The first comparative history of African American and Black British artists, artworks, and art movements, Stick to the Skin traces the lives and works of over fifty painters, photographers, sculptors, and mixed-media, assemblage, installation, video, and performance artists working in the United States and Britain from 1965 to 2015. The artists featured in this book cut to the heart of hidden histories, untold narratives, and missing memories to tell stories that "stick to the skin" and arrive at a new "Black lexicon of liberation."
Informed by extensive research and invaluable oral testimonies, Celeste-Marie Bernier’s remarkable text forcibly asserts the originality and importance of Black artists’ work and emphasizes the need to understand Black art as a distinctive category of cultural production. She launches an important intervention into European histories of modern and contemporary art and visual culture as well as into debates within African American studies, African diasporic studies, and Black British studies.
Artists featured:
Larry Achiampong
Hurvin Anderson
Benny Andrews
Rasheed Araeen
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Zarina Bhimji
Sutapa Biswas
Frank Bowling
Sonia Boyce
Vanley Burke
Chila Kumari Burman
Eddie Chambers
Thornton Dial
Godfried Donkor
Kimathi Donkor
Sokari Douglas Camp
Melvin Edwards
Mary Evans
Nicola Frimpong
Joy Gregory
Bessiey Harvey
Mona Hatoum
Lubaina Himid
Lonnie Holley
Gavin Jantjes
Claudette Johnson
Tam Joseph
Roshini Kempadoo
Juginder Lamba
Hew Locke
Steve McQueen
Chris Ofili
Keith Piper
Ingrid Pollard
Thomas J. Price
Noah Purifoy
Faith Ringgold
Donald Rodney
Betye Saar
Joyce J. Scott
Yinka Shonibare
Gurminder Sikand
Marlene Smith
Maud Sulter
Barbara Walker
Kara Walker
Carrie Mae Weems
Deborah Willis
Hank Willis Thomas
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Celeste-Marie Bernier is Professor of US and Atlantic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of African American Visual Arts; Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination; Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin; and (with Andrew Taylor) If I Survive: Frederick Douglass and Family in the Walter O. Evans Collection.
"A long-overdue comparative and interdisciplinary history of African American and Black British art and artists that gives critical voice and analytical exposure to those artists who have been alienated within their own marginalized status. Impressively thorough, praiseworthy, and necessarily bold."—James Smalls, Professor of Visual Arts, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
"Celeste-Marie Bernier's necessary and timely research fosters crucial bridging of African American studies and Black British studies, advancing our deeper understanding of the Black Atlantic."—Dr. Zoe Whitley, co-curator of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power
"Bernier has indeed produced a weighty study. Perhaps her greatest achievement in Stick to the Skin is the way in which she obliges us to see the merit, wisdom, and benefits of looking at Black artists in a range of wider contexts. Bernier emphatically overturns the insularity that has tended to be the hallmark of African American artists’ histories, and instead, proposes a bold and challenging set of new theoretical frameworks with which to consider the work of artists of the Black Atlantic over a period of half a century. This book will take its place as one of the most substantial tomes on the work of Black visual artists."—Eddie Chambers, Professor of Art and Art History, University of Texas, Austin
344 pp.9 x 10.5Illus: 99 color illustrations
9780520286535$85.00|£71.00Hardcover
Jan 2019