{"title":"Darby English","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"to-describe-a-life-book-darby-english-9780300230383","title":"To Describe a Life","description":"A passionate, rigorous, and persuasive look at the helpful complexity of art during a time of profound cultural turmoil   By turns historical, critical, and personal, this book examines the use of art—and love—as a resource amid the recent wave of shootings by American police of innocent black women and men. Darby English attends to a cluster of artworks created in or for our tumultuous present that address themes of racial violence and representation idiosyncratically, neither offering solutions nor accommodating shallow narratives about difference. In Zoe Leonard’s Tipping Point, English sees an embodiment of love in the face of brutality; in Kerry James Marshall’s untitled 2015 portrait of a black male police officer, a greatly fraught subject treated without apparent judgment; in Pope.L’s Skin Set Drawings, a life project undertaken to challenge codified uses of difference, color, and language; and in a replica of the Lorraine Motel—the site of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968—a monument to the unfinished business of the integrated nonviolent movement for civil rights. For English, the consideration of art is a paradigm of social life, because art is something we must share. Powerful, challenging, and timely, To Describe a Life is an invitation to rethink what life in ongoing crisis is and can be—and, indeed, to discover how art can help.  Published in association with the Hutchins Center for African \u0026amp; African American Research","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49708583682321,"sku":"CIN0300230389G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0300230389.jpg?v=1751259743"},{"product_id":"among-others-book-darby-english-9781633450349","title":"Among Others","description":"\u003ci\u003eAmong Others: Blackness at MoMA\u003c\/i\u003e begins with an essay that provides a rigorous and in-depth analysis of MoMA's history regarding racial issues. It also calls for further developments, leaving space for other scholars to draw on particular moments of that history. It takes an integrated approach to the study of racial blackness and its representation: the book stresses inclusion and, as such, the plate section, rather than isolating black artists, features works by non-black artists dealing with race and race- related subjects. As a collection book, the volume provides scholars and curators with information about the Museum's holdings, at times disclosing works that have been little documented or exhibited. The numerous and high-quality illustrations will appeal to anyone interested in art made by black artists, or in modern art in general.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49733363564817,"sku":"NGR9781633450349","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50300392079633,"sku":"CIN1633450341G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50386535350545,"sku":"CIN1633450341VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51041357627665,"sku":"NIN9781633450349","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52989697753361,"sku":"GOR014682439","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1633450341.jpg?v=1751151489"},{"product_id":"1971-book-darby-english-9780226131054","title":"1971","description":"Art historian Darby English is celebrated for working against the grain and plumbing gaps in historical narratives. In this book, he explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of black cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in America, shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, an integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto.1971 takes an insightful look at many black artists' desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their and their advocates' efforts to further that aim through public exhibitions. Amid calls to define a \"black aesthetic\" or otherwise settle the race question, these experiments with modernist art favored cultural interaction and instability. Contemporary Black Artists in America highlighted abstraction as a stance against normative approaches, while The DeLuxe Show positioned abstraction in a center of urban blight. The power and social importance of these experiments, English argues, came partly from color's special status as a racial metaphor and partly from investigations of color that were underway in formalist American art and criticism. From Frank Bowling to Virginia Jaramillo, Sam Gilliam to Peter Bradley, black modernists and their supporters rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for racial reconciliation. At a time when many debates about identity sought closure, these exhibitions offered openings; when icons and slogans touted simple solutions, they chose difficulty. But above all, as English demonstrates in this provocative book, these exhibitions and artists responded with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding culture's preoccupation with color.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50331036287249,"sku":"GOR013929563","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51379402440977,"sku":"NGR9780226131054","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53157616615697,"sku":"GOR014787809","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53679924216081,"sku":"CIN022613105XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/022613105X.jpg?v=1751101704"},{"product_id":"how-to-see-a-work-of-art-in-total-darkness-book-darby-english-9780262050838","title":"How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness","description":"\u003cb\u003eGoing beyond the 'blackness' of black art to examine the integrative and interdisciplinary practices of Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L--five contemporary black artists in whose work race plays anything but a defining role.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eWork by black artists today is almost uniformly understood in terms of its blackness, with audiences often expecting or requiring it to represent the race. In \u003ci\u003eHow to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness\u003c\/i\u003e, Darby English shows how severely such expectations limit the scope of our knowledge about this work and how different it looks when approached on its own terms. Refusing to grant racial blackness--his metaphorical total darkness--primacy over his subjects' other concerns and contexts, he brings to light problems and possibilities that arise when questions of artistic priority and freedom come into contact, or even conflict, with those of cultural obligation. English examines the integrative and interdisciplinary strategies of five contemporary artists--Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L--stressing the ways in which this work at once reflects and alters our view of its informing context: the advent of postmodernity in late twentieth-century American art and culture.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe necessity for black art comes both from antiblack racism and resistances to it, from both segregation and efforts to imagine an autonomous domain of black culture. Yet to judge by the work of many contemporary practitioners, English writes, black art is increasingly less able--and black artists less willing--to maintain its standing as a realm apart. Through close examinations of Walker's controversial silhouettes' insubordinate reply to pictorial tradition, Wilson's and Julien's distinct approaches to institutional critique, Ligon's text paintings' struggle with modernisms, and Pope.L's vexing performance interventions, English grounds his contention that to understand this work is to displace race from its central location in our interpretation and to grant right of way to the work's historical, cultural, and aesthetic specificity.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50466922660113,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50466923381009,"sku":"CIN0262050838G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262050838.jpg?v=1751005389"},{"product_id":"how-to-see-a-work-of-art-in-total-darkness-book-darby-english-9780262514934","title":"How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness","description":"\u003cb\u003eGoing beyond the 'blackness' of black art to examine the integrative and interdisciplinary practices of Kara Walker, Fred Wilson, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, and William Pope.L--five contemporary black artists in whose work race plays anything but a defining role.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003eWork by black artists today is almost uniformly understood in terms of its blackness, with audiences often expecting or requiring it to represent the race. In \u003ci\u003eHow to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness\u003c\/i\u003e, Darby English shows how severely such expectations limit the scope of our knowledge about this work and how different it looks when approached on its own terms. Refusing to grant racial blackness--his metaphorical total darkness--primacy over his subjects' other concerns and contexts, he brings to light problems and possibilities that arise when questions of artistic priority and freedom come into contact, or even conflict, with those of cultural obligation. 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Through close examinations of Walker's controversial silhouettes' insubordinate reply to pictorial tradition, Wilson's and Julien's distinct approaches to institutional critique, Ligon's text paintings' struggle with modernisms, and Pope.L's vexing performance interventions, English grounds his contention that to understand this work is to displace race from its central location in our interpretation and to grant right of way to the work's historical, cultural, and aesthetic specificity.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51267479437585,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52122897121553,"sku":"NLS9780262514934","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0262514931.jpg?v=1751324182"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-au\/collections\/author-books-by-darby-english.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}