Krista Thompson - Böcker

EN MAS' is one of the first publications to give serious scholarly attention to contemporary art works considering carnival in the 21st century, filling a gap in two decades of exhibitions of contemporary Caribbean art that did not explicitly address carnival as an artistic practice. A hybrid exhibition catalogue and academic reader with a lively carnivalesque feel, it presents nine newly commissioned artist projects by John Beadle, Charles Campbell, Christophe Chassol, Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Marlon Griffith, Hew Locke, Ebony G. Patterson, Lorraine O'Grady and Cauleen Smith. The book also includes a timeline of diasporic pan-Caribbean carnivals, tracing the influence of Caribbean carnivals and festivals on the theater, dance, and Broadway stages in New York and London, in contemporary art galleries and biennials from São Paulo to Havana to Gwangju, at the Olympics as well as in protest and other movements.

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.