BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 8.5 x 10 in. / 256 pgs / 203 color / 33 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 9/26/2017 Active
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2017 p. 3
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781942884170TRADE List Price: $45.00 CAD $62.00
AVAILABILITY In stock
TERRITORY NA ONLY
EXHIBITION SCHEDULE
London, UK Tate Modern, 7/12/17–10/22/17
Bentonville, AR Crystal Bridges, 02/02/18–04/23/18
New York Brooklyn Museum, 09/07/18–02/03/19
Los Angeles, CA The Broad, 03/23/19–09/01/19
San Francisco, CA de Young Museum, 11/09/19–03/15/20
Houston, TX Museum of Fine Arts, 04/19/20–07/19/20
The Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Feminism movements challenged artists to portray the African American fight for equality and power. Soul of a Nation documents over 200 artworks -- from painting to performance -- by some 60 artists working both individually and within groups like AfriCOBRA and the Black Arts Movement. The history of art in America is incomplete without the stories of the Black American artists working during this period of radical change.
“Soul of a Nation” opened on July 12, exactly a month before violence erupted in Charlottesville, Va., leaving a woman dead and many injured after clashes between white nationalists — including Klan members and neo-Nazis — and counter-protesters. But “Soul of a Nation” highlights art made by African-American artists between 1963 and 1983, 20 years that saw the emergence of the civil rights movement and the more militant call for black power.
“We didn’t anticipate that there would be such clear links between our show and contemporary events,” said Mark Godfrey, who curated the exhibition with Zoe Whitley. “A number of our visitors have remarked on it; it makes it even more shocking that some of the dreams of the civil rights leaders haven’t been realized.” - The New York Times
African American art in the era of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers
ABOUT THE BOOK: Surveys 1963-1983 African American Art on the 50th Anniversary of the term "Black Power" (coined by Stokely Carmicheal).Art made in the context of politics including the March on Washington, the Watts Riots, and the Black Panthers.Artists include Barkley L. Hendricks, Betye Sayer, Romare Bearden, David Hammons, Faith Ringgold, Emory Douglas, Sun Ra.
PRESS & PROMOTION: The book is published in conjunction with a major international exhibition opening at the Tate in London in Fall 2017 and travelling to the Brooklyn Museum, September 7th, 2018 - February 3rd, 2019 . Show at Tate opened to rave reviews:
“Civil rights meet aesthetics in this riveting survey of 20 crucial years of black American art and struggle” -- The Guardian
"The Black Power movement was more than just a protest group; it was a watershed moment in American history and a coming-together of enormous importance and influence -- not just socially and politically, but culturally and artistically as well.”--CNN Style
"At London’s flagship modern art gallery, Tate Modern, one of this summer’s most lauded exhibitions features work by African-American artists made in the age of Martin Luther King Jr. Yet, while “Soul of a Nation” is nominally a historical display, gallery goers spilling out of the show this week found an obvious contemporary resonance to the art they had just seen."--The New York Times
There is no other illustrated book on this topic
A great visual companion to the book from the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Dream a World Anew: The African American Experience and the Shaping of America
American contributors include Susan Cahan (Yale) author of Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power (Duke University Press, 2016) and David Driscoll, a curator of African American Art
WEST COAST INTEREST: Features Emory Douglas' graphic art from Oakland CA based Black Panthers, Noah Purifoy's Watts Tower Art Center, and the Los Angeles based Black Arts Council among others.
Edited with text by Mark Godfrey, Zoé Whitley. Contributions by Linda Goode Bryant, Susan E. Cahan, David Driskell, Edmund Barry Gaither, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Samella Lewis.
African American art in the era of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers
In the period of radical change that was 1963–83, young black artists at the beginning of their careers confronted difficult questions about art, politics and racial identity. How to make art that would stand as innovative, original, formally and materially complex, while also making work that reflected their concerns and experience as black Americans?
Soul of a Nation surveys this crucial period in American art history, bringing to light previously neglected histories of 20th-century black artists, including Sam Gilliam, Melvin Edwards, Jack Whitten, William T. Williams, Howardina Pindell, Romare Bearden, David Hammons, Barkley L. Hendricks, Senga Nengudi, Noah Purifoy, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Charles White and Frank Bowling.
