'Free as they want to be': Artists Committed to Memory is the companion publication to the FotoFocus biennial exhibition that is scheduled for Fall 2022 and will run at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center until Spring 2023. This project considers the historic and contemporary role that photography and film have played in remembering legacies of slavery and its aftermath while examining the social lives of Black Americans within various places including the land, at home, in photographic albums, at historic sites, and in public memory. This exhibition acknowledges artists' constant involvement with efforts to explore the possibilities of freedom and their relationship to it. Their quest to be 'as free as they want to be' is envisioned in the subject matter they explore as well as in their persistent drive to innovate aesthetic practices in photographic media. The publication presents some 20 artists working in photography, video, silkscreen, projection, and mixed media installation. Free as they want to be is inspired by the words of James Baldwin and the timely theme of FotoFocus, World Record, as well as events of late that have shaped the world as we know it. The artists selected for this publication are on the frontlines, creating, documenting, and writing. The works they have conceived reflect defining moments in the struggle for racial justice and equality. Free as they want to be presents an occasion to reflect upon the past, to mark significant defining moments - both triumphs and tragedies - that characterize a people and their experiences in the present - and to propose future possibilities. The artists offer images that advance a different sense of empowerment. Their images thus play an integral part in casting resilient narratives as they commemorate endurance, longevity, and accomplishment. The timing of a publication like this could not be more urgent given the human toll of the pandemic, widening economic disparities, the threat of war, voting rights, global migration crises, and quotidian violence. Proposed Artists: Terry Adkins; Radcliffe Bailey; J.P. Ball Studio; Sadie Barnett; Dawoud Bey; Sheila Pree Bright; Bisa Butler; Omar Victor Diop; Nona Faustine; Adama Delphine Fawundu; Daesha Devon Harris; Isaac Julien; Cathy Opie; Hank Willis Thomas; Lava Thomas; Carrie Mae Weems; Wendel White; William Earle Williams; anonymous tintype photographer - photo album

Published to accompany an exhibition at MK Gallery, this is the first major survey of the work of contemporary British artist and photographer Ingrid Pollard, nominated for the Turner Prize 2022. This publication provides the first overview of works by British artist and photographer Ingrid Pollard. Pollard is renowned for using portrait and landscape photography to question our relationship with the natural world and to interrogate social constructs such as Britishness, race, sexuality and identity. Working across a variety of techniques from photography, printmaking, drawing and installation to artists' books, video and audio, Pollard combines meticulous research and experimental processes to make art that is at once deeply personal and socially resonant. 'Ingrid Pollard's practice has long been focused on the human body, astro-physics and geology, and in particular geology in the formation of the stars and planets. The title of this publication - Carbon Slowly Turning - invites us to reflect on geological time in relation to human time. On the one hand, the millennia in which carbon, rock and other natural materials are made, and on the other, the brevity of human existence by comparison and the affecting nature of geology on the human form. A number of Pollard's works reflect on the cyclical nature of history and human experience, where everything is subject to change, sometimes over hundreds or thousands of years, at other times in the blink of an eye.' - Gilane Tawadros, Curator, writer and CEO, DACS 'Ingrid Pollard's work slows down our looking to create space to consider alternative formations of history and landscape. Across four decades she has re-scripted Britishness, looking back in order that we might move forward differently. This is a profound and timely exploration of this vital British artist.' - Maria Balshaw, Director, Tate This book accompanies an exhibition at MK Gallery and Turner Contemporary, curated by Gilane Tawadros, with the artist, and supported by the Freelands Award 2020. Edited by Fay Blanchard and Anthony Spira. Essays by Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Cheryl Finley, Paul Gilroy, Mason Leaver-Yap and Gilane Tawadros.

A vivid and moving celebration of the ways that Black Americans have shaped and been shaped by photography, from its inception to the present day. A Picture Gallery of the Soul presents the work of more than one hundred Black American artists whose practice incorporates the photographic medium. Organized by the Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the University of Minnesota, this group exhibition samples a range of photographic expressions produced over three centuries, from traditional photography to mixed media and conceptual art. From the daguerreotypes made by Jules Lion in New Orleans in 1840 to the Instagram post of the Baltimore Uprising made by Devin Allen in 2015, photography has chronicled Black American life, and Black Americans have defined the possibilities of photography. Frederick Douglass recognized the quick, easy, and inexpensive reproducibility of photography and developed a theoretical framework for understanding its impact on public discourse, which he delivered as a series of four lectures during the Civil War. It has been widely acknowledged that Douglass, the subject of 160 photographic portraits and the most photographed American of the nineteenth century, anticipated that the history of American photography and the history of Black American culture and politics would be deeply intertwined. A Picture Gallery of the Soul honors the diverse visions of Blackness made manifest through the lens of photography. Published in association with the Katherine E. Nash Gallery. Exhibition dates: Katherine E. Nash Gallery: September 13-December 10, 2022.

