Books by Allie Biswas
Any Day Now: Toward a Black Aesthetic (ekphrasis)
A comprehensive and inspiring collection of essays by Larry Neal, a founder of the seminal Black Arts Movement
“The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America.”
—Larry Neal, The Drama Review, 1968
Larry Neal, a poet, dramatist, and critic, was a founding figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s in New York. Writing as the arts editor for Liberator magazine, a radical journal published in Harlem, Neal called for Black artists to produce work that was politically oriented, rooted in the Black experience, and written for the Black community. Engaging with fiction, music, drama, and poetry in his texts, he challenged the dominance of the Western art-historical canon and charged Black artists and writers with reshaping artistic traditions according to their own history. As he proclaimed in his essay “The Black Writer’s Role,” written in 1966, “Black writers must listen to the world with their whole selves––their entire bodies. Must make literature move people. Must want to make our people feel, the way our music makes them feel.”
The writer Allie Biswas, who selected the texts Neal wrote from 1964 to 1978 included here, introduces the volume, illuminating the rich and varied context in which he produced his work.
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The Soul of a Nation Reader: Writings by and about Black American Artists, 1960 - 1980
A comprehensive compendium of artists and writers confronting questions of Black identity, activism and social responsibility in the age of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, based on the landmark traveling exhibition
A New York Magazine 2021 holiday gift guide pick
What is “Black art”? This question was posed and answered time and time again between 1960 and 1980 by artists, curators and critics deeply affected by this turbulent period of radical social and political upheaval in America. Rather than answering in one way, they argued for radically different ideas of what “Black art” meant.
Across newspapers and magazines, catalogs, pamphlets, interviews, public talks and panel discussions, a lively debate emerged between artists and others to address profound questions of how Black artists should or should not deal with politics, about what audiences they should address and inspire, where they should try to exhibit, how their work should be curated, and whether there was or was not such a category as “Black art” in the first place.
Conceived as a reader connected to the landmark exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which shone a light on the vital contributions made by Black artists over two decades, this anthology collects over 200 texts from the artists, critics, curators and others who sought to shape and define the art of their time.
Exhaustively researched and edited by exhibition curator Mark Godfrey, who provides the substantial introduction, and Allie Biswas, included are rare and out-of-print texts from artists and writers, as well as texts published for the first time ever.
Contributors include: Lawrence Alloway, Emma Amos, Benny Andrews, Tomie Arai, Ralph Arnold, Dore Ashton, Malcolm Bailey, Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, Fred Beauford, Cleveland Bellow, LeGrace G. Benson, Dawoud Bey, Camille Billops, Gloria Bohanon, Claude Booker, Frank Bowling, David Bradford, Peter Bradley, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kay Brown, Milton Brown, Vivian Browne, Linda Goode Bryant, Margaret G. Burroughs, Debbie Butterfield, Steve Cannon, Yvonne Parks Catchings, Elizabeth Catlett, Dana Chandler, Claudia Chapline, Charles Childs, Edward Clark, A.D. Coleman, Dan Concholar, John Coplans, Hugh M. Davies, Douglas Davis, Bing Davis, Alonzo Davis, Dale Davis, Melvin Dixon, Jeff Donaldson, Robert Doty, Emory Douglas, John Dowell, Louis Draper, David C. Driskell, Tony Eaton, Eugene Eda, Melvin Edwards, Ray Elkins, Ralph Ellison, Marion Epting, Elton Fax, Elsa Honig Fine, Frederick Fiske, Babatunde Folayemi, Clebert Ford, Edmund Barry Gaither, Addison Gayle, Henri Ghent, Ray Gibson, Sam Gilliam, Robert H. Glauber, Lynda Goode-Bryant, Allan M. Gordon, Earl