vital, timely and compelling publication is an expressive exploration of Black popular culture at its most wildly imaginative, artistically ambitious and politically urgent.

A mother explains to her child all the ways her love remains even while she's away.

Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic is a collection of interviews, critical essays, and artwork that consider matters of life and death having to do with breath, both allegorical and literal. Bringing into mutual proximity the ecological, public health, political, and spiritual crises that came to the fore in 2020, this book considers these compounding events and how they impact one another and asks with critical optimism what can happen in this moment of transition.

Double Consciousness explores the conceptual art practices of African-American artists over the past 35 years, using as its underpinning, the "reflexive" nature of art-making which emerged with the avant-garde of the late 1960s. The exhibition chronicles conceptual art as practice of ideas as manifested through the use of everyday materials and objects--performance as action; interventions or critiques; as well as writings. It also focuses on the evolution of conceptual art in subsequent decades as a tool to deconstruct existing precepts regarding gender and race, and as a strategy in presenting ideas regarding the complexities of contemporary society and how artists skillfully negotiate these complexities as it relates to themselves and the community at large. The exhibition's concept is an aesthetic contribution to the rethinking of DuBois's "double conciousness" theory that asserts that African-Americans are no longer relegated to looking at themselves through the eyes of others, but rather through their own gaze. The catalogue features a chronology of significant events that have helped shape the language and ideas of artists over the last century as well as an anthology by a few artists in the exhibition--Adrian Piper, Charles Gaines, Arthur Jafa and Howardena Pindell, to name a few. Participating artists include Terry Adkins, Edgar Arceneaux, Sanford Biggers, Ellen Gallagher, Jennie C. Jones, Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, Gary Simmons, Nari Ward and others.

No one would have guessed a marriage could sprout from a one-night stand, but Holly Radcliffe and Austin Bailey appear to be written in the stars. From the backseat of Austin's Jeep to the altar they come. The town of Lake Starlight along with the Bailey's are prepping for the event of the year, but as usual things never go smoothly with these nine siblings and let's not forget Grandma Dori! This is a novella in the Bailey series!