An invaluable celebration of Black creativity.
Making their voices heard.
Art historian Farrington has edited a comprehensive collection of statements from more than 60 Black artists, from the turn of the 20th century to the present, reflecting on their aesthetic goals, their connection to European and indigenous artistic movements, and their response to the call from the community to create a Black aesthetic. Some artists gained easy recognition; others struggled with poverty and bias: “The pathology of racism has affected most, if not all, of them,” Farrington reveals. Organized chronologically and thematically, the collection begins in 1879 with Henry Tanner, the first African American to enroll at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and Alain Locke, a leading Black intellectual and Howard University professor. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s is represented by 10 artists, including sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller, who studied with Rodin, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence. Two sections are devoted to the Black diaspora: The first, which emerged as a sister movement of the Harlem Renaissance, aimed to foster international Black consciousness in the arts; the later movement, in the 1960s and ’70s, sought racial solidarity in the wake of decolonization. Other sections gather artists’ responses to abstract art, activism during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, Black feminist art, and conceptual art. A final section, titled “Rethinking Race,” features artists working at the turn of the 21st century who engage with—and argue about—the term “post-Black.” Included in this section are some well-known figures: Jean Michel-Basquiat, MacArthur Fellow Kara Walker, and Obama portraitist Kehinde Wiley. The handsomely produced volume includes 14 color images and 21 black-and-white images. Each of the book’s nine sections is contextualized with a perceptive introduction.
An invaluable celebration of Black creativity.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780520384125
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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