bell hooks: Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (1995)

“In her first book about art and the “politics of the visual,” hooks, a writer known for her clarifying views on feminism and black women, addresses the deplorable absence of discourse on black artists, especially by black critics. Why, she asks, has art played a minimal role in the lives of most African Americans? With a firm grasp of the racial and cultural climate in which black aesthetics must grow, hooks offers some astute answers to that question and holds out hope for change. She then hones her aesthetic in her adept interpretations of the work and impact of black artists, including Romare Bearden, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alison Saar, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Margo Humphreys. Hooks also discusses portrayals of black women and men in art and, in an essay on photography, how the ‘struggle over images’ became part of the black liberation movement. Art matters, hooks assures us; it helps us forge our identities while forcing society to evolve from being exclusive to inclusive. As erudite and sophisticated as hooks is, she is also eminently readable, even exhilarating.” (Donna Seaman)

Publisher The New Press, New York, 1995
ISBN 1565842634, 9781565842632
xvi+224 pages
via Arch

Reviews: Okwui Enwezor (Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, 1996), Phoebe Farris (Art Journal, 1996), Publishers Weekly (1995), Kirkus Review (1995).

Author
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (18 MB, updated on 2019-11-5)

Mike Kelley: Foul Perfection: Essays and Criticism / Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals (2003-2004)

Collected writings Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley. The first volume contains his critical writings and commentary, the latter focuses on his own work.

“The work of artist Mike Kelley (1954-2012) embraced performance, installation, drawing, painting, video, and sculpture. Drawing distinctively on high art and vernacular traditions, including historical research, popular culture, and psychology, Kelley came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of sculptures composed of craft materials. His more recent work offered dialogues with architecture and with repressed memory syndrome, and a sustained inquiry into his own aesthetic and social history. The subjects on which Kelley wrote are as varied as his artistic media. They include the work of fellow artists, sound, caricature, the uncanny, UFOlogy, and gender-bending.

While the first volume, Foul Perfection, contains thematic essays and writings about other artists; the second collection concentrates on Kelley’s own work, ranging from texts in ‘voices’ that grew out of scripts for performance pieces to expository critical and autobiographical writings.”

Edited by John C. Welchman
Publisher MIT Press, 2003 and 2004
Writing Art series
ISBN 9780262112703, 0262112701 (1), 9780262112772, 0262112779 (2)
xx+238 and xxv+431 pages

Publisher (1)
Publisher (2)
WorldCat (1)
WorldCat (1)

Volume 1
Volume 2

Jack Burnham: The Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formalist Art (1974)

A collection of essays by the critic Jack Burnham. Originally appeared in Artforum and Arts Magazine.

Publisher G. Braziller, New York, 1974
ISBN 0807607401, 9780807607404
167 pages
via rumblebee

Commentary: John R. Blakinger (Tate, 2017).

WorldCat

PDF (16 MB)