Art on My Mind: Visual Politics

by bell hooks, Mickalene Thomas (Foreword by)

Overview

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:	9781620979297
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	05/27/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	19 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

bell hooks (1952–2021) was the author of over thirty books, including the feminist classic Ain’t I a Woman, the memoir Bone Black, the New York Times bestselling All About Love, and Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (The New Press).

Editorial Reviews

In her first book about art and the "politics of the visual," hooks, a writer known for her clarifying views on feminism and black women, addresses the deplorable absence of discourse on black artists, especially by black critics. Why, she asks, has art played a minimal role in the lives of most African Americans? With a firm grasp of the racial and cultural climate in which black aesthetics must grow, hooks offers some astute answers to that question and holds out hope for change. She then hones her aesthetic in her adept interpretations of the work and impact of black artists, including Romare Bearden, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alison Saar, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, and Margo Humphreys. Hooks also discusses portrayals of black women and men in art and, in an essay on photography, how the "struggle over images" became part of the black liberation movement. Art matters, hooks assures us; it helps us forge our identities while forcing society to evolve from being exclusive to inclusive. As erudite and sophisticated as hooks is, she is also eminently readable, even exhilarating.

Donna Seaman

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