"Death as a Friend," showing a man greeting his death as an old friend, with a hysterical mixture of joy and terror. "The People," in which a mother shields her offspring from phantoms of hate, poverty, and ignorance — and symbolizes woman as creator, begetter of the human race, link between past and future.These works represent the recurrent themes which most characterize the work of Käthe Kollwitz: social consciousness and a sense of the suffering of mankind, an urge to voice the basic maternal attitude, and a preoccupation with death. She has been called a propagandist, a crusader, yet her art is essentially apolitical. Her concern was not with partisan causes, but rather with universal rights.Fundamentally a dramatic artist, Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) brought to each of her works an uncanny ability to evoke human emotions through subtle gestures and facial expressions. The reactions of her characters were psychologically true primarily because she tested them on herself.The present collection contains 83 of Mrs. Kollwitz's finest works, including the last great print cycles: "The Weavers" of 1898; "The Peasant War" of 1908; "War" of 1925; and "Death" of 1935. These selections provide a full panorama of Mrs. Kollwitz's development as a master of the graphic techniques of etching, woodcutting and lithography. Over 69 of the illustrations have been rephotographed from the original works specially for this edition, and new techniques in photolithography and a larger format have resulted in reproductions that are as close as possible to the prints and drawings themselves.

    Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now. In 2018, Hansberry will get the recognition she deserves with the PBS American Masters documentary "Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart" and Imani Perry's multi-dimensional, illuminating biography, Looking for Lorraine.After the success of A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry used her prominence in myriad ways: challenging President Kennedy and his brother to take bolder stances on Civil Rights, supporting African anti-colonial leaders, and confronting the romantic racism of the Beat poets and Village hipsters. Though she married a man, she identified as lesbian and, risking censure and the prospect of being outed, joined one of the nation's first lesbian organizations. Hansberry associated with many activists, writers, and musicians, including Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, among others. Looking for Lorraine is a powerful insight into Hansberry's extraordinary life—a life that was tragically cut far too short.

    Nell Irvin Painter's journey is filled with surprises, even as she brings to bear the incisiveness of her insights from two careers, which combine in new ways even as they take very different approaches—one searching for facts and cohesion, the other seeking the opposite. She travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, such as Alice Neel, Faith Ringgold, or Maira Kalman, even as she comes to understand how they are undervalued; and struggles with the ever-changing balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful demands of a life fully lived.

    Brown.From its inception in California in 1974 to its Broadway revival in 2022, the Obie Award–winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country for nearly fifty years. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it meant to be a woman of color in the 20th century. First published in 1975, when it was praised by The New Yorker for “encompassing…every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Now with new introductions by Jesmyn Ward and Broadway director Camille A. Brown, and one poem not included in the original, here is the complete text of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.

    In these twelve essays, bell hooks digs ever deeper into the personal and political consequences of contemporary representations of race and ethnicity within a white supremacist culture.

    Over the past decade, she has gained international recognition for her room-sized tableaux, which depict historical narratives haunted by sexuality, violence and subjugation and are made using the paradoxically genteel eighteenth-century art of cut-paper silhouettes. Set in the antebellum American South, Walker's compositions play off of stereotypes to portray, often grotesquely, life on the plantation, where masters, mistresses and slave men, women and children enact a subverted version of the past in an attempt to reconfigure their status and representation. Over the years, the artist has used drawing, painting, colored-light projections, writing, shadow puppetry, and, most recently, film animation to narrate her tales of romance, sadism, oppression and liberation. Her scenarios thwart conventional readings of a cohesive national history and expose the collective, and ongoing, psychological injury caused by the tragic legacy of slavery. Deploying an acidic sense of humor, Walker examines the dialectics of pleasure and danger, guilt and fulfillment, desire and fear, race and class. This landmark publication, which is sure to win international design awards, accompanies Walker's first major American museum survey. It features critical essays by Philippe Vergne, Sander L. Gilman, Thomas McEvilley, Robert Storr and Kevin Young, as well as an illustrated lexicon of recurring themes and motifs in the artist's most influential installations by Yasmil Raymond, more than 200 full-color images, an extensive exhibition history and bibliography, and a 36-page insert by the artist.

    Through personal essays, criticism, interviews, testimonials, poetry, and visual art, the collection explores, as coeditor Cherríe Moraga writes, “the complex confluence of identities—race, class, gender, and sexuality—systemic to women of color oppression and liberation.”

    feminist protest. Benita Roth explores the ways that feminist movements emerged from the Civil Rights/Black Liberation movement, the Chicano movement, and the white left, and the processes that supported political organizing decisions made by feminists. She traces the effects that inequality had on the possibilities for feminist unity and explores how ideas common to the left influenced feminist organizing.

