John P Bowles – författare

A rich reappraisal of a key Black American modernist through a lens of cross-cultural engagement  Sargent Claude Johnson (1888–1967) was the first Black modernist on the West Coast to gain national acclaim. His artistic practice, forged in California, drew from a range of international influences, including traditional and contemporary arts of Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America, particularly Mexican modernism and Indigenous pottery techniques. Spanning the Black Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Johnson’s career was devoted to sensitive, ennobling portrayals of people of color. Though best known as a sculptor, he worked expertly in a broad range of media—from painting and printmaking to enamelwork and ceramics—each illuminating his multifaceted identity as an artist.   In this catalogue, leading scholars examine Johnson’s artistic evolution and offer fresh perspectives on his work. From sculptures of underrepresented subjects to majestic architectural commissions—including a celebrated mural reproduced in lavish gatefold format—the book positions Johnson’s oeuvre within an expansive framework of global modernism.  Distributed for the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens  Exhibition Schedule:  Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens(February 17–May 20, 2024)

In 1972 the artist Adrian Piper began periodically dressing as a persona called the Mythic Being, striding the streets of New York in a mustache, Afro wig, and mirrored sunglasses with a cigar in the corner of her mouth. Her Mythic Being performances critically engaged with popular representations of race, gender, sexuality, and class; they challenged viewers to accept personal responsibility for xenophobia and discrimination and the conditions that allowed them to persist. Piper’s work confronts viewers and forces them to reconsider assumptions about the social construction of identity. Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment is an in-depth analysis of this pioneering artist’s work, illustrated with more than ninety images, including twenty-one in color.Over the course of a decade, John P. Bowles and Piper conversed about her art and its meaning, reception, and relation to her scholarship on Kant’s philosophy. Drawing on those conversations, Bowles locates Piper’s work at the nexus of Conceptual and feminist art of the late 1960s and 1970s. Piper was the only African American woman associated with the Conceptual artists of the 1960s and one of only a few African Americans to participate in exhibitions of the nascent feminist art movement in the early 1970s. Bowles contends that Piper’s work is ultimately about our responsibility for the world in which we live.