1971: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF COLOR, by Darby English, “should be required reading for anyone interested in the intersections of race and the history of twentieth-century art as it once was.” — Aram Moshayedi, curator, Hammer Museum*
An investigation of two 1971 exhibitions—Contemporary Black Artists in America at the old Whitney, and The DeLuxe Show, an abstract art show in a Houston movie theater—English’s book “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…
“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.”**
DARBY ENGLISH—1971: A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF COLOR
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
* hammer.ucla.edu/curators-pick-their-favorite-art-books-of-the-year
Darby English. Book cover image credit: University of Chicago Press.
