07: Art Historian Samantha Noël on In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe

In light of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement after the death of George Floyd, one book that brings me solace as I think about the inexplicable prevalence of premature Black death and the enduring resolve of Black life is Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. This heartfelt yet powerful text offers a close look at the “wake” in all of its iterations as it has manifested in the lives of Black people in the Americas across time and space. For Sharpe, to be in the wake is to continuously be aware of slavery’s unfolding presence in the lives of Black people, beginning not only with the trans-Atlantic slave trade but also staying awake to keep watch with the dead during wakes, and, more importantly, developing particular kinds of enduring consciousness (as in being woke) as forms of resistance.

Sharpe’s enquiry into this study begins on a personal level as she discusses the loss of loved ones in her family, but then connects them to the loss of other Black lives that succumb to the afterlives of slavery -- or the term systemic racism that is widely used in popular culture these days. These afterlives of slavery consist of everything from incarceration, limited access to healthcare and education, to the crises of black maternal health and inequities in living wages. Throughout the book, Sharpe examines visual, literary and quotidian representations of Black life that exalt the primacy of being in the wake which ultimately reminds us of the enduring spirit of Black life.

– Samantha Noël

Samantha A. Noël is an Associate Professor of Art History at Wayne State University. She received her B.A. in Fine Art from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University. Her research interests revolve around the history of art, visual culture and performance of the Black Diaspora. She has published on black modern and contemporary art and performance in journals such as Small Axe, Third Text and Art Journal. Noël’s current book, Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2021), examines black modernism in the early twentieth century, particularly how tropicality functioned as a unifying element in African Diasporic art and performance.

06: Asmaa Walton and the Black Art Library on Children’s Books

My name is Asmaa Walton and I’m the founder of the Black Art Library. I recently created a list of all the children’s books I have been collecting for the library so I could share it with teachers, parents, and really anyone who was interested. Children’s books have been some of my favorite to collect because I’m drawn to the illustrations!

All of the books are about Black artists or were created by Black artists. Every book I added to the list was wonderful but I will give some short reviews on a few of them!

Bronzeville Boys and Girls
By Gwendolyn Brooks and illustrated by Faith Ringgold
Ages 7-10

This book is honestly great for not only kids but kids at heart! I loved reading it so much. It is a collection of poems that tells the stories of different boys and girls in Bronzeville. This illustrations are by Faith Ringgold and they are fantastic.


Jacob Lawrence: In the City
By Susan Goldman Rubin
Ages 2-4

This one is a board book for younger children and it is one of the only board books I’ve come across about a Black artist so I think it’s very special. Jacob Lawrence’s paintings illustrate a bustling city for the young readers.


American Struggle: Teens Respond to Jacob Lawrence
Edited by Chul R. Kim

This is one that I didn’t put on the list because it’s one of the few YA books that I have. In this book multiple teens share their perspectives on the timeless work of Jacob Lawrence. This is a really unique book to me but it is not often that we’re able to hear from teens about how art speaks to them.

Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat
Ages 6-9
By Javaka Steptoe

The illustrations in this book are so beautiful. It takes us through a young Jean-Michel’s journey to becoming an artist and we’re introduce to members of his family and the roles they played in introducing him to art. It’s a great story.

– Asmaa Walton

View the Black Art Library’s list of Children’s books here.

Donate to the Black Art Library here!

05: When did you learn about the South African Apartheid?

In recent weeks, we’ve shared many books that are essential reads, not just in this moment, but books that have always been urgent. One book that I didn’t include in this list is Trevor Noah’s Born A Crime—not included because, really, it just didn’t come to mind, which makes sense because this book is my current read not for the reasons nox library has been promoting others—I didn’t pick this book up as one to coincide with the movement against white supremacy. 

My longtime friends since second grade and I decided over a month ago to partake in a book circle. Our locations span the US, from Arkansas, Chicago and Detroit, to Vermont and New York. Our book circle works like this: 

There’s a designated week in which Aisling in Vermont mails one of her favorite books to Kirsten in New York. 

Kirsten then mails her favorite book to Bailey in Arkansas. 

Bailey mails hers to Anna in Chicago, who then mails hers to Ana, who is also in Chicago, and then Ana mails one of her favorite books to me—I’m in Detroit.

Ana sent me Born A Crime. What I love about this book circle is that I learn something about one of my oldest best friends that I had previously neglected to recognize. I don’t watch Trevor Noah but I don’t have anything against him. It's an interesting fact to realize that Ana chose this book first to read and then to send to me. When I opened my mail, Cameron (my partner) immediately stated he wants to read Noah’s book after me. So I guess I also learned that’s a bonding point between my two closest friends. 

