Books by Darby English

Among Others: Blackness at MoMA

by Darby English, Charlotte Barat

"Considers MoMA's complex history with black artists, black audiences, and art about blackness" –Victoria L Valentine, Culture Type
A New York Times critics' pick | Best Art Books 2019

This expansive collection of essays on nearly 200 works in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art is the first substantial exploration of MoMA’s uneven historical relationship with black artists, black audiences and the broader subject of racial blackness. By addressing these subjects through the consideration of works produced either by black artists or in response to race-related subjects, Among Others confronts two kinds of truth: one plainly factual and informative, the other moral. It is equal parts historical investigation and truth-telling about the Museum’s role in the history of the cultural politics of race.

The richly illustrated volume begins with two historical essays. The first, by Darby English and Charlotte Barat, traces the history of MoMA’s encounters with racial blackness since its founding―from an early commitment to African art and solo exhibitions devoted to the work of artists such as William Edmondson and Jacob Lawrence in the 1930s and 1940s to its activities during the Civil Rights Movement to the controversial Primitivism show of 1984 and beyond. The second essay, by Mabel O. Wilson, scrutinizes the Museum’s record in collecting the work of black architects and designers. Following these essays are nearly 200 plates, each accompanied by an essay by one of the over 100 authors who hail from a range of fields.

Darby English (born 1974) is Adjunct Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Carl Darling Buck Professor at the University of Chicago, where he teaches modern and contemporary art and cultural studies. He is the author of How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (2010), 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (2016) and To Describe a Life (2019).

Contributing authors include: Esther Adler, Margaret Aldredge-Diamond, Sean Anderson, Carol Armstrong, Julie Ault, Quentin Bajac, Charlotte Barat, Dawoud Bey, Giampaolo Bianconi, Klaus Biesenbach, Gregg Bordowitz, Jessica Bell Brown, Linda Goode Bryant, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Kaira M. Cabañas, Andrianna Campbell, Dessane Lopez Cassell, Sophie Cavoulacos, Mary Weaver Chapin, Christophe Cherix, Lisa Collins, Stuart Comer, Roberto Conduru, Lynne Cooke, John Corbett, Kate Cowcher, Douglas Crimp, Thomas Crow, Emily Cushman, Edwidge Danticat, J. Michael Dash, Samuel R. Delany, Leah Dickerman, Liz Donato, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Adrienne Edwards, Peter Eleey, Anthony Elms, Darby English, Starr Figura, Jacqueline Francis, Samantha Friedman, Diana Fuss, Samba Gadjigo, Ellen Gallagher, Lucy Gallun, Kristen Gaylord, Hanna Girma, Robert Gober, Karen Grimson, Rachel Haidu, Irena Haiduk, Claudrena N. Harold, Phillip Brian Harper, Jenny Harris, Jodi Hauptman, Cannon Hersey, Heidi Hirschl Orley, Harmony Holiday, Laura Hoptman, Amanda Hunt, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Ashley James, Ana Janevski, Martha Joseph, Bouchra Khalili, Byron Kim, Michelle Kuo, Abigail Lapin Dardashti, Thomas J. Lax, Glenn Ligon, Ron Magliozzi, Cara Manes, Roxana Marcoci, Kerry James Marshall, Courtney J. Martin, Nomaduma Rosa Masilela, Mia Matthias, Sarah Hermanson Meister, Kobena Mercer, Carmen Merport Quiñones, Richard Meyer, Jocelyn Miller, Anne Monahan, Anne Morra, Fred Moten, Sasha Nicholas, Tavia Nyong'o, Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Erica Papernik-Shimizu, Kirsi Peltomäki, Luis Pérez-Oramas, Paulina Pobocha, Antonia Pocock, Ross Posnock, Richard J. Powell, Martin Puryear, Christian Rattemeyer, Yasmil Raymond, Hillary Reder, Jodi Roberts, Ed Ruscha, Jenny Schlenzka, Abbe Schriber, Christina Sharpe, Kelly Sidley, Lowery Stokes Sims, Robert Slifkin, Jenni Sorkin, Katerina Stathopoulou, Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Greg Tate, Lanka Tattersall, Phil Taylor, Hervé Télémaque, Ann Temkin, Akili Tommasino, Ana Torok, Luc Tuymans, Anne Umland, Sarah

How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (The MIT Press)

by Darby English

Going beyond the 'blackness' of black art to examine the integrative and interdisciplinary practices of Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L—five contemporary black artists in whose work race plays anything but a defining role.
Work by black artists today is almost uniformly understood in terms of its "blackness," with audiences often expecting or requiring it to "represent" the race. In How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, Darby English shows how severely such expectations limit the scope of our knowledge about this work and how different it looks when approached on its own terms. Refusing to grant racial blackness—his metaphorical "total darkness"—primacy over his subjects' other concerns and contexts, he brings to light problems and possibilities that arise when questions of artistic priority and freedom come into contact, or even conflict, with those of cultural obligation. English examines the integrative and interdisciplinary strategies of five contemporary artists—Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L—stressing the ways in which this work at once reflects and alters our view of its informing context: the advent of postmodernity in late twentieth-century American art and culture.
The necessity for "black art" comes both from antiblack racism and resistances to it, from both segregation and efforts to imagine an autonomous domain of black culture. Yet to judge by the work of many contemporary practitioners, English writes, black art is increasingly less able—and black artists less willing—to maintain its standing as a realm apart. Through close examinations of Walker's controversial silhouettes' insubordinate reply to pictorial tradition, Wilson's and Julien's distinct approaches to institutional critique, Ligon's text paintings' struggle with modernisms, and Pope.L's vexing performance interventions, English grounds his contention that to understand this work is to displace race from its central location in our interpretation and to grant right of way to the work's historical, cultural, and aesthetic specificity.

