Art on My Mind: Visual Politics

by bell hooks

Overview

“As erudite and sophisticated as hooks is, she is also eminently readable, even exhilarating.” —Booklist

In Art on My Mind, bell hooks, a leading cultural critic, responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting, and criticizing art and aesthetics in an art world increasingly concerned with identity politics. Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781565842632
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	07/01/1995
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	187,201
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

bell hooks is Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College. Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, she has chosen the lower case pen name bell hooks, based on the names of her mother and grandmother, to emphasize the importance of the substance of her writing as opposed to who she is. A writer and critic, hooks is the author of more than thirty books, many of which have focused on issues of social class, race, and gender. Among her many books are the feminist classic Ain’t I a Woman, the dialogue Breaking Bread (with Cornel West), the children’s book Happy to Be Nappy, and the memoir Bone Black. She lives in Berea, Kentucky.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Art on My Mind:
“In an art world obsessed with identity politics, Art on My Mind is a long-overdue rescue of the liberating, rather than confining, power of art.”
—Paper Magazine

“Passionate and highly personal.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Sharp and persuasive.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“[Art on My Mind] is a guide to the ways that political meaning and esthetic pleasure may be discovered, bound together, in many works by contemporary artists of color.”
—Art America

“[hooks] brings a welcome clarity to such issues as received art and the development of a Western canon.”
—San Francisco Examiner

From the Publisher

A prolific critical writer, hooks has contributed a collection of essays on contemporary art and what she describes as the troubling relationship between the dominant white, male art world, its practices, protocols and biases, and the creative production of African American artists-particularly women-and others whose works grapple with issues of identity and social context. Decrying the lack of black critics writing on today's art, hooks provides a minute dissection of issues of race, gender and ``cultural hegemony'' in the works of the late Jean-Michel Basquiat; examines the historical impact of photography in black life and the trenchant intelligence and beauty of Carrie Mae Weems's photographs; and highlights important critical works by black art historian Sylvia Boone and black architect LaVerne Wells-Bowie. Hooks has a knack for balancing flat academic jargon with vivid language, illuminating the historical and psychoanalytic underpinnings of her topics while anticipating the visceral responses of a lay audience. Despite her generic invocations of the dominant, marginalizing Eurocentric patriarchy, etc., etc., her passionate and highly personal exploration of these and other issues (including a distressing account of her own illness and an aestheticized betrayal by an artist friend) transforms academic abstractions into recognizable human patterns linking the everyday lives of Americans, black or white. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly