Cora Gilroy-Ware – författare

A visual and literary meditation juxtaposing Isaac Julien’s artworks with archival images of Frederick Douglass and essays that consider his enduring legacyPublished with MAG, Tang Museum, and Isaac Julien Studio.This sumptuously illustrated artist's book and reader documents Lessons of the Hour (2019), the ten-screen film installation and series of related photographic artworks by the internationally acclaimed artist Isaac Julien CBE RA (born 1960), which honor the public and private life of one the most important figures in US history: Frederick Douglass. The visionary African American orator, philosopher, intellectual and self-liberated freedom fighter was born into slavery in Maryland and went on to develop a remarkable aesthetic theory through his thinking and writing on abolitionism and Black self-representation through the apparatus of photography. Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour – Frederick Douglass takes the reader on a journey through Douglass’ life and thinking, and is a vital consideration of his political and aesthetic legacy.

A radical, lively departure from received notions about art of the Romantic periodFor many, the term “neoclassicism” has come to imply discipline, order, restraint, and a certain myopia. Leaving the term behind, this book radically challenges enduring assumptions about the art produced from the late 18th century to the early Victorian period, casting new light on appropriations of the classical body by British artists. It is the first to foreground the intersections of gender, race, and class in discussions of British visual classicism, laying bare artists’ alternately politicizing and emphatically sensual engagements with Greco-Roman art. Rather than rely exclusively on subsequent scholarship, the book takes up the poet John Keats (1795–1821) as a theoretical framework. Eschewing the “Golden Age” narrative, which sees J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) as the pinnacle of the period’s artistic achievement, the book examines overlooked artists, such as Henry Howard (1769–1847) and John Graham Lough (1798–1876). The result is a fresh account of underappreciated works of British painting and sculpture.Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art