Walls of Prophecy and Protest is an illustrated history of the life, work, and legacy of famed Chicago muralist William Walker by Chicago arts journalist Jeff Huebner.
Words of the Prophets treats graffiti as a form of political prophecy. Whether we consider austerity in Thessaloniki, Camorra infiltration in Naples, the fall of Communism in Gdansk, or the rise of gang warfare in Chicago, graffiti is a form of democratic self-expression that dates back to Periclean Athens and the Book of Daniel. Words of the Prophets offers close readings of 400 original photographs taken between 2014 and 2021 in Philadelphia, Venice, Milan, Florence, Syracuse, and Warsaw, alongside literary works by Pawel Huelle, films by Andrezj Wajda, Antonio Capua, and music videos by Natasha Bedingfield and Beyoncé. A third of the book is dedicated to interviews with Krik Kong, Iwona Zajac, Ponchee.193, Jay Pop, Ser, Simoni Fontana, and Mattia Campo Dall’Orto.
This Companion authoritatively points to the main areas of enquiry within the subject of African American art history. The first section examines how African American art has been constructed over the course of a century of published scholarship. The second section studies how African American art is and has been taught and researched in academia. The third part focuses on how African American art has been reflected in art galleries and museums. The final section opens up understandings of what we mean when we speak of African American art. This book will be of interest to graduate students, researchers, and professors and may be used in American art, African American art, visual culture, and culture classes.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Chicago witnessed a remarkable flourishing of visual arts associated with the Black Arts Movement. From the painting of murals as a way to reclaim public space and the establishment of independent community art centers to the work of the AFRICOBRA collective and Black filmmakers, artists on Chicago's South and West Sides built a vision of art as service to the people. In Art for People's Sake Rebecca Zorach traces the little-told story of the visual arts of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago, showing how artistic innovations responded to decades of racist urban planning that left Black neighborhoods sites of economic depression, infrastructural decay, and violence. Working with community leaders, children, activists, gang members, and everyday people, artists developed a way of using art to help empower and represent themselves. Showcasing the depth and sophistication of the visual arts in Chicago at this time, Zorach demonstrates the crucial role of aesthetics and artistic practice in the mobilization of Black radical politics during the Black Power era.
The Julius Rosenwald Fund has been largely ignored in the literature of both art history and African American studies, despite its unique focus, intensity, and commitment. Spertus Museum in Chicago has organized an exhibition, guest curated by Daniel Schulman, that presents and explores the work of funded artists as well as the history of the Fund. Through it, and this accompanying collection of essays, illustrations, and color plates, we see the Fund’s groundbreaking initiative to address issues relating to the unequal treatment of blacks in American life. The book constitutes a veritable Who’s Who of African American artists and intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, as well as a roll call of modern contributors who represent the leading scholars in their fields, including Peter M. Ascoli, grandson and biographer of Julius Rosenwald, and Kinshasha Holman Conwill, deputy director of the National Museum of African American Art and Culture. With far-reaching influence even today, the Julius Rosenwald Fund stands alongside the Rockefeller and Carnegie funds as a major force in American cultural history.
With vivid images and words, The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago tells the story of the mural on Chicago's South Side whose creation and evolution was at the heart of the Black Arts Movement in the United States.
A “well-chosen anthology of the radical historian’s prodigious output,” from A People’s History of the United States and lesser known sources (Kirkus Reviews). When Howard Zinn died in early 2010, millions of Americans mourned the loss of one of the nation’s foremost intellectual and political guides; a historian, activist, and truth-teller who, in the words of the New York Times’s Bob Herbert, “peel[ed] back the rosy veneer of much of American history to reveal sordid realities that had remained hidden for too long.” A collection designed to highlight Zinn’s essential writings, The Indispensable Zinn includes excerpts from Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States; his memoir, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train; his inspiring writings on the civil rights movement, and the full text of his celebrated play, Marx in Soho. Noted historian and activist Timothy Patrick McCarthy provides essential historical and biographical context for each selection. With a foreword by Noam Chomsky and an afterword from Zinn’s former Spellman College student and longtime friend, Alice Walker, The Indispensable Zinn is both a fitting tribute to the legacy of a man whose “work changed the way millions of people saw the past,” and a powerful and accessible introduction for anyone coming to Zinn’s essential body of work for the first time (Noam Chomsky).
This book is the collaborative response of engaged scholars from diverse countries and disciplines who are disturbed by the contemporary resurgence of anti-democratic movements and regimes throughout the world. These movements have manifest in vitriolic “nationalist” polemics, state-supported violence, and exclusionary anti-immigrant policies, less than a century after the rise and fall and horrific devastations of fascism in the early 20th century.
"The whole world of nature appears in our day to be in revolt, with all her unprecedented disturbances. And how clearly are the nations preparing by granting unrestrained powers to individual men, such as we note in Russia, Germany, Italy, and in our own country,--all preparing for the one man prophesied by our Lord in John 5:43: 'I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive Me not: if another shall come in his own name, him ye will receive.' We are surely in the world-age of the feet of iron mixed with miry clay of Daniel's image. "Let me repeat that this book, so full of spiritual meat and helpful, illustrative anecdotes, so interesting while so splendidly setting forth these vital, scattered Bible teachings, is destined to reach many hearts and to build up many Christians in a more vital, Spirit-filled faith." --From the Introduction by Howard A. Kelly