G. Graves, Carroll Greene, Abdul Alkalimat, David Hammons, David Henderson, Napoleon Henderson, M.J. Hewitt, Richard Hunt, Sam Hunter, Josine Ianco-Starrels, Nigel Jackson, Jay Jacobs, Jae Jarrell, Wadsworth Jarrell, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Marie Johnson, Walter Jones, Lois Mailou Jones, Barbara Jones-Hogu, Cliff Joseph, Paul Keene, Martin Kilson, Wee Kim, April Kingsley, Hilton Kramer, Jacob Lawrence, Carolyn Lawrence, Don L. Lee, Hughie Lee-Smith, Samella Lewis, Tom Lloyd, Al Loving, Howard Mallory, Earl Roger Mandle, Jan van der Marck, Phillip Mason, James Mellow, Paul Mills, Evangeline J. Montgomery, Toni Morrison, Keith Morrison, Larry Neal, Cindy Nemser, Senga Nengudi, Robert Newman, Lorraine O'Grady, Ademola Olugebefola, John Outterbridge, Joe Overstreet, Marion Perkins, Marcy S. Philips, Howardena Pindell, Mimi Poser, Helaine Posner, Noah Purifoy, Ishmael Reed, Gary Rickson, Clayton Riley, Faith Ringgold, Mark Rogovin, Barbara Rose, Victoria Rosenwald, Joseph Ross, Bayard Rustin, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Robert Sengstacke, Jeanne Siegel, Lowery Stokes Sims, Steve Smith, Beuford Smith, Frank Smith, Val Spaulding, Edward Spriggs, Nelson Stevens, James Stewart, Edward K. Taylor, Alma Thomas, Ruth Waddy, William Walker, Francis and Val Gray Ward, Timothy Washington, Burto
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Hew Locke Passages
by Allie Biswas, Martina Droth
An in-depth look at the innovative career of an artist renowned for his multimedia explorations of colonial and postcolonial power
For the past thirty years, Guyanese British artist Hew Locke (b. 1959) has used strategies of appropriation to reveal and upend the visual codes of imperialism. Incorporating sculpture, photography, drawing, and found objects, Locke's oeuvre has been described as a "postcolonial baroque" that deconstructs and reimagines deeply entrenched iconographies of British sovereignty. This richly illustrated catalogue showcases the full spectrum of Locke's practice, bringing together distinct bodies of work that scrutinize the visual language of empire and colonialism's present-day legacies of global market capitalism, migration, and diaspora. Essays from leading curators, critics, and scholars of contemporary art situate Locke's work within the context of colonial and postcolonial history and theory, reveal how his use of nontraditional materials--including cardboard, fabric, beads, sequins, and readymade toys--enables the artist to reflect on his Guyanese-British heritage, and consider how the artist's dense, highly textured, and multilayered works fuse vernacular and formal traditions.
Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art
Exhibition Schedule:
Yale Center for British Art
(October 2, 2025-January 11, 2026)
Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH
(February 13-May 24, 2026)
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
(June 21-September 13, 2026)
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Hiroshi Sugimoto Time Machine
by Edmund de Waal, Margaret Wertheim, Allie Biswas, Geoffrey Batchen, Ralph Rugoff, James Attlee, David Chipperfield, Mami Kataoka, Lara Strongman
Der international renommierte Künstler und Fotograf Hiroshi Sugimoto hat durch seine ausgiebigen Erkundungen der Möglichkeiten von Fotografie einige der verführerischsten und rätselhaftesten Bildwerke unserer Zeit geschaffen. Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine bietet einen umfassenden Überblick über die Arbeiten der letzten fünf Jahrzehnte. Die Publikation vereint seine wichtigsten fotografischen Serien wie Theaters und Seascapes, bis zu weniger bekannten Werken, die seinen innovativen, konzeptionellen Ansatz beleuchten. Beiträge von internationalen Schriftsteller*innen, Künstler*innen und Wissenschaftler*innen – darunter James Attlee, Allie Biswas, David Chipperfield, Edmund de Waal, Mami Kataoka, Ralph Rugoff, Lara Strongman und Margaret Wertheim – beleuchten seine philosophische und zugleich spielerische Auseinandersetzung mit unserem Verständnis von Zeit und Erinnerung sowie dem paradoxen Charakter der Fotografie zwischen Dokumentation und Erfindung.
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