To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror (Richard D. Cohen Lectures on African & African American Art)

by Darby English

A passionate, rigorous, and persuasive look at the helpful complexity of art during a time of profound cultural turmoil

By turns historical, critical, and personal, this book examines the use of art—and love—as a resource amid the recent wave of shootings by American police of innocent black women and men. Darby English attends to a cluster of artworks created in or for our tumultuous present that address themes of racial violence and representation idiosyncratically, neither offering solutions nor accommodating shallow narratives about difference. In Zoe Leonard’s Tipping Point, English sees an embodiment of love in the face of brutality; in Kerry James Marshall’s untitled 2015 portrait of a black male police officer, a greatly fraught subject treated without apparent judgment; in Pope.L’s Skin Set Drawings, a life project undertaken to challenge codified uses of difference, color, and language; and in a replica of the Lorraine Motel—the site of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968—a monument to the unfinished business of the integrated nonviolent movement for civil rights. For English, the consideration of art is a paradigm of social life, because art is something we must share. Powerful, challenging, and timely, To Describe a Life is an invitation to rethink what life in ongoing crisis is and can be—and, indeed, to discover how art can help.

Published in association with the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research

Art History and Emergency: Crises in the Visual Arts and Humanities (Clark Studies in the Visual Arts)

by Darby English, David Breslin

Art History and Emergency assesses art history’s role and responsibilities in what has been described as the “humanities crisis”—the perceived decline in the practical applications of the humanities in modern times. This timely collection of critical essays and creative pieces addresses several thought-provoking questions on the subject. For instance, as this so-called crisis is but the latest of many, what part has “crisis” played in the humanities’ history? How are artists, art historians, and professionals in related disciplines responding to current pressures to prove their worth? How does one defend the practical value of knowing how to think deeply about objects and images without losing the intellectual intensity that characterizes the best work in the discipline? Does art history as we know it have a future?

Distributed for the Clark Art Institute

1971: A Year in the Life of Color

by Darby English

In this book, art historian Darby English explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of United States cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in America, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, a racially integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto.

1971: A Year in the Life of Color looks at many black artists’ desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their efforts—and those of their advocates—to further that aim through public exhibition. Amid calls to define a “black aesthetic,” these experiments with modernist art prioritized cultural interaction and instability. Contemporary Black Artists in America highlighted abstraction as a stance against normative approaches, while The DeLuxe Show positioned abstraction in a center of urban blight. The importance of these experiments, English argues, came partly from color’s special status as a cultural symbol and partly from investigations of color already under way in late modern art and criticism. With their supporters, black modernists—among them Peter Bradley, Frederick Eversley, Alvin Loving, Raymond Saunders, and Alma Thomas—rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for interracial collaboration and, above all, responding with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding culture’s preoccupation with color.

Black is, Black Ain't

by Darby English, Professor Kenneth W. Warren, Greg Foster-Rice, Huey Copeland, Amy M. Mooney, Kimberly N. Pinder, Krista Thompson, Hamza Walker

Taking its title from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, exhibition Black Is, Black Ain't (April 20 – June 8, 2008) explored a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and retained. Curated by the Renaissance Society's Associate Curator and Education Director Hamza Walker, the exhibition brought together works by twenty-seven black and non-black artists whose work collectively examines a moment where the cultural production of so-called "blackness" is concurrent with efforts to make race socially and politically irrelevant. The publication features essays by Huey Copeland, Darby English, Greg Foster-Rice, Amy M. Mooney, Kymberly N. Pinder, Krista Thompson, Hamza Walker, and Kenneth Warrren.

Theaster Gates Heavy Sketches

by Darby English

A book on the internationally renowned artist known for his blend of social practice, sculpture, and urban development.
Gates has created a series of works that utilize bronze along with repurposed stone and wood, tar, and ceramics to explore the forms and imagery of African masks. Documentation of the works will be accompanied by images from the artist's expansive archives of anthropological slides, stills from a video performance, and a conversation between Gates and scholar Darby English.

Vivian Browne My Kind of Protest

by Darby English, Lowery Stokes Sims, Ethel Renia

A long overdue volume which re-establishes Vivian Browne as an important and dynamic American artist with an expressive hand and expansive world view.

Vivian Browne's (1929-1993) varied career spanned more than three decades, from her early portraits and landscapes in the late 1950s and early '60s, her Little Men series of 1966-69, through her final San Joaquin and King's Canyon paintings of the very early 1990s, completed just before her death in 1993. This highly active career was framed by Browne's lasting political engagement and activism, that included being an initial director of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC), born out of a response to the Metropolitan Museum's failure to include a single Black Harlem-based artist in its 1969 exhibition, Harlem on My Mind, and her active memberships of Where We At (WWA), the Women's Caucus for Art (WCA), and the feminist art collective Heresies, from the early 1970s through her death in 1993.

This volume presents about 62 paintings, prints, and works on paper across several major bodies of work, alongside ephemera highlighting Browne's enduring activism and teaching work. Drawing upon previously unknown works and archives that have recently become available, this is a significant contribution to the history of twentieth century American art. It accompanies a major exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH, and at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, in 2025.