This deluxe hardcover survey, featuring profiles of 50 artists on the rise, is the definitive guide to contemporary African art.With African artists attracting sizable audience numbers to museums, setting sky-high auction records, and appearing in mainstream press, it has become impossible to overlook the cultural significance of contemporary African art today.
Author and curator Osei Bonsu's engaging profiles of leading African artists - along with gorgeous full-color reproductions of their work - introduce readers to a generation of movers and shakers whose innovative artwork reflects on Africa as both an idea and an experience. Using diverse forms, languages, and expressions to articulate what it means to be a part of the world, these artists generate alternate histories and imaginative futures - work that is both personal and political, universal and incredibly specific.
There has never been anyone else like Bessie Smith. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1894 and orphaned by the age of nine, Bessie Smith sang on street corners before becoming a big name in traveling shows. In 1923, she made her first recording for the newly founded Columbia Records. It sold 780,000 copies and catapulted her to fame. Known for her unmatched vocal talent, her timeless and personal blues narratives, her tough persona, and her ability to enrapture audiences with her raw voice, the Empress of the Blues remains a force and an enigma.
In this remarkable book, Kay combines history and personal narrative, poetry and prose to create an enthralling account of an extraordinary life, and to capture the soul of the woman she first identified with as a young Black girl growing up in Glasgow.
This groundbreaking study explores the visual representations of Black culture across the globe throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.The African diaspora -- a direct result of the transatlantic slave trade and Western colonialism -- has generated a wide array of artistic achievements, from blues and reggae to the paintings of the pioneering American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner and the music videos of Solange.
This study concentrates on how these works, often created during times of major social upheaval and transformation, use Black culture both as a subject and as context. From musings on "the souls of black folk" in late-nineteenth-century art to questions of racial and cultural identities in performance, media, and computer-assisted arts in the twenty-first century, this book examines the philosophical and social forces that have shaped Black presence in modern and contemporary visual culture.
. Featuring over 300 hours of new interviews with 100 subjects, an oral history of the girl groups (such as The Ronettes, The Shirelles, The Supremes, and The Vandellas) that redefined the early 1960s. . . . . The girl group sound, made famous and unforgettable by acts like The Ronettes, The Shirelles, The Supremes, and The Vandellas, took over the airwaves by capturing the mixture of innocence and rebellion emblematic of America in the 1960s. .
As songs like "Will You Love Me Tomorrow," "Then He Kissed Me," and "Be My Baby" rose to the top of the charts, girl groups cornered the burgeoning post-war market of teenage rock and roll fans, indelibly shaping the trajectory of pop music in the process. While the songs are essential to the American canon, many of the artists remain all but anonymous to most listeners.
The essential oral history of hip-hop, from its origins on the playgrounds of the Bronx to its reign as the most powerful force in pop culture - from the award-winning journalist behind All the Pieces Matter, the New York Times bestselling oral history of The Wire "The Come Up is Abrams at his sharpest, at his most observant, at his most insightful." - Shea Serrano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hip-Hop (And Other Things)
The music that would come to be known as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it's the most popular music genre in America. Just as jazz did in the first half of the twentieth century, hip-hop and its groundbreaking DJs and artists - nearly all of them people of color from some of America's most overlooked communities - pushed the boundaries of music to new frontiers, while transfixing the country's youth and reshaping fashion, art, and even language.
His white teacher tells her all-black class, Youll all wind up porters and waiters. What did she know? Gordon Parks is most famous for being the first black director in Hollywood. But before he made movies and wrote books, he was a poor African American looking for work. When he bought a camera, his life changed forever. He taught himself how to take pictures and before long, people noticed. His success as a fashion photographer landed him a job working for the government.
In Washington DC, Gordon went looking for a subject, but what he found was segregation. He and others were treated differently because of the color of their skin. Gordon wanted to take a stand against the racism he observed. With his camera in hand, he found a way. Told through lyrical verse and atmospheric art, this is the story of how, with a single photograph, a self-taught artist got America to take notice.
The first full and authoritative biography of an American - indeed a world-wide - musical and cultural legend. "No one worked harder than B.B. No one inspired more up-and-coming artists. No one did more to spread the gospel of the blues." - President Barack Obama "He is without a doubt the most important artist the blues has ever produced." - Eric Clapton Riley "Blues Boy" King (1925-2015) was born into deep poverty in Jim Crow Mississippi. Wrenched away from his sharecropper father, B.B. lost his mother at age ten, leaving him more or less alone. Music became his emancipation from exhausting toil in the fields. Inspired by a local minister's guitar and by the records of Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker, encouraged by his cousin, the established blues man Bukka White, B.
Written when she was just twenty-eight,?Lorraine Hansberry's?landmark A Raisin in the Sun is listed by the National Theatre as one of the hundred most significant works of the twentieth century.?Hansberry?was the first Black woman to have a play performed on Broadway, and the first Black and youngest American playwright to win a New York Critics' Circle Award.
Charles J.?Shields's?authoritative biography of one of the twentieth century's most admired playwrights examines the parts of?Lorraine Hansberry's?life that have escaped public knowledge: the influence of her upper-class background, her fight for peace and nuclear disarmament, the reason why she embraced Communism during the Cold War, and her dependence on her white husband-her best friend, critic, and promoter.
Many of the identity issues about class, sexuality, and race that she struggled with are relevant and urgent today. This dramatic telling of a passionate life-a very American life through self-reinvention-uses previously unpublished interviews with close friends in politics and theater, privately held correspondence, and deep research to reconcile old mysteries and raise new questions about a life not fully described until now.
From one of the preeminent cultural critics of her generation, a radiant weave of memoir, criticism, and biography that tells the story of black women in music - from the Dixie Cups to Gladys Knight to Janet, Whitney, and Mariah - as the foundational story of American pop.
From one of the most lyrically gifted, socially conscious rappers of the past twenty years, Vibrate Higher is a firsthand account of hip-hop as a political forceBefore Talib Kweli became a world-renowned hip hop artist, he was a Brooklyn kid who liked to cut class, spit rhymes, and wander the streets of Greenwich Village with a motley crew of artists, rappers, and DJs who found hip hop more inspiring than their textbooks (much to the chagrin of the educator parents who had given their son an Afrocentric name in hope of securing for him a more traditional sense of pride and purpose) .
Kweli's was the first generation to grow up with hip hop as established culture -- a genre of music that has expanded to include its own pantheon of heroes, rich history and politics, and distinct worldview.
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