"Romare Bearden (1911-1988), one of the most prolific, original, and acclaimed American artists of the twentieth century, richly depicted scenes and figures rooted in the American South and the Black experience. Bearden hailed from North Carolina but was forced to relocate to the North when a white mob harassed [his family] in the 1910s. His family story is a compelling, complicated saga of Black middle-class achievement in the face of relentless...

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Puerto Rican mother and Haitian father. When he was eight and recovering from a car accident, his mother gave him a copy of Gray's Anatomy, which sparked his interest in the human form. This biography of the world's most famous street artist features a facts and photos section at the back.

"One of the most important and underappreciated visual artists of the twentieth century, Romare Bearden started as a cartoonist during his college years and emerged as a painter during the 1930s, at the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance and in time to be part of a significant community of black artists supported by the WPA. Though light-skinned and able to "pass," Bearden embraced his African heritage, choosing to paint social realist canvases of...

For generations, the marsh-surrounded town of Shimmer, Maryland has played host to a loose movement of African-American artists, all working in different media, but all utilizing the same haunting color. Landscape paintings, trompe l'oeil quilts, decorated dolls, mixed-media assemblages, and more, all featuring the same peculiar hue, a shifting pigment somewhere between purple and pink, the color of the saltmarsh orchid, a rare and indigenous flower....

"Jacob Lawrence was one of the best-known African American artists of the twentieth century. In Painting Harlem Modern, Patricia Hills renders a vivid assessment of Lawrence's long and productive career. She argues that his complex, cubist-based paintings developed out of a vital connection with a modern Harlem that was filled with artists, writers, musicians, and social activists. She also uniquely positions Lawrence alongside such important African...

"In this groundbreaking study, Richard J. Powell investigates the visual forms of satire produced by black artists in 20th- and 21st-century America. Underscoring the historical use of visual satire as antiracist dissent and introspective critique, Powell argues that it has a distinctly African American lineage. Taking on some of the most controversial works of the past century--in all their complexity, humor, and provocation--Powell raises important...

Bill Traylor was born into slavery in 1853 on a cotton plantation in rural Alabama, and continued to farm the land until the late 1920s when he moved to Montgomery and worked odd jobs in the thriving segregated black neighborhood. A decade later, in his late 80s, Traylor became homeless and started to draw and paint, devising his visual language to depict his memories of slavery and scenes of a radically changing urban culture, becoming one of America's...

"HOW TO GO MAD WITHOUT LOSING YOUR MIND questions long-standing Eurocentric accounts of psychopathology and describes the way art and madness connect in Black life. La Marr Jurelle Bruce uses a method of radical compassion, or radical care, to read the actions of Black artists and creatives. He seeks to understand their motives not simply as individual pathology but as sociocultural event and effect which makes itself evident as Black radical creativity....

Bright paint, sequins, rhinestones, fabric, feathers - and time and again the artist himself in various roles: the material collages of painter Devan Shimoyama are midsummer night's dreams of alternative masculinities. As a homosexual African-American, the artist has an intense connection to themes of the Black community and queer subculture. Shimoyama's works are worlds of neon and glitter; Greek mythology and Black pop culture; spirituality and...

Seventh-graders Jin, Alexandra, and Elvin come from very different backgrounds and circumstances, but they all live in Harlem, and when Elvin's grandfather is attacked they band together to find out who is responsible--and the search leads them to an enigmatic artist whose missing masterpieces are worth a fortune, and into conflict with an ambitious politician who wants to turn Harlem into an historic amusement park.