Art On My Mind
In Art on My Mind, bell hooks, a leading cultural critic, responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting, and criticizing art and aesthetics in an art world increasingly concerned with identity politics. Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community.\ \ A response to the dearth of...
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In Art on My Mind, bell hooks, a leading cultural critic, responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting, and criticizing art and aesthetics in an art world increasingly concerned with identity politics. Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community.Publishers WeeklyA prolific critical writer, hooks has contributed a collection of essays on contemporary art and what she describes as the troubling relationship between the dominant white, male art world, its practices, protocols and biases, and the creative production of African American artists-particularly women-and others whose works grapple with issues of identity and social context. Decrying the lack of black critics writing on today's art, hooks provides a minute dissection of issues of race, gender and ``cultural hegemony'' in the works of the late Jean-Michel Basquiat; examines the historical impact of photography in black life and the trenchant intelligence and beauty of Carrie Mae Weems's photographs; and highlights important critical works by black art historian Sylvia Boone and black architect LaVerne Wells-Bowie. Hooks has a knack for balancing flat academic jargon with vivid language, illuminating the historical and psychoanalytic underpinnings of her topics while anticipating the visceral responses of a lay audience. Despite her generic invocations of the dominant, marginalizing Eurocentric patriarchy, etc., etc., her passionate and highly personal exploration of these and other issues (including a distressing account of her own illness and an aestheticized betrayal by an artist friend) transforms academic abstractions into recognizable human patterns linking the everyday lives of Americans, black or white. (July)
Introduction: Art MattersArt on My Mind1The Poetics of Soul: Art for Everyone10Talking Art with Alison Saar22Altars of Sacrifice: Re-membering Basquiat35Subversive Beauty: New Modes of Contestation49In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life54Diasporic Landscapes of Longing65Talking Art with Carrie Mae Weems74Facing Difference: The Black Female Body94Talking Art as the Spirit Moves Us101Critical Genealogies: Writing Black Art108Beauty Laid Bare: Aesthetics in the Ordinary119Women Artists: The Creative Process125Being the Subject of Art133Workers for Artistic Freedom138Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice145Architecture in Black Life: Talking Space with LaVerne Wells-Bowie152Aesthetic Interventions163Straighten Up and Fly Right: Talking Art with Emma Amos171Intervening Printmakers: Talking Art with Margo Humphreys194Representing the Black Male Body202The Radiance of Red: Blood Works213
\ Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly\ A prolific critical writer, hooks has contributed a collection of essays on contemporary art and what she describes as the troubling relationship between the dominant white, male art world, its practices, protocols and biases, and the creative production of African American artists-particularly women-and others whose works grapple with issues of identity and social context. Decrying the lack of black critics writing on today's art, hooks provides a minute dissection of issues of race, gender and ``cultural hegemony'' in the works of the late Jean-Michel Basquiat; examines the historical impact of photography in black life and the trenchant intelligence and beauty of Carrie Mae Weems's photographs; and highlights important critical works by black art historian Sylvia Boone and black architect LaVerne Wells-Bowie. Hooks has a knack for balancing flat academic jargon with vivid language, illuminating the historical and psychoanalytic underpinnings of her topics while anticipating the visceral responses of a lay audience. Despite her generic invocations of the dominant, marginalizing Eurocentric patriarchy, etc., etc., her passionate and highly personal exploration of these and other issues (including a distressing account of her own illness and an aestheticized betrayal by an artist friend) transforms academic abstractions into recognizable human patterns linking the everyday lives of Americans, black or white. (July)\ \