How an eighteenth-century engraving of a slave ship became a cultural icon of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance One of the most iconic images of slavery is a schematic wood engraving depicting the human cargo hold of a slave ship. First published by British abolitionists in 1788, it exposed this widespread commercial practice for what it really was-shocking, immoral, barbaric, unimaginable. Printed as handbills and broadsides, the image Cheryl Finley has termed the "slave ship icon" was easily reproduced, and by the end of the eighteenth century it was circulating by the tens of thousands around the Atlantic rim. Committed to Memory provides the first in-depth look at how this artifact of the fight against slavery became an enduring symbol of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance. Finley traces how the slave ship icon became a powerful tool in the hands of British and American abolitionists, and how its radical potential was rediscovered in the twentieth century by Black artists, activists, writers, filmmakers, and curators. Finley offers provocative new insights into the works of Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, and many others. She demonstrates how the icon was transformed into poetry, literature, visual art, sculpture, performance, and film-and became a medium through which diasporic Africans have reasserted their common identity and memorialized their ancestors. Beautifully illustrated, Committed to Memory features works from around the world, taking readers from the United States and England to West Africa and the Caribbean. It shows how contemporary Black artists and their allies have used this iconic eighteenth-century engraving to reflect on the trauma of slavery and come to terms with its legacy.

"An inspiring makeshift ingenuity....These mirror images with their uncanny resemblances traverse space and time, spotlighting the black lives that have been silenced by the canon of western art, while also inviting us to interrogate the present." -Times (UK) Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter Brathwaite has thoughtfully researched and reimagined more than one hundred artworks featuring portraits of Black sitters-all posted to social media with the caption "Rediscovering #blackportraiture through #gettymuseumchallenge." Rediscovering Black Portraiture collects more than fifty of Brathwaite's most intriguing re-creations. Introduced by Brathwaite and framed by contributions from experts in art history and visual culture, this fascinating book offers a nuanced look at the complexities and challenges of building identity within the African diaspora and how such forces have informed Black portraits over time. Artworks featured include The Adoration of the Magi by Georges Trubert, Portrait of an Unknown Man by Jan Mostaert, Rice n Peas by Sonia Boyce, and many more. This volume also invites readers behind the scenes, offering a glimpse of the elegant artifice of Brathwaite's props, setup, and process. An urgent and compelling exploration of embodiment, representation, and agency, Rediscovering Black Portraiture serves to remind us that Black subjects have been portrayed in art for nearly a millennium and that their stories demand to be told.

Whitfield Lovell: Passages accompanies a major traveling exhibition of the artist s masterful conte crayon drawings, assemblages, and multi-sensory installations that focus on aspects of Black history, raising questions about identity, memory, and America s collective heritage. Whiteld Lovell (b. 1959, Bronx), a 2007 MacArthur Foundation fellowship recipient and conceptual artist, creates exquisite drawings inspired by his own collection of vintage photographs of unidentied African Americans taken between the Emancipation Proclamation and the civil rights movement. He pairs his meticulously rendered drawings done on paper or on salvaged wooden boards with found objects, creating enigmatic assemblages and stand-alone tableaux that are rich with symbolism and ambiguity and evoking personal memories, ancestral connections, and the collective American past. This richly illustrated volume features essays by leading scholars that contextualize Lovell s work through the exploration of compelling elements such as sound and card playing, contemplating memory as method.

A global history of self-taught artists advocating for a nuanced understanding of modern and contemporary art often challenged by the establishment When the art world has paid attention to makers from outside the cultural establishment, including so-called outsider and self-taught artists, it has generally been within limiting categories. Yet these artists, including many women, people with disabilities, and people of color, have had a transformative effect on the history of modern art. Responding to growing interest in these artists, this book offers a nuanced history of their work and how it has been understood from the early twentieth century to the present day. Nonconformers includes work by Henry Darger, Hilma af Klint, and Bill Traylor alongside that of many other artists who deserve widespread recognition. The book reviews how self-taught artists influenced key movements of twentieth-century art and highlights the voices of contemporary practitioners, offering new interviews with William Scott, Mamadou Cisse, and George Widener. An international group of contributors addresses topics such as the development of the Black Folk Art movement in America and l'Art Brut in France, the creative process of self-taught artists working outside of traditional studios, and the themes of figuration, landscape, and abstraction. Global in scope and with chronological breadth, this alternative narrative is an essential introduction to the genre long known as "Outsider Art."