In this book, art historian Darby English explores the year 1971, when two exhibitions opened that brought modernist painting and sculpture into the burning heart of United States cultural politics: Contemporary Black Artists in America, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The DeLuxe Show, a racially integrated abstract art exhibition presented in a renovated movie theater in a Houston ghetto. 1971: A Year in the Life of Color looks at many black artists’ desire to gain freedom from overt racial representation, as well as their efforts—and those of their advocates—to further that aim through public exhibition. Amid calls to define a “black aesthetic,” these experiments with modernist art prioritized 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 importance of these experiments, English argues, came partly from color’s special status as a cultural symbol and partly from investigations of color already under way in late modern art and criticism. With their supporters, black modernists—among them Peter Bradley, Frederick Eversley, Alvin Loving, Raymond Saunders, and Alma Thomas—rose above the demand to represent or be represented, compromising nothing in their appeals for interracial collaboration and, above all, responding with optimism rather than cynicism to the surrounding culture’s preoccupation with color.

1971: A Year in the Life of Color

Arts & Photography

English, Darby

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

The product of nearly 25 years of research, Pershing: General of the Armies remains one of the most authoritative biographies of the man known as "Black Jack." Newly appointed head of the American Expeditionary Forces, Pershing sailed for Europe in May 1917. Once in France, he set about the task of building an army. By October the Americans were at the front and over the next year became involved in increasingly significant battles, all vividly recounted here: Cantigny, Chateau-Thierry, Belleau Wood, Soissons, St. Mihiel, and the 47-day slugfest in the Meuse-Argonne. Although the impact of the American forces on the outcome of the war has been much debated, there is no question that the troops acquitted themselves well under Pershing’s command. Pershing’s postwar life included an unsuccessful run for president, a stint as Chief of Staff, and a secret romance with a French woman 34 years younger than he; nonetheless, his influence as a leader extended into World War II.

How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness

MIT Press]

Going 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.
Work 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 How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness, 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.
The 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.

The MIT Press

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.

To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror (Richard D. Cohen Lectures on African & African American Art)

Yale University Press

“This collection of Walker's astonishing tableaux dramatizes black-white interactions via horrifically accurate imaginings of one-on-one encounters–encounters that, in their microcosms of exploitation and mutual dependency, seem to speak directly to current forms of black-white relations.” –Publishers Weekly

Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress

Reinhardt, Mark

Berry, Ian

Patterson, Vivian

Rizzoli

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.

Black is, Black Ain't

Warren, Professor Kenneth W.

Copeland, Huey

Walker, Hamza

Mooney, Amy M.

Foster-Rice, Greg

Thompson, Krista

Pinder, Kimberly N.

Renaissance Society

Glenn Ligon is one of the preeminent members of a generation of American artists who came to prominence in the late 1980s with conceptually-based paintings, photographs and text-oriented works concerning the social, linguistic and political constructions of race, gender and sexuality. Incorporating sources as diverse as photographic scrapbooks and Richard Pryor's stand-up comedy routines--his lush coal-dust paintings of excerpts from James Baldwin's 1955 essay "Stranger in the Village," for instance--Ligon's art is a meditation on representation of the self in relation to culture and history. Handsomely designed with a hardcover slipcase, Some Changes is the artist's first significant monograph. Well-illustrated texts by critics and curators Wayne Baerwaldt, Huey Copeland, Darby English, Wayne Koestenbaum and Mark Nash survey Ligon's works from 1982 to 2005, and a candid interview with Toronto artist Stephen Andrews delves into Ligon's personal insights and professional experiences.

Glenn Ligon: Some Changes

Koestenbaum, Wayne

Baerwaldt, Wayne

Nash, Mark

The Power Plant

Accompanying the landmark exhibition by renowned Hudson Valley–based artist Martin Puryear (born 1941), who is representing the United States at the 58th Venice Biennale, this book captures a high point in the career of one of today’s most acclaimed artists. In addition to extensive illustrations of new sculptures made for the Biennale, including a significant site-specific work, the book features major texts by Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Darby English and Anne Wagner. The works and essays demonstrate Puryear’s powerful, original and influential engagement with art history and social history on both a personal level, as an African American artist, and universally. With a definitive illustrated chronology of the artist’s career over the last fifty years, Martin Puryear: Liberty / Libertà is an essential look at one of the most important artists today, who continues to work at the height of his powers.

Martin Puryear: Liberty / Libertà

Rapaport, Brooke Kamin

Wagner, Anne

Haslett, Tobi

Gregory R. Miller & Co.

Charles Ray: Adam and Eve

Individual Artists

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Books by English, Darby