    A powerful account of the changing role of American black women in the labor force and in the family.

    This book reveals how five distinct African civilizations have shaped the specific cultures of their New World descendants.

    WACK! documents and illustrates the impact of the feminist revolution on art made between 1965 and 1980, featuring pioneering and influential works by artists who came of age during that period, Chantal Akerman, Lynda Benglis, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Valie Export, Mary Heilmann, Sanja Ivekovic, Ana Mendieta, Annette Messager, and others, as well as important works made in those years by artists whose careers were already well established, including Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, Lucy Lippard, Alice Neel, and Yoko Ono.The art surveyed in WACK! includes work by more than 120 artists, in all media, from painting and sculpture to photography, film, installation, and video, arranged not by chronology but by theme: Abstraction, "Autophotography," Body as Medium, Family Stories, Gender Performance, Knowledge as Power, Making Art History, and others. WACK!, which accompanies the first international museum exhibition to showcase feminist art from this revolutionary era, contains more than 400 color images. Highlights include the figurative paintings of Joan Semmel; the performance and film collaborations of Sally Potter and Rose English; the untitled film stills of Cindy Sherman; and the large-scale, craft-based sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz.Written entries on each artist offer key biographical and descriptive information and accompanying essays by leading critics, art historians, and scholars offer new perspectives on feminist art practice. The topics, including the relationship between American and European feminism, feminism and New York abstraction, and mapping a global feminism, provide a broad social context for the artworks themselves. WACK! is both a definitive visual record and a long-awaited history of one of the most important artistic movements of the twentieth century.Essays by: Cornelia Butler, Judith Russi Kirshner, Catherine Lord, Marsha Meskimmon, Richard Meyer, Helen Molesworth, Peggy Phelan, Nelly Richard, Valerie Smith, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Jenni SorkinArtists include: Marina Abramovic, Chantal Akerman, Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, Louise Bourgeois, Judy Chicago, Lygia Clark, Jay DeFeo, Mary Beth Edelson, Valie Export, Barbara Hammer, Susan Hiller, Joan Jonas, Mary Kelly, Maria Lassnig, Linda Montano, Alice Neel, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O'Grady, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Orlan, Howardena Pindell, Yvonne Rainer, Faith Ringgold, Ketty La Rocca, Ulrike Rosenbach, Martha Rosler, Betye Saar, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, Cindy Sherman, Hannah Wilke

    Focusing on the visions of activists from C. L. R. James to Aime Cesaire and Malcolm X, Kelley writes of the hope that Communism offered, the mindscapes of Surrealism, the transformative potential of radical feminism, and of the four-hundred-year-old dream of reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. From 'the preeminent historian of black popular culture' (Cornel West), an inspiring work on the power of imagination to transform society.

    She shares how she took on an entrenched system, gave a public voice to millions, and sets the stage for her trailblazing bid to be the first woman and first African-American President of the United States. By daring to be herself, Shirley Chisholm shows us how she forever changed the status quo. This expanded edition, edited by Scott Simpson, digs deeper with analysis by experts like Donna Brazile and Shola Lynch exploring Shirley Chisholm's impact on today and tomorrows world.

    His story of growing up in South Africa was one of the most riveting accounts of life under apartheid. Mathabane's newest book, Miriam's Song, is the story of Mark's sister, who was left behind in South Africa. It is the gripping tale of a woman -- representative of an entire generation -- who came of age amid the violence and rebellion of the 1980s and finally saw the destruction of apartheid and the birth of a new, democratic South Africa. Mathabane writes in Miriam's voice based on stories she told him, but he has re-created her unforgettable experience as only someone who also lived through it could. The immediacy of the hardships that brother and sister endured -- from daily school beatings to overwhelming poverty -- is balanced by the beauty of their childhood observations and the true affection that they have for each other.

    Rosa Parks was often described as a sweet and reticent elderly woman whose tired feet caused her to defy segregation on Montgomery’s city buses, and whose supposedly solitary, spontaneous act sparked the 1955 bus boycott that gave birth to the civil rights movement. The truth of who Rosa Parks was and what really lay beneath the 1955 boycott is far different from anything previously written. In this important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a twenty-four-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer—Rosa Parks—to Abbeville. In taking on this case, Parks launched a movement that exposed a ritualized history of sexual assault against black women and added fire to the growing call for change.