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 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
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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