The book features substantial essays from Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley, writing on abstraction and figuration, respectively. It also explores the art-historical and social contexts with subjects ranging from black feminism, AfriCOBRA and other artist-run groups to the role of museums in the debates of the period and visual art’s relation to the Black Arts Movement. Over 170 artworks by these and many other artists of the era are illustrated in full color.
2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the first use of the term “black power” by student activist Stokely Carmichael; it will also be 50 years since the US Supreme Court overturned the prohibition of interracial marriage. At this turning point in the reassessment of African American art history, Soul of a Nation is a vital contribution to this timely subject.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Soul of a Nation.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
The Guardian
Jonathan Jones
Civil rights meet aesthetics in this riveting survey of 20 crucial years of black American art and struggle ... uncovers an entire lost history of American art.
The Telegraph
Mark Hudson
This is a rich, absorbing and thought-provoking exhibition with enough themes and ideas to power three shows its size … this is an epic response to an epic subject and without doubt one of the shows of the year.
CNN
The Black Power movement was more than just a protest group; it was a watershed moment in American history and a coming-together of enormous importance and influence -- not just socially and politically, but culturally and artistically as well.
The Financial Times
The new survey of work made in two tumultuous decades of black activism reveals a prodigious range of artistic expression.
Frieze.com
Osei Bonsu
Successfully layering a broader socio-historical narrative onto a period of radical non-conformity, this is an important show, now.
Crave
Miss Rosen
A masterful catalogue published by the Tate/D.A.P., which features substantial essays that provide much-needed insights into this vastly underserved and broadly neglected period of art history.... a tour-de-force,
The Studio Museum
Thelma Golden
Soul of a Nation is a significant and transformative contribution to art history – and American history. Richly informative and deeply engaging, this volume documents the powerful role black artists had in shaping contemporary art and our society at a pivotal moment in history. It is sure to be a profoundly valuable resource … for decades to come.
New York Times
Patrick Kingsley
At London’s flagship modern art gallery, Tate Modern, one of this summer’s most lauded exhibitions features work by African-American artists made in the age of Martin Luther King Jr. Yet, while “Soul of a Nation” is nominally a historical display, gallery goers spilling out of the show this week found an obvious contemporary resonance to the art they had just seen.
Bookforum
Sara Christoph
..impresssive feat of research, presenting and contextualizing many artists who never became household names.
Socialist Review
Theresa Bennett
This is a celebration of the work of Black American artists in the 1960s and 1970s. While the art on display is inspired by the mass Civil Rights Movement in the US during that time it is incredibly poignant that the issues raised remain so relevant today.
New York Times
Roslyn Sulcas
...a sweeping look at how artists of the time responded to ideas about black identity, political activism and social responsibility.
New York Times
Roslyn Sulcas
A sweeping look at how artists of the time responded to ideas about black identity, political activism and social responsibility.
Frieze
Pernilla Holmes
[the] story of the radical, brilliant and hugely varied art made by African American artists in the political and cultural landscape of Civil Rights, Black Panthers, Blaxploitation, and other manifestations of the fight for equality in education, jobs and representation.... a diversity of aesthetics, ideas and ambition.
Artforum
Cheryl Finley
...an intense, transformative period in American art, activism, and culture, when black identity came into sharper focus and demanded to be reckoned with, while the spark of black liberation caught fire in the US, the Caribbean, and Africa.
Culture Type
Victoria L. Valentine
...a visual journey through the period with documentary photographs and full-color images of art and ephemera…. The curators expound upon a score of topics, from the Studio Museum in Harlem, Just Above Midtown Gallery, The Black Photographers Annual, and Emory Douglas and the Black Panther newspaper to abstraction shows, black women artists, FESTAC ’77, and the Wall of Respect and mural movement.
New York Review of Books
Nell Irvin Painter
This powerful work of documentary photography captures the momentum of the civil rights movement through one of its lesser known demonstrations.
The New York Times
Holland Cotter
Radiant and radical...defining the soul of black art.
Culture Type
Victoria L. Valentine
Groundbreaking.
