A Black Gaze

This contemporary art coffee table book celebrates the work of 9 Black artists who are dismantling the white gaze-and demanding we see Blackness anew. "Offers a license to be at home in one's own skin . . . [and] issues an invitation to action, not of a performative sympathy but of rigorous reflection." -Washington Post Book World In this stunning art coffee table book, Tina Campt examines contemporary Black artists who are shifting the very nature of our interactions with the visual through their creation and curation of a distinctively Black gaze. Their work-from Deana Lawson's disarmingly intimate portraits to Arthur Jafa's videos of the everyday beauty and grit of the Black experience, from Kahlil Joseph's films and Dawoud Bey's photographs to the embodied and multimedia artistic practice of Okwui Okpokwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson-requires viewers to do more than simply look; it solicits visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity. Campt shows that this new way of seeing shifts viewers from the passive optics of looking at to the active struggle of looking with, through, and alongside the suffering-and joy-of Black life in the present. These 9 Black artists challenge the fundamental disparity that defines the dominant viewing practice: the notion that Blackness is the elsewhere (or nowhere) of whiteness. They create images that flow, that resuscitate and revalue the historical and contemporary archive of Black life in radical ways. Writing with rigor and passion, Campt celebrates Black art and describes the creativity, ingenuity, cunning, and courage that is the modus operandi of a Black gaze.

Tina M. Campt, a Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and a Research Associate at the VIAD (Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre) at the University of Johannesburg. She is the author of Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe, Listening to Images, and other books.

Prelude to a Black Gaze 1 Verse One The Intimacy of Strangers 27 Verse Two Black (Counter)gravity 43 Verse Three The Visual Frequency of Black Life 77 Verse Four The Slow Lives of Still-Moving-Images 109 Verse Five Sounding a Black Feminist Chorus 145 Verse Six Adjacency and the Poethics of Care 167 Reprise The Haptic Frequencies of Radical Black Joy 193 Acknowledgments 203 Notes 207 Index 215