Born A Crime is an autobiography that focuses on Trevor Noah’s childhood in South Africa, in about the 1980s and early 90s. It takes place mostly under the Apartheid—something that I admittedly never learned about in school (no surprise) nor in dialogue with friends, family and neighbors. I’ve been thinking a lot about why this might be. The South African Apartheid: a severely intricate system of racial segregation that lasted until the 1990s. The 1990s! Why was this something so many of us in the US had neglected to place in our understanding of history? Or maybe it wasn’t “so many of us”; maybe it was just me who neglected to make room for this long-term historic attack on human rights into my mental encyclopedia of history. But I seriously doubt that’s the case—I know I’m not the only one to live with a privilege that allowed me to never before reckon with Apartheid. So what came as surprising to me when I began reading this book, is that already, not even halfway through the book, had I learned so much more about global white supremacy through Noah’s stories than I had learned in my 18 years of US education. (Okay, maybe that didn’t come as a surprise.)

So although Born A Crime isn’t about the United States, its insight on Apartheid still feels informative on our own system of institutionalized and individualized racism, with comedic breaks to keep us sane. I don’t think it’s the book to read to learn about these things, but I would suggest it as a light read that still lets us learn during times when we are so prone to becoming burnt out. For times when we desperately need to keep going. Maybe that’s a sloppy end to a “review,” but the 30-second mark has been passed. Just pick the book up and see for yourselves.

– Danielle Francisca

04: Navigating an endless stream of things to learn from and of

I began the year reading Lydia Davis's shorts, then Merve Emre's Once and Future Feminist. By March I was only panic-reading the news. Then I tried to digest the pandemic by reading Paul Preciado's "Learning From the Virus,” but also digging back to Virginia Woolf's "On Being Ill," and other seminal texts on illness, ailments, and culture. 

At the time George Floyd was murdered, I was in Chicago with my partner, probably reading about a bored celebrity in their mansion or watching Breaking Bad. The world changed overnight. Perhaps because everyone was tired of being either inside or essential; perhaps because Black and Brown people were disproportionately affected by the pandemic; perhaps because of all of the other events that had transpired in the past 400 years, it felt like a time for action. 

Shortly after the protests began there was a flood of organized documents, reading lists, and spreadsheets. The endless bounty of knowledge omitted from American pedagogy could fill, well, a library. There are so many things on my reading list now: books I'm upset I wasn't given in my youth, books I'm ashamed I didn't know about. And to be clear, my reading list isn't exclusively about race. There is so much to learn about the world, but the lens through which I intake these things is always going to be through what I have learned in the American school system—a system predicated on race. 

I'm trying to read, listen, and act in equal measures in order to interrogate my own spheres of references and knowledge. Because it's been so hard to sit down to read a book, I am starting with the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the NYT. I am a maximalist, and this project has it all: podcasts, long-form journalism, extensive criticism, poetry, compact phone-legibility, and more. It's such a robust bank of information about the insidious genesis of contemporary racist structures and systems. At once poetic and disruptive, it provides deep learning for thirsty allies. It's hard to review a compendium of works in medias res, but I can safely guess that there is no conclusion to the 1619 Project at this time. What happens next? I think we're trying to answer that right now.  

I've definitely gone past 30 seconds. 4.5/5 stars—half a point deducted because it is not a book and this is a book review column. But, anything Ted Cruz decries as propaganda is probably going to be excellent.

–Tizziana Baldenebro

Tizziana Baldenebro is a Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). Her practice emphasizes critical research and documentation, privileging historically undervalued and underrepresented artists and designers. Tizziana received a Masters of Architecture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. 

03: Books on race, class, america and more

From Pressed Coffee 03

If you’ve had the time and focus to read a book for fun right now, I’m truly impressed.

nox library, in collaboration with supporters of our fundraiser, has compiled a lengthy list of essential reads for these times and forward. Here are the five most applauded (in no particular order):

1. Fascism: What It Is And How To Fight It by Leon Trotsky: “Why fascism was able to conquer only in those countries where social democratic or Stalinist parties blocked the workers and their allies from utilizing a revolutionary situation to remove the capitalists from power.”

2. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison: “Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves' garden do not bloom. Pecola's life does change- in painful, devastating ways.
   What its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child's yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrisons's most powerful, unforgettable novels- and a significant work of American fiction.”
   

3. Freedom Is A Constant Struggle by Angela Davis: “In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.”

4. Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat by J. Sakai: “The authoritative attack on the idea that the American working class is primarily white, with Black, Asian and Indian labour being little more than special interest groups. This book presents US history from a working class, revolutionary and non-white perspective.”

5. Origins of an Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit by Thomas J. Sugrue: “Once America's ‘arsenal of democracy,’ Detroit has become the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of America's dilemma of racial and economic inequality, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty.”

02: On The Artist As Curator (An Anthology) edited by Elena Filipovic

From Pressed Coffee 02