Brooklyn Daily
Alexandra Simon
It’s black and it’s beautiful.
Vice
Taylor Hosking
Each piece in the exhibit is not so much a representation of the movement as they are physical artifacts of the revolution itself.
Elle
...a deeply wonderful, playful, and moving collection of images and text that prove her achievement of something seemingly impossible: photographing the invisible.
The New York Times
Holland Cotter
More than 60 [black artists] appear in this big, beautiful, passionate show of art that functioned as seismic detector, political persuader and defensive weapon.
New York Times
Holland Cotter
[A] big, beautiful, passionate show of art.
New York Magazine
Andria Hickey
Soul of a Nation is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of American art and the importance of black artists in that history. The book is both a record and a revelation, making the presence of African-American artists acutely visible in tandem with the radical changes that occurred in art and politics from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Forbes
Natasha Gural
Learn about the artists who didn’t leave the same legendary mark as Jean-Michel Basquiat, but who made an impact on black feminism, AfriCOBRA, and other artist-run groups. Delve deep into the role of museums in the debates of the period, and visual art’s relation to the Black Arts Movement.
Hyperallergic
Daniel Gerwin
The Aspirations of a Generation of Black Artists Visualized in Soul of a Nation.
The Guardian
André Wheeler
Soul of Nation captures a shift in how black people used art in the fight for liberation. Artists were no longer satisfied with pain being seen; they wanted it to be felt.
AnOther
Belle Hutton
In these works, and in countless others, is the power of art to uplift, showcase, describe and demonstrate the black experience – sometimes in uncomfortable but entirely necessary, vital ways.
Cultured
Portrays the art of the civil rights era not simply as an index of revolutionary political projects or desires, but as a revolution in and of itself.
Essence
Marcellas Reynolds
Soul of a Nation surveys 1963–83, the crucial period in American art history, bringing to light previously neglected histories of 20th-century Black artists.
New York Magazine
Tembe Denton-Hurst
The OG Soul of a Nation book, which chronicles work created by Black artists from 1963–1983...focuses on the art of the time, much of which wrestled with questions about racial identity and politics and what it means to be Black in America... and gives context to a unique moment in history.
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FROM THE BOOK
Excerpt from the Introduction
We begin in 1963 with the formation of Spiral, a ‘group of Negro artists’ as they called themselves, who assembled in New York to work out a shared position on what it meant to make art within the wider context of the Civil Rights movement. Soul of a Nation takes into account major events such as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom; the murder weeks later of four little girls in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama; the commanding oratory and assassinations of both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Watts Rebellion; unifying calls for Black Power and global pan-Africanism; the formation of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and the subsequent violent suppression of its leaders; Angela Davis’s imprisonment; and the Attica Prison uprising. Many of the illustrated artworks refer explicitly to these events and people. As important is the wider cultural landscape in which visual artists were working; where John Coltrane revolutionized jazz music, Baraka set alight the literary world with contentious poems and plays, Marvin Gaye recorded What’s Going On, and Nigeria convened what was then the largest ever pan-African arts festival.
Crucially, however, the exhibition is not organized according to a chronology of events nor framed by socio-political history. Instead, focusing on art and artists, it takes as its organizing principle different aesthetic strategies and debates circling around what it meant to be a Black artist at this time. We look at the way artist-colleagues came together in collectives and Black-owned galleries; at different approaches to art making from collage to political figuration, abstraction to assemblage, and attempts to forge a Black aesthetic in photography. We focus on artists who campaigned to ensure Black artists’ work was shown in mainstream art institutions, as well as on artists who deliberately distributed their work on the streets and who founded new museums to specifically address Black audiences. Some artists sought revolution by overturning economic and juridical power; others explored spirituality and rituals through organic materials. We conclude with Just Above Midtown, a commercial gallery run to give a platform to the Black avant-garde. As much as the exhibition emphasizes social groupings and shared aesthetics, so too it reveals disagreement and divergent positions on the very possibility of Black art.
