Art on My Mind: Visual Politics - Softcover

Bell Hooks

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1565842634 ISBN 13: 9781565842632

Publisher: The New Press, 1995

Synopsis

In Art on My Mind, bell hooks, a leading cultural critic, responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting, and criticizing art and aesthetics in an art world increasingly concerned with identity politics. Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community.

About this title

About the Author:

bell hooks is Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College. Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, she has chosen the lower case pen name bell hooks, based on the names of her mother and grandmother, to emphasize the importance of the substance of her writing as opposed to who she is. A writer and critic, hooks is the author of more than thirty books, many of which have focused on issues of social class, race, and gender. Among her many books are the feminist classic Ain’t I a Woman, the dialogue Breaking Bread (with Cornel West), the children’s book Happy to Be Nappy, the memoir Bone Black, and Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (The New Press). She lives in Berea, Kentucky.

From Publishers Weekly:

A prolific critical writer, hooks has contributed a collection of essays on contemporary art and what she describes as the troubling relationship between the dominant white, male art world, its practices, protocols and biases, and the creative production of African American artists-particularly women-and others whose works grapple with issues of identity and social context. Decrying the lack of black critics writing on today's art, hooks provides a minute dissection of issues of race, gender and "cultural hegemony" in the works of the late Jean-Michel Basquiat; examines the historical impact of photography in black life and the trenchant intelligence and beauty of Carrie Mae Weems's photographs; and highlights important critical works by black art historian Sylvia Boone and black architect LaVerne Wells-Bowie. Hooks has a knack for balancing flat academic jargon with vivid language, illuminating the historical and psychoanalytic underpinnings of her topics while anticipating the visceral responses of a lay audience. Despite her generic invocations of the dominant, marginalizing Eurocentric patriarchy, etc., etc., her passionate and highly personal exploration of these and other issues (including a distressing account of her own illness and an aestheticized betrayal by an artist friend) transforms academic abstractions into recognizable human patterns linking the everyday lives of Americans, black or white.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1565842634
• ISBN 13: 9781565842632
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240