Books on Display

Left Display Case

Don't Hold Me Back: My Life and Art.

Author: Winfred Rembert (with Charles and Rosalie Baker)
Illustrator: Winfred Rembert
Peru, IL: Carus Publishing, 2003.

Born in the 1950s, child of a Georgia fieldworker, Winfred Rembert is a self-taught artist who paints primarily on leather. His book is prefaced by this poem written for him by Nikki Giovanni:

Don't Hold Me Back

Nikki Giovanni

And when I dream I dream
In colors
Even rainy days sparkle
Even clouds have shine


And when I hope I hope
In smiles
Even laughter has bubbles
Even giggles ballet


And so I understand
That life is precious
And important
And wonderful


When things go wrong
When things go back
When things don't work


I start to dream

A Drawing in the Sand: A Story of African American Art.

Author: Jerry Butler
Illustrator: Jerry Butler
Madison, WI: Zino Press, 1998

Butler's journey began when his Grand Mo Lu called his family to gather around a drawing of his family he had made in the sand and commanded them all to, "Look at this." Later, "Whenever I said I wanted to be an FBI agent of something Grand Mo Lu would say, "You’re already an artist. That's enough to be." This book chronicles Butler's own development as an artist and includes attention to the artists who influenced him, for instance, Jacob Lawrence and Augusta Savage.

Romare Bearden: Collage of Memories.

Author: Jan Greenberg
New York: Harry Abrams.

Blond and blue-eyed, Romare Bearden was born in the rural South and moved to New York City with his parents in the early 1900s. He is particularly well-known for his photomontages and for his paintings. "Art celebrates a victory," he said. "It involves conquering and redeeming both the beauty and sullenness of the past…it proclaims that black people have survived in spite of everything."

Stitching Stars: The Story Quilts of Harriet Powers.

Author: Mary E. Lyons
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993

Harriet Powers story quilts tell both stories of her life as a slave on a Georgia Plantation--weddings, and thunderstorms, and meteor showers--and also of the Bible. She finished her first story quilt in 1886 and eventually sold it to support her family to an admiring local art teacher who wanted to preserve it as folk art. Her quilts now hang in the Smithsonian and in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

"Sing a ho that I had the wings of a dove, I'd fly away and be at rest."

The Black Man in Art.

Author: Rena Neumann Coen
Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publications, 1970.

A counterpoint to the other books in this display, this book chronicles not only how blacks have depicted themselves but how they have been depicted by others. The author begins with Africa, then moves onto the Ancient World, Europe, and finally America in the mid-20th century.

Starting Home: The Story of Horace Pippin, Painter.

Author: Mary E. Lyon
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993.

Horace Pippin joined an all-black regiment during WWI and spent a year fighting in France where, just before the war ended, he was shot in the right shoulder. With a steel plate in his shoulder he went on to produce a number of paintings based on his wartime experiences both at home and abroad, including the famous "The End of the War: Starting Home" during the painting which he said he relived the war.

Harlem Renaissance Artists.

Author: Denise Jordan
Chicago, IL: Heinemann Library, 2003.

Palmer Hayden, Aaron Douglas (sometimes called "the father of black American art"), Lois Mailou Jones, and Augusta Savage are but a few of the painters, sculptors, and photographers who thrived in Harlem between 1920 and 1929 and are highlighted in this children's book.

Right Display Case

The Art of African Masks: Exploring Cultural Traditions.

Author: Carol Finley
Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publications, 1999.

From the book: "The purpose of a mask is not only to conceal the identity of the warer. The mask actually creates a new identity--one from the spirit world."

Now read this poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar:

We Wear the Mask

by Paul Laurence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
    We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
    We wear the mask!

Wake Up Our Souls: A Celebration of Black American Artists.

Author: Tonya Bolden
New York: Harry Abrams, 2004.

This work surveys 300 years of art by black Americans, including sulptors, painters, folk articles, ceramicists, and photographers. One, Edmonia Lewis, was educated in the mid-1800s at Oberlin. She sculpted first in cheaper materials such as clay and plaster and later in marble. Her figure of Cleopatra, depicted after her suicide, caused a sensation (both negative and positive) at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition held in Philadelphia.

Master of Mahogany: Tom Day, Free Black Cabinetmaker.

Author: Mary E. Lyons
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994.

Thomas Day was a successful 19th century North Carolina furniture maker and businessman, the most successful furniture maker in the state at that time, in fact. An ad he posted in 1827 for his shop read:

"Thomas Day, cabinet maker, returns his thanks for the patronage he has received, and wishes to inform his friends and the public that he has on hand, and intends keeping, a handsome supply of mahogony, walnut, and stained furniture, the most fashionable and common bedsteads, etc. which he would be glad to sell very low. All orders in his line, in repairing, varnished, etc. will be thankfully received and punctually attended to."

Faith Ringgold.

Author: Robyn Montana Turner
Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.

Born in Harlem just as the Harlem Renaissance period was drawing to a close, Faith Ringgold is another example of an artist who creates art with fabric, including soft sculpture and story quilts, "a painter who works in the quilt medium," she says.

"After I decided to be an artist, the first thing that I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could be on the art scene without sacrificing one iota of my blackness, or my femaleness, or my humanity."

Art Against the Odds: From Slave Quilts to Prison Paintings.

Author: Susan Goldman Rubin
New York: Crown, 2004

"Outsider art" is the focus of this book. Who is an outsider? Everyone from American slaves, those confined to WWII prison camps, to psychiatric wards, to 21st century children imprisoned by poverty and violence. This book shows examples of how creativity can help outsiders cope with the walls that wall them out.

Painting Dreams: Minnie Evans,

Author: Mary E. Lyons
Visionary Artist Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.

Self-taught artist Minnie Evans (1892-1987) did not begin to paint until she was forty-three years old. Her art, based on dreams and visions reeling with biblical figures, birds, plants, masks, and angels, is brilliantly colored and frequently symmetric in design. "God has sent me teachers," she once said. "The angel that stands by me, answers me...and directs me what to do."

Booksellers
An Altavista search for venders from whom you may purchase copies of the books displayed,
here presented with respects to the publishers of these books.