The artists came from all over America. Though the exhibition contains rooms devoted to groups in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, we attend as well to Dana Chandler’s work in Boston, Emory Douglas’s work in the Bay Area, Sam Gilliam and Alma Thomas in Washington, DC. The South seems absent until one remembers that more than a third of the artists were born there, traveling as children as part of the Great Migration, or as young adults to study in the art schools and universities. Frank Bowling is the only figure not born in the United States, but in British Guiana. Having arrived in New York from London in 1966, he became a well-exhibited artist and a key polemicist in the debate over Black art.
Soul of a Nation is above all an exhibition about artists who transformed the parameters of American art. It is also about the power of Black subjectivity, of the dignity and resilience of Black people. One of the rooms is named ‘Black Heroes’ and includes images of poets, painters, everyday people and also Andy Warhol’s portrait of Muhammad Ali. Rendered in the colors of the pan-African flag, Ali’s portrait simultaneously embodies America’s cultural contradictions and greatness through its singularly extraordinary subject. Despite Ali’s peerless athletic prowess and charisma, he was stripped of his boxing title when he objected conscientiously to being drafted into the Vietnam War. Not only were Blackness and Americanness viewed as not necessarily compatible but Muslim belief and Americanness all the more. And yet in his self-belief and self-making, Ali – immortalized by an equally confident and self-made Warhol – was exported to the world as a representation of the nation at its best. —Mark Godfrey and Zoé Whitley, Introduction
Barkley L. Hendricks’ riveting 1969 self-portrait—titled Icon for My Man Superman (Superman Never Saved any Black People—Bobby Seale)—is reproduced from Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, a book that we are proud to have published, and kept in print through many editions, since it came out alongside the groundbreaking TATE exhibition in 2017. “The work’s subtitle invites a declarative statement of solidarity with the Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale,” co-curator Zoé Whitley writes. “But Hendricks makes evident another position: here we find the Black artist as superhero, painting himself into history rather than waiting for someone else to confer the honor upon him.” A staff pick for Black History Month and beyond. continue to blog
“Revolutionary art begins with the program that Huey P. Newton instituted with the Black Panther Party,” graphic designer and Black Panther Minister of Culture Emory Douglas wrote in The Black Panther newspaper in 1970. “Revolutionary art, like the Party, is for the whole community and deals with all its problems. It gives the people the correct picture of our struggle whereas the revolutionary ideology gives the people the correct political understanding of our struggle.” Pictured here is Douglas's back cover poster for the February 17, 1970, issue of the paper, which he also designed. (Caption reads: "We shall survive. Without a doubt.") “Deploring imperialism, capitalism and police brutality, Douglas depicted police, politicians and bankers as pigs and rats,” the curators of Soul of a Nation write. “Heroic Black women fight actual rats in substandard housing. Valiant workers are shown as revolutionary soldiers. A smiling child holds his head high, wearing sunglasses whose lenses are photographs of the free breakfast program that the Party implemented to feed children of poor and working families…” continue to blog
Featured image is one of 70 photographs documenting Art Is…, the 1983 performance staged by Lorraine O’Grady (aka Mademoiselle Bourgeoisie Noire) as part of the Harlem African American Day Parade. The piece was inspired by a friend’s comment, “avant-garde art doesn’t have anything to do with Black people.” Mademoiselle’s response, according to Soul of a Nation curator Zoé Whitley, was to hire 15 dancers to carry gold frames, "disembarking from the float to interact with the crowd. The performance lasted for eight hours. As the float traversed the several miles-long parade route, the parade announcer mocked, ‘They tell me this is art… I don’t understand that stuff.’ But some members of the crowd responded enthusiastically, ‘Frame me! Frame me! Make me art!’ And ‘That’s right. That’s what art is; we’re the art!’” continue to blog
Featured this month on the cover of ARTFORUM, where it is treated to a six-page review by Cheryl Finley, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power may be one of the most important shows of the decade. Certainly, its timing is impeccable. En route to Crystal Bridges and the Brooklyn Museum from Tate, the show, and its superb catalog—one of our top Holiday Gift Art Books of 2017—features work by major names like Romare Beardon (pictured here), as well as "a handful of works that had not seen the light of day anywhere in decades.” continue to blog
