Description
Over the years, Kobena Mercer has critically illuminated the visual innovations of African American and black British artists. In Travel & See he presents a diasporic model of criticism that gives close attention to aesthetic strategies while tracing the shifting political and cultural contexts in which black visual art circulates. In eighteen essays, which cover the period from 1992 to 2012 and discuss such leading artists as Isaac Julien, Renee Green, Kerry James Marshall, and Yinka Shonibare, Mercer provides nothing less than a counternarrative of global contemporary art that reveals how the "dialogical principle" of cross-cultural interaction not only has transformed commonplace perceptions of blackness today but challenges us to rethink the entangled history of modernism as well.
About the Author
Kobena Mercer is Professor of History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University. He is author of Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, editor of Cosmopolitan Modernisms, among other titles, and an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing.
Reviews
"Travel & See benefits from a retrospective gaze; Mercer's 30-year career gives him a judicious distance on some highly charged aesthetic movements and issues.... Mercer's volume ... does not simply collect his past writings; it forces us to see international modernism in a way that has implications for future scholarship both within and beyond the field of black diasporic art. Travel & See posits Mercer as a chronicler not only of the field of contemporary art of the Afro-modern world, but of the inextricable ties of black diasporic and modernism itself." -- Sarah Lewis * Art in America *
"Travel & See is an essential addition to any art historian's library.... With Travel & See, Mercer further establishes himself as a leading figure in the field while also modeling the type of work that still needs to be done. The volume shows how Mercer's writing redefined contemporary art history just as much as it shows how black diaspora artists changed contemporary art." -- Uchenna Itam * Shift *
"Mercer's optimistic spirit encourages the reader to dare to travel in space and time in order to see better." -- Maureen Murphy * Critique d'art *
"Subtleties of thought and elegance of expression are characteristic of Mercer's writings, read avidly by those art historians who have sought insight into Black British Cultural Studies, increasingly influential over the last thirty years. Mercer's essays offer a welcome contrast to art-historical scholarship aimed at the specialist, and also to criticism on the contemporary arts of the African and Asian diasporas." -- Amna Malik * Art History *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822360940
Author Kobena Mercer
Format Paperback
Page Count 384
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 862g
About the Author
Kobena Mercer is Professor of History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University. He is author of Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, editor of Cosmopolitan Modernisms, among other titles, and an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing.
Reviews
"Travel & See benefits from a retrospective gaze; Mercer's 30-year career gives him a judicious distance on some highly charged aesthetic movements and issues.... Mercer's volume ... does not simply collect his past writings; it forces us to see international modernism in a way that has implications for future scholarship both within and beyond the field of black diasporic art. Travel & See posits Mercer as a chronicler not only of the field of contemporary art of the Afro-modern world, but of the inextricable ties of black diasporic and modernism itself." -- Sarah Lewis * Art in America *
"Travel & See is an essential addition to any art historian's library.... With Travel & See, Mercer further establishes himself as a leading figure in the field while also modeling the type of work that still needs to be done. The volume shows how Mercer's writing redefined contemporary art history just as much as it shows how black diaspora artists changed contemporary art." -- Uchenna Itam * Shift *
"Mercer's optimistic spirit encourages the reader to dare to travel in space and time in order to see better." -- Maureen Murphy * Critique d'art *
"Subtleties of thought and elegance of expression are characteristic of Mercer's writings, read avidly by those art historians who have sought insight into Black British Cultural Studies, increasingly influential over the last thirty years. Mercer's essays offer a welcome contrast to art-historical scholarship aimed at the specialist, and also to criticism on the contemporary arts of the African and Asian diasporas." -- Amna Malik * Art History *
Book Information
ISBN 9780822360940
Author Kobena Mercer
Format Paperback
Page Count 384
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 862g
