Since the 1970s, Cynthia Hawkins (born 1950) has investigated the potentials of abstract painting. Her process-oriented practice embraces the improvisational to create a space for her continually evolving vocabulary. From 1979 to 1981, Hawkins documented these developments in a journal. A record of routine and the everyday, the journal also gathers sketches, notes for new and in-progress works, and responses to contemporary art and criticism, bringing the artist’s reflections into relief. Art Notes, Art also offers a picture of the burgeoning Black-owned gallery scene in New York that Hawkins was an important participant in—including Just Above Midtown, where she had . . . .go to book page >>

American artist Michael Richards (1963–2001) was born in Brooklyn and raised in Kingston, Jamaica. Integral to a generation of Black artists emerging in the 1990s, Richards’ work gestures toward reprieve from social injustices, often in the context of the historic and ongoing oppression of Black people. Richards’ exploration of freedom and escape centered on themes of flight and aviation, which he engaged with through the legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen, Greek mythology, Christianity and African and African American folklore. His nascent career was cut short on September 11, 2001 when he was killed while working in his Lower Manhattan Cultural . . . .go to book page >>

Published on the occasion of her standout solo exhibition at the Queens Museum, Point Reflection is the first major volume devoted to the work of New York–based artist Aki Sasamoto (born 1980). Conceived as an artist’s book, Point Reflection centers on Sasamoto’s major installation Sink or Float, first presented at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Building on the artist’s idiosyncratic research into snail shell chirality—the direction in which the shell coils—as a cypher for thinking through questions of change, aging, (non)normativity, vulnerability and natural processes, Point Reflection brings together the diagrammatic visions, narrative experimentation, structured improvisations and stream-of-consciousness monologues characteristic of . . . .go to book page >>