Kirjahaku

Writings on black men’s cultural production and black masculinity by one of today’s leading historians of modern and contemporary art. Collecting twenty years of incisive essays, articles, and interviews—including four published here for the first time—by art historian Huey Copeland, this book affirms the extraordinary depth of black men’s cultural production and the diversity of artistic practices that explore visual black masculinity in the United States. Part history, part memoir, part critical manifesto, Touched by the Mother offers a multi-faceted look at American art and discourse of the past fifty years, a personal meditation on navigating the world as a black gay man, and a feminist perspective on the ways transatlantic slavery continues to mark African and African diasporic men. Focusing on how the black maternal shapes black masculinity, Copeland confronts the dynamics that position African-American men—after their mothers—as sites of violence, creativity, and contestation in the cultural imagination. Richly illustrated throughout, Touched by the Mother considers an exciting range of assemblage, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and video works by more than twenty renowned practitioners, along with interviews featuring Hilton Als, Thelma Golden, Frank B. Wilderson, III, and other influential figures in contemporary art, culture, and criticism. Works by artists including Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, David Hammons, Barkley L. Hendricks, Arthur Jafa, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Howardena Pindell, Sun Ra, and Lorna Simpson represent modes of making and thinking that are uniquely “touched by the mother,” Copeland argues, moving us toward the promise of black feminist futures.

Writings on black men’s cultural production and black masculinity by one of today’s leading historians of modern and contemporary art. Collecting twenty years of incisive essays, articles, and interviews—including four published here for the first time—by art historian Huey Copeland, this book affirms the extraordinary depth of black men’s cultural production and the diversity of artistic practices that explore visual black masculinity in the United States. Part history, part memoir, part critical manifesto, Touched by the Mother offers a multi-faceted look at American art and discourse of the past fifty years, a personal meditation on navigating the world as a black gay man, and a feminist perspective on the ways transatlantic slavery continues to mark African and African diasporic men. Focusing on how the black maternal shapes black masculinity, Copeland confronts the dynamics that position African-American men—after their mothers—as sites of violence, creativity, and contestation in the cultural imagination. Richly illustrated throughout, Touched by the Mother considers an exciting range of assemblage, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and video works by more than twenty renowned practitioners, along with interviews featuring Hilton Als, Thelma Golden, Frank B. Wilderson, III, and other influential figures in contemporary art, culture, and criticism. Works by artists including Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, David Hammons, Barkley L. Hendricks, Arthur Jafa, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Howardena Pindell, Sun Ra, and Lorna Simpson represent modes of making and thinking that are uniquely “touched by the mother,” Copeland argues, moving us toward the promise of black feminist futures.

Taking its title from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, exhibition Black Is, Black Ain't (April 20 – June 8, 2008) explored a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and retained. Curated by the Renaissance Society's Associate Curator and Education Director Hamza Walker, the exhibition brought together works by twenty-seven black and non-black artists whose work collectively examines a moment where the cultural production of so-called "blackness" is concurrent with efforts to make race socially and politically irrelevant. The publication features essays by Huey Copeland, Darby English, Greg Foster-Rice, Amy M. Mooney, Kymberly N. Pinder, Krista Thompson, Hamza Walker, and Kenneth Warrren.