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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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