Throughout his more than four-decade-long career in the arts, Brooker has created a distinctive artistic language that calls out to viewers to not only look at his work as arrangements of patterns, colors, and shapes on canvas or paper, but also as investigations into the divine.
This essay sets out to explore the aesthetic, cultural, and personal strategies behind Barthé’s approach to classical idealism and its application to the racialized body.
This is to move beyond simply writing a more inclusive history of art to understanding African Americans as active participants in the history of modernism.
In the context of the recent Confederate memorial debates, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, directly challenges the heroic narrative of the Confederacy as an honorable struggle and the idea that slavery was a benevolent institution.
At the heart of “American democracy” and “American freedom,” there is a shameful rot, which public monuments “labor” to paper over in order to present our struggles and conflicts as resolved and settled.
Dell Upton
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015; 280 pp., 59 b/w illus.; ISBN 9780300211757; Hardcover: $35.00
Reviewed by: Lauren Kroiz, Associate Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Edited by Miranda Lash and Trevor Schoonmaker
Durham: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2016; 276 pp.; 336 color illus.; ISBN: 978-0-938989-38-7; Softcover $22.95
Reviewed by: Jennifer Jankauskas, Curator of Art, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts
Rebecca Peabody
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016; 208 pp.; 20 color illus.; 32 b/w illustrations; ISBN: 9780520288928; Hardcover: $49.95
Reviewed by: Vivien Green Fryd, Professor, Department of History of Art, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.
Curated by: Mark Godfrey, Zoé Whitley
Tate Modern, London, July 12–October 22, 2017
Reviewed by: Levi Prombaum, PhD Candidate, University College, London
Curated by: Romi Crawford, Abdul Alkalimat, and Rebecca Zorach / Curated by: Daniel Schulman, with Jeffrey Huebner and Michelle Rene Perkins
Chicago Cultural Center, February 25–July 30, 2017 / January 21–June 25, 2017
Reviewed by: Marissa H. Baker, PhD candidate, University of Illinois at Chicago