Akili Tommasino – författare

A new retrospective of the work of trailblazing artist Barbara Chase-RiboudBarbara Chase-Riboud is a bestselling novelist, an award-winning poet, and a renowned visual artist whose sculpture and drawings are in museum collections around the world. Among her best-known sculptural work is the Malcolm X series of flowing cast bronze forms combined with braided fiber elements. Barbara Chase-Riboud Monumentale traces this pioneering artist’s remarkable career from the 1950s to the present, providing the most comprehensive account of her important body of work to date.The book features both celebrated and never-before-seen artworks that highlight Chase-Riboud’s groundbreaking contributions to contemporary sculpture. In addition to some forty sculptures, the book presents nearly twenty works on paper, a selection of Chase-Riboud’s poetry, and excerpts from an interview with the artist.Exploring the many different aspects of Chase-Riboud’s artistic practice, Barbara Chase-Riboud Monumentale provides unprecedented insights into her meditations on form, memory, and monument, while revealing the rich array of inspiration she has drawn from global art history and literature.Published in association with the Pulitzer Arts Foundation

Bowling's transition to abstraction, seen against the backdrop of 1960s–’70s debates on abstract art and the Black Arts movement“Modernism belonged to me also.” So resolved the British Guiana–born artist Frank Bowling in 1966, when he moved from his temporary home base of London to New York City, keen to make his mark on modern painting. This volume surveys for the first time the transformative years that Bowling spent in the US from 1966 through 1975, a chapter of extraordinary productivity and artistic growth that would greatly shape his thinking and practice.Bowling’s relocation to New York brought him into contact with an art scene in flux, with abstract painting on the rise and vigorous debates unfolding around Black cultural identity and artistic practice. Bowling participated in this scene in broad and deep ways, from his unique vantage point as an emigre twice over: exhibiting widely, writing for art magazines, engaging peers in dialogue and, in 1969, organizing 5+1, an exhibition of five leading African American abstract artists plus himself. During these years, his own work explored the tension between representational imagery and fields of color, ultimately moving toward full abstraction.Frank Bowling’s Americas assembles more than 30 paintings—many rarely seen—from this critical period, and places them in the context of both Bowling’s own artistic trajectory and the New York art scene at a time of aesthetic and racial reckoning. Offering magnificent reproductions of these vibrant, multifaceted works, accompanied by curatorial essays and statements by contemporary artists, this book invites new understanding of an artist whose work has remained always in motion.Born in British Guiana in 1934, Frank Bowling arrived in London in 1953, graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1962. By the early 1960s, he was recognized as an original force in London’s art scene. After moving to New York in 1966, Bowling shifted away from figurative imagery. He returned to London in 1975 but continued to spend significant periods in New York. Bowling was awarded a knighthood in 2020. He is the subject of a BBC documentary, Frank Bowling's Abstract World.

The first publication to examine the symbolic importance of ancient Egypt to Black artists and other cultural figures, from the nineteenth century through the Harlem Renaissance to the present  From the late nineteenth century onward, Black Americans looked to ancient Egypt as evidence of a preeminent ancient culture from the African continent. Flight into Egypt traces ancient Egypt’s influence on artists, from Edmonia Lewis’s sculpture The Death of Cleopatra (1876) to the efflorescence of Afrocentric visual art during the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and artistic tendencies of the ensuing decades. This volume explores how Black artists, writers, and musicians—and modern and contemporary Egyptian artists—have employed ancient Egyptian imagery to craft a unifying identity. Authors bring to light the overlooked contributions of Black scholars to the study of ancient Egypt, while statements by contemporary Black and Egyptian artists illuminate ancient Egypt’s continued hold on the creative imagination.  Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press  Exhibition Schedule:  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York(November 17, 2024–February 17, 2025)