Mixed Blessings

In America today there is a little-known explosion of creative art by women and men from many different ethnic backgrounds. Mixed Blessings is the first book to discuss the crosscultural process taking place in the work of Latino, Native-, African-, and Asian-American artists. Rich with illustrations of artworks in many different mediums, and filled with incisive quotes and unsettling reports, it is more than a book about art, it is a complex meditation on the relationships of people to their cultures.

Lucy R. Lippard, one of our most original and insightful writers on art, challenges conventional approaches and explores the role of images in a changing society. Among her subjects are the uncertainty of exile; the confusion of identity in attempts to climb out of the melting pot; and art that speaks for itself, reversing stereotypes and reclaiming history and memory. Mixed Blessings is a book that will affect how we think of ourselves and each other.

"This is more than a book about art. I call it a round dance of cultural concepts, ideas, and meanings that prove what American art is really up to in these last days of the century. Lippard affirms that the melting pot was an idea that never happened; in this beautiful book we experience a crossroads of memory expressed in form, color, spirit, words.What a gift!" -- Joy Harjo, poet and associate professor, University of Arizona

"Lucy Lippard's intellectual devotion to the power of women and persons of color enacted and idealized within their works of visual art has brought her to level of discourse that is rich in democratic possibility and promise. I love this book, in short, and recommend it highly." -- Robert Farris Thompson, professor of African and African-American art history, Yale University