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Queering Post-Black Art

Artists Transforming African-American Identity After Civil Rights

Derek Conrad Murray author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:22nd Oct '15

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Queering Post-Black Art cover

This book explores the political, conceptual, and aesthetic concerns of a post-Civil Rights generation of artists, as they imagine African-American identity through a more inclusive critical lens.

What impact do sexual politics and queer identities have on the understanding of 'blackness' as a set of visual, cultural and intellectual concerns? In Queering Post-Black Art, Derek Conrad Murray argues that the rise of female, gay and lesbian artists as legitimate African-American creative voices is essential to the development of black art. He considers iconic works by artists including Glenn Ligon, Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas and Kalup Linzy, which question whether it is possible for blackness to evade its ideologically over-determined cultural legibility. In their own unique, often satirical way, a new generation of contemporary African American artists represent the ever-evolving sexual and gender politics that have come to define the highly controversial notion of 'post-black' art. First coined in 2001, the term 'post-black' resonated because it articulated the frustrations of young African-American artists around notions of identity and belonging that they perceived to be stifling, reductive and exclusionary. Since then, these artists have begun to conceive an idea of blackness that is beyond marginalization and sexual discrimination.

'In Queering Post-Black Art, Murray takes on the project of art history itself, its creation of arbitrary value that lauds certain efforts and excludes others. Murray parses out and takes on discourses that are key to understandings of art history, African-American art, and Contemporary art. He is unafraid of speaking truth to power.' - Cherise Smith, Associate Professor of Art History: African-American and African Diaspora Art

ISBN: 9781784532871

Dimensions: 216mm x 138mm x 18mm

Weight: 351g

256 pages