Book Displays

This collection is the first interdisciplinary volume to examine black women's negotiation of race and gender in African American music. Contributors address black women's activity in musical arenas that pre- and postdate the emergence of the vaudeville blues singers of the 1920s. Throughout, the authors illustrate black women's advocacy of themselves as blacks and as women in music. Feminist? Black feminist? The editors take care to stress that each term warrants interrogation: "Black women can and have forged, often, but not always--and not everywhere the same across time--identities that are supple enough to accommodate a sense of female empowerment through 'musicking' in tandem with their sensitivities to black racial allegiances."   Individual essays concern the experiences of black women in classical music and in contemporary blues, the history of black female gospel-inflected voices in the Broadway musical, and "hip-hop feminism" and its complications. Focusing on under-examined contexts, authors introduce readers to the work of a prominent gospel announcer, women's music festivals (predominantly lesbian), and to women's involvement in an early avant-garde black music collective. In contradistinction to a compilation of biographies, this volume critically illuminates themes of black authenticity, sexual politics, access, racial uplift through music, and the challenges of writing (black) feminist biography. Black Women and Music is a strong reminder that black women have been and are both social actors and artists contributing to African American thought.

Widely known for works that celebrate the traditions of her family and her South Texas Latino community, Carmen Lomas Garza has been active as a painter, printmaker, muralist, and children's book illustrator since the 1970s. Born in Kingsville, Texas, she experienced institutionalized racism in a segregated school system that punished Mexican American students for speaking Spanish. Through her art, which draws on her childhood memories and depicts the relationship between family and community, Garza challenges the legacy of repression while establishing the folk art idiom, as employed by nonwhite and immigrant artists, as a vital element of American modernism.   Garza's art illustrates how, despite racial inequities, cultural conflict, and urban pressures, the Mexican American community has sustained a rich and vital cultural identity. In this volume of the pathbreaking A Ver series, Constance Cortez explores Garza's artwork in the context of the Chicano/a art movement, family and regional traditions, and Garza's own political and social activism.

Dolly Parton is instantly recognizable for her iconic style and persona, but how did she create her enduring image? Dolly crafted her exaggerated appearance and stage personality by combining two opposing stereotypes--the innocent mountain girl and the voluptuous sex symbol. Emerging through her lyrics, personal stories, stage presence, and visual imagery, these wildly different gender tropes form a central part of Dolly's media image and portrayal of herself as a star and celebrity. By developing a multilayered image and persona, Dolly both critiques representations of femininity in country music and attracts a diverse fan base ranging from country and pop music fans to feminists and gay rights advocates. In Dolly Parton, Gender, and Country Music, Leigh H. Edwards explores Dolly's roles as musician, actor, author, philanthropist, and entrepreneur to show how Dolly's gender subversion highlights the challenges that can be found even in the most seemingly traditional form of American popular music. As Dolly depicts herself as simultaneously "real" and "fake," she offers new perspectives on country music's claims of authenticity.

Eva Hesse (1936--1970) was a highly experimental artist who continually challenged the conventions of her time. For Hesse, drawing played a unique role, providing the nexus between her works in all media. Eva Hesse Drawing is the first book to explore her drawing process, following her work from drawing to painting and sculpture, and always back to drawing. The book features important, recently rediscovered "working drawings,” providing an intimate look at Hesse’s everyday practice and methodology.   An accomplished draftswoman, Hesse began to develop her wandering, tentative line while studying at Yale University in the late 1950s. Her early 1960s works on paper engaged with visual vocabularies from geometry to biomorphic abstraction. In 1965, Hesse combined her tactile sensibility for materials with her stringlike line to achieve a breakthrough: her astonishing reliefs, which began to bridge the space between two and three dimensions. Balancing the disembodiment of line with its intensified materialization, Hesse went on to develop one of the most innovative oeuvres of the twentieth century, anticipating the hybridization of media and crossing borderlines linking one impossible space to another.

This revolutionary, award-winning play by a lauded playwright and poet is a fearless portrayal of the experiences of women of color--"extraordinary and wonderful...that anyone can relate to" (The New York Times) and continues to move and resonate with readers today more than ever. From its inception in California in 1974 to its highly acclaimed critical success at Joseph Papp's Public Theater and on Broadway, 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. Passionate and fearless, Shange's words reveal what it is to be of color and female in the twentieth 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. Here is the complete text, with stage directions, of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem written in vivid and powerful language that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.

With a foreword by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards Girls Rock! explores the many ways women have defined themselves as rock musicians in an industry once dominated and controlled by men. Integrating history, feminist analysis, and developmental theory, the authors describe how and why women have become rock musicians--what inspires them to play and perform, how they write, what their music means to them, and what they hope their music means to listeners. As these musicians tell their stories, topics emerge that illuminate broader trends in rock's history. From Wanda Jackson's revolutionary act of picking up a guitar to the current success of independent artists such as Ani DiFranco, Girls Rock! examines the shared threads of these performers' lives and the evolution of women's roles in rock music since its beginnings in the 1950s. This provocative investigation of women in rock is based on numerous interviews with a broad spectrum of women performers--those who have achieved fame and those just starting bands, those playing at local coffeehouses and those selling out huge arenas. Girls Rock! celebrates what female musicians have to teach about their experiences as women, artists, and rock musicians.

"Real changes are upon us, and today one can reel off the names of a number of first-rate women artists. Nevertheless, women are just getting started."-- The New Yorker Five centuries of fascinating female creativity presented in more than 400 compelling artworks and one comprehensive volume The most extensive fully illustrated book of women artists ever published, Great Women Artists reflects an era where art made by women is more prominent than ever. In museums, galleries, and the art market, previously overlooked female artists, past and present, are now gaining recognition and value. Featuring more than 400 artists from more than 50 countries and spanning 500 years of creativity, each artist is represented here by a key artwork and short text. This essential volume reveals a parallel yet equally engaging history of art for an age that champions a greater diversity of voices.

"Poignant . . . Powerful . . . Beautifully captures the threshold experience of the new immigrant, where the past is not yet a memory." --The New York Times Book Review Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez's beloved first novel gives voice to four sisters as they grow up in two cultures. The García sisters--Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía--and their family must flee their home in the Dominican Republic after their father's role in an attempt to overthrow brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo is discovered. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Caribbean. In the wondrous but not always welcoming U.S.A., their parents try to hold on to their old ways as the girls try find new lives: by straightening their hair and wearing American fashions, and by forgetting their Spanish. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating to be caught between the old world and the new. Here they tell their stories about being at home--and not at home--in America. Julia Alvarez's new novel, Afterlife, is available now.

In her most ambitious work since In the Time of Butterflies, Julia Alvarez tells the story of a woman whose poetry inspired one Caribbean revolution and of her daughter whose dedication to teaching strengthened another. Camila Henriquez Urena is about to retire from her longtime job teaching Spanish at Vassar College. Only now as she sorts through family papers does she begin to know the woman behind the legend of her mother, the revered Salome Urena, who died when Camila was three. In stark contrast to Salome, who became the Dominican Republic's national poet at the age of seventeen, Camila has spent most of her life trying not to offend anybody. Her mother dedicated her life to educating young women to give them voice in their turbulent new nation; Camila has spent her life quietly and anonymously teaching the Spanish pluperfect to upper-class American girls with no notion of revolution, no knowledge of Salome Urena. Now, in 1960, Camila must choose a final destination for herself. Where will she spend the rest of her days? News of the revolution in Cuba mirrors her own internal upheaval. In the process of deciding her future, Camila uncovers the truth of her mother's tragic personal life and, finally, finds a place for her own passion and commitment. Julia Alvarez has won a large and devