Books by Valerie Cassel Oliver
Dawoud Bey: Elegy
Dawoud Bey focuses on the landscape to create a portrait of the early African American presence in the United States.
Renowned for his Harlem street scenes and expressive portraits, Dawoud Bey continues his ongoing series on African American history. Elegy brings together Bey’s three landscape series to date—Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2017); In This Here Place (2021); and Stony the Road (2023)—elucidating the deep historical memory still embedded in the geography of the United States. Bey takes viewers to the historic Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, where Africans were marched onto auction blocks; to the plantations of Louisiana, where they labored; and along the last stages of the Underground Railroad in Ohio, where fugitives sought self-emancipation. Essays by the exhibition’s curator, Valerie Cassel Oliver, and scholars LeRonn P. Brooks, Imani Perry, and Christina Sharpe illuminate the work. By interweaving these bodies of work into an elegy in three movements, Bey doesn’t merely evoke history, he retells it through historically grounded images that challenge viewers to go beyond seeing and imagine lived experiences.
Copublished by Aperture and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
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$65.00
Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen
by Naomi Beckwith, Valerie Cassel Oliver
This retrospective volume celebrates five decades of Howardena Pindell's art, including works on paper, collage, photography, film, and video.
Born in middle-class Philadelphia in the 1940s, Howardena Pindell came of age during the Civil Rights movement. As an African-American woman artist, making her way in the world provided Pindell with source material to inspire her work. This book examines every facet of Pindell's impressive career to date. Since the 1960s, she has used materials such as glitter, talcum powder, and perfume to stretch the boundaries of traditional canvas painting. She has also infused her work with traces of her labor, such as obsessively affixing dots of pigment and circles made with an ordinary hole punch tool. After a car crash in 1979 left her with short-term amnesia, Pindell's work looked beyond the painting studio to explore a wide range of subjects, including the personal and diaristic as well as the social and political. This monograph also highlights Pindell's work with photography, film, and performance. Excerpts from the artist's writing, in particular her critique of the art world and her responses to feminism and racial politics, provide prescient commentary in light of conversations around equality and inclusion today.
Published in association with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
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Trenton Doyle Hancock: Skin and Bones: 20 Years of Drawing
by Valerie Cassel Oliver, Brooke Anderson
Best known for his exuberant paintings centered around semitragic fictional characters called the Mounds, Trenton Boyle Hancock (born 1974) is also a prolific draftsman. The first in-depth examination of his drawings, collages and works on paper, this comprehensive survey brings together works made between 1984 and 2014. Tracing the evolution of Hancock's vision by showing the genesis of his mythology, including that of the epic Mound saga, and his wide range of high and low influences (comics, graphic novels, cartoons, music and film, as well as visual art), this catalogue demonstrates the fundamental, continuing importance of drawing in Hancock's work up to the present day. Also included in this volume is a 32-page comic book.
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