"Couple walking" (1979), by Roy DeCarava, is reproduced from Black History Month Staff PickSoul of a Nation, back in stock this week! In the chapter "Notes on Black Abstraction," Mark Godfrey notes that DeCarava photographed many of his subjects from behind or on the side. "While he was taking these photographs, William Eggleston, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand were being feted for the sharpness of their portraits: indeed it is impossible to call to mind their work without remembering the idiosyncratic facial expressions of the subjects. So why did DeCarava photograph his subjects from behind? Arguably his intention was to eschew character studies and instead to photograph abstract concepts: community, resilience, family love and tenderness, romance, dignity, elegance. These images constitute [a] kind of Black abstraction." continue to blog
Emma Amos’s “Eva the Babysitter” (1973) is reproduced from Soul of a Nation, the catalog to the blockbuster survey currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum. Amos was the only female member of the New York City-based Spiral Group, which included Charles Alston, Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis, also in the show. Called "radiant and radical" by Holland Cotter in the New York Times, this landmark exhibition collects twenty years worth of "work that functioned, in its time, as seismic detector, political persuader and defensive weapon." We couldn't be prouder to have co-published the exhibition catalog. Other artists include Sam Gilliam, Jack Whitten, Howardena Pindell, David Hammons, Barkley L. Hendricks and Betye Saar, to name just a few. continue to blog
“Wake Up” (1971) by Gerald Williams is reproduced from Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, published to accompany the blockbuster international traveling exhibition currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum. Williams was one of the original members of AfriCOBRA (the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), whose manifesto in part read, “It’s NATION TIME and we are now searching. Our guidelines are our people—the whole family of African people, the African family tree. And in this spirit of familyhood, we have carefully examined our roots and searched our branches for those visual qualities that are more expressive of our people/art.” See more Staff Picks for Black History Month here! continue to blog
“I feel it is my moral obligation as a black artist to try to graphically document what I feel socially,” David Hammons said in 1969, one year before he made this haunting double self-portrait. Titled “Black First, America Second” (1970), this body print and silkscreen on paper presents one version of the self that “clings to the stars of the national flag,” according to Soul of a Nation originating curators Mark Godfrey and Zoé Whitley, “while the other self appears almost painfully cleaved by its stripes… [It] is an image both timely and resolutely of its time.” This work and 235 others are featured in Soul of a Nation—a crucial reference at a moment when both the presidential and senatorial elections have literally been decided by Black voters, even as white supremacist insurgents were allowed yesterday to storm the Capital as part of President Trump's historically shameful last act. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 8.5 x 10 in. / 256 pgs / 203 color / 33 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $62 ISBN: 9781942884170 PUBLISHER: D.A.P./Tate AVAILABLE: 9/26/2017 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by D.A.P./Tate. Edited with text by Mark Godfrey, Zoé Whitley. Contributions by Linda Goode Bryant, Susan E. Cahan, David Driskell, Edmund Barry Gaither, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Samella Lewis.
African American art in the era of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers
In the period of radical change that was 1963–83, young black artists at the beginning of their careers confronted difficult questions about art, politics and racial identity. How to make art that would stand as innovative, original, formally and materially complex, while also making work that reflected their concerns and experience as black Americans?
Soul of a Nation surveys this crucial period in American art history, bringing to light previously neglected histories of 20th-century black artists, including Sam Gilliam, Melvin Edwards, Jack Whitten, William T. Williams, Howardina Pindell, Romare Bearden, David Hammons, Barkley L. Hendricks, Senga Nengudi, Noah Purifoy, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Charles White and Frank Bowling.
The book features substantial essays from Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley, writing on abstraction and figuration, respectively. It also explores the art-historical and social contexts with subjects ranging from black feminism, AfriCOBRA and other artist-run groups to the role of museums in the debates of the period and visual art’s relation to the Black Arts Movement. Over 170 artworks by these and many other artists of the era are illustrated in full color.
2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the first use of the term “black power” by student activist Stokely Carmichael; it will also be 50 years since the US Supreme Court overturned the prohibition of interracial marriage. At this turning point in the reassessment of African American art history, Soul of a Nation is a vital contribution to this timely subject.
