Artists, designers and artisans come together in these 18 must-reads to reflect on the history and imagine the future of what it means to be Black in primarily white creative fields. Join us in adding them to your 2023 reading lists, as aspire design and home celebrates Black History Month this February and all year long.
An Anthology of Blackness: The State of Black Design edited by Terresa Moses and Omari Souza | The MIT Press
An Anthology of Blackness examines the intersection of Black identity and practice, probing why the design field has failed to attract Black professionals, how Eurocentric hegemony impacts Black professionals, and how Black designers can create an anti-racist design industry.
Available now.
Now You See Me: An Introduction to 100 Years of Black Design by Charlene Prempeh | Prestel
Previously marginalized, overlooked, or even erased from history, Black designers are finally given their due in this first book to celebrate a century of ground-breaking work by Black graphic artists, architects and fashion designers whose work has helped define key cultural moments and movements.
Available now.
Amaza Lee Meredith Imagines Herself Modern: Architecture and the Black American Middle Class by Jacqueline Taylor | The MIT Press
Tells the captivating story of Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black woman architect, artist, and educator born into the Jim Crow South, whose bold choices in both life and architecture expand our understanding of the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance, while revealing the importance of architecture as a force in Black middle-class identity.
Available now.
Centered: People and Ideas Diversifying Design by Kaleena Sales | Chronicle Books
A rich, inclusive, contemporary, and global look at design diversity, past and present, through essays, interviews, and images curated by design educator and advocate Kaleena Sales.
Available now.
Poemhood: Our Black Revival edited by Amber McBride, Erica Martin, Taylor Byas | Harper Collins
Featuring an all-star group of thirty-seven powerful poetic voices, including such luminaries as Kwame Alexander, James Baldwin, Ibi Zoboi, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Gwendolyn Brooks, this riveting anthology depicts the diversity of the Black experience by fostering a conversation about race, faith, heritage, and resilience between fresh poets and the literary ancestors that came before them.
Available now.
Rapper’s Deluxe: How Hip Hop Made The World by Dr. Todd Boyd | Phaidon
A visual and cultural history of hip hop, charting its meteoric rise from underground trailblazer to global tastemaker.
Available now.
The Color of Dance: A Celebration of Diversity and Inclusion in the World of Ballet by TaKiyah Wallace-McMillian | Black Dog & Leventhal
From the photographer behind the Instagram sensation Brown Girls Do Ballet, this stunning coffee-table book showcases breathtaking images of ballerinas of color of all ages and levels that reflect today’s beautifully diverse world of dance.
Available now.
Black Caesars and Foxy Cleopatras by Odie Henderson | Abrams Press
A definitive account of Blaxploitation cinema—the freewheeling, often shameless, and wildly influential genre—from a distinctive voice in film history and criticism.
Available now.
Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual by Kimberly Juanita Brown | The MIT Press
In Mortevivum, Kimberly Juanita Brown shows us how the visual logic of documentary photography and the cultural legacy of empire have come together to produce the understanding that blackness and suffering—and death—are inextricable.
Available now.
Forthcoming:
God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin edited by Hilton Als | Dancing Foxes Press with the Brooklyn Museum
In God Made My Face, texts by Hilton Als, Stephen Best, Daphne A. Brooks, Teju Cole, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Barry Jenkins, Jamaica Kincaid, David Leeming, and Darryl Pinckney create a kind of mosaic, one that not only mirror’s Baldwin’s various voices but examines, closely, his sui generis contributions to cinema, theater, the essay, and Black American critical studies—including queerness.
Available February 20, 2024.
The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism edited by Denise Murrell | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
A groundbreaking volume resituating the Harlem Renaissance as integral to the development of twentieth-century modernism.
Available February 27, 2024.
The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure edited by Ekow Eshun | National Portrait Gallery
Acknowledging the paradox of race as both a “socially constructed fiction” and a “lived reality,” as Eshun writes, The Time is Always Now celebrates these Black figurative artworks against a background of heightened cultural visibility.
Available April 2, 2024.
LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity edited by Roxana Marcoci | The Museum of Modern Art
Frazier’s personalized arrangements of her compelling photographs recognize the myriad social and political struggles of Black working-class communities.
Available May 7, 2024.
Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art by Erica N. Cardwell | Feminist Press
A dazzling hybrid of personal memoir and criticism, considering the work of Black visual artists as a means to explore loss, legacy, and the reclamation of life through art.
Available March 12, 2024.
Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940 edited by María Elena Ortiz | Delmonico Books with Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
How modern and contemporary artists across the African and Caribbean diasporas transformed European Surrealism into a tool for Black expression.
Available March 19, 2024.
Sista Said: Words of Wisdom from Women of Color in Social Justice & the Arts from photographer Amos Paul Kennedy Jr. | Letterform Archive Books
This freshly commissioned set of postcards from the Detroit-based letterpress printer Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. (born 1948) highlights the voices of women of color in the Black arts and social justice movements, including Sojourner Truth, Audre Lorde, Coretta Scott King, Octavia Butler, Rosa Parks and others.
Available June, 2024.
Martin Puryear: Lookout | Gregory R. Miller & Company
Inspired by global masonry techniques and Hudson Valley history, Martin Puryear’s installation for Storm King Art Center opens its oculi onto the museum grounds. Featuring essays by Nora Lawrence and Amy S. Weisser, an interview with the artist conducted by Glenn Adamson, and full-color images of Lookout across several seasons and different stages of its fabrication.
Available April, 2024.
Black, Queer, and Untold: A New Archive of Designers, Artists, and Trailblazers by Jon Key | Chronicle Books
Growing up in Seale, Alabama as a Black Queer kid, then attending the Rhode Island School of Design as an undergraduate, Jon Key hungered to see himself in the fields of Art and Design. In Black, Queer, & Untold, he manifests the book he and so many others wish they had when they were coming up.
Available September 10, 2024.
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