Hamza Walker - Böcker

Taking its title from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, exhibition Black Is, Black Ain't (April 20 – June 8, 2008) explored a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and retained. Curated by the Renaissance Society's Associate Curator and Education Director Hamza Walker, the exhibition brought together works by twenty-seven black and non-black artists whose work collectively examines a moment where the cultural production of so-called "blackness" is concurrent with efforts to make race socially and politically irrelevant. The publication features essays by Huey Copeland, Darby English, Greg Foster-Rice, Amy M. Mooney, Kymberly N. Pinder, Krista Thompson, Hamza Walker, and Kenneth Warrren.

The collected exhibition essays of Hamza Walker, former director of education at the Renaissance Society.Hamza Walker was director of education at the Renaissance Society for twenty-one years, between 1994 and 2015. During that time, he wrote essays about almost every single exhibition, both those he curated and many others curated by Suzanne Ghez. These texts were published first in the Renaissance Society’s newsletters and then eventually on the exhibition posters, which were distributed far more widely. In the course of this workman-like writing in the service of the institution, Walker developed not only his distinctive personal writing style and a keen eye but also a theory of what museum education could be and do. In his writing, Walker draws on his art's historical knowledge but looks equally to current events (both minutely local and international), insisting on the mutual relevance and related nature of the two. In Walker’s own words, “If we’re going to live up to the idea that art is for everybody, it needs a set of wider reference points,” an emphasis that has arguably shaped the identity of the institution in turn.This book collects those essays together into a volume that celebrates Walker’s brilliant, joyful, and generous writing. It also serves as a lively record of two decades of the Renaissance Society’s exhibition programming and reflects the prevalent theories, issues, and fashions of the art world during that time, not to mention the events occurring in the wider world.

Scholars and contemporary artists reckon with decommissioned monuments, examining fraught narratives of the legacy of the Civil War and slavery as well as national identity in the United StatesPublished with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Brick.This volume features a selection of decommissioned monuments, many of them Confederate, presented alongside contemporary artworks that address American history and national identity. MONUMENTS, which accompanies the eponymous exhibition, marks the last several years of monument removals as a historic moment and aims to build a better understanding of our shared history and ideals, while holding the monuments accountable to the present. Featuring contributions by the exhibition curators, Bennett Simpson, Hamza Walker and Kara Walker, as well as scholars, poets and artists, the publication attends to the social, political, historical and art historical context of these monuments as well as the legacies of the people and events they commemorate. It includes additional essays by Sven Beckert, Emily Bingham, Thomas J. Brown, Karen Cox, Hilary N. Green, Grace Elizabeth Hale, Michael Lobel, Dani R. Merriman, Charmaine A. Nelson, Michael Ralph, Kirk Savage, Cherise Smith, Tsione Wolde-Michael and Dell Upton, and contributions by Derrick Austin, Mark Thomas Gibson, David Hartt, Ashley M. Jones, Melissa Lyttle and Kiki Petrosino.Artists include: Bethany Collins, Karon Davis, Abigail DeVille, Stan Douglas, Leonardo Drew, Torkwase Dyson, Kevin Jerome Everson, Nona Faustine, Jon Henry, Kahlil Robert Irving, Monument Lab, Walter Price, Martin Puryear, Andres Serrano, Cauleen Smith, Hank Willis Thomas, Davone Tines, Kara Walker.

The first comprehensive monograph on one of today’s most innovative and successful painters - made in close collaboration with the artistDefined by bold brushstrokes, a dynamic use of color and imaginative compositions, the paintings of Dana Schutz are panoramic expanses that offer visions of humanity in all its complex facets. Her deeply subjective approach, untethered from realism, translates into images that seem to exist in a place that transcends time while celebrating the intrinsic qualities of her medium of choice with freedom and intelligence. As the artist herself stated, ‘I’m interested in painting as an affective place where the hierarchies of the world can be rearranged within the space of a painting.'This first comprehensive monograph on her work was created in close collaboration with the artist and features a number of never-before-seen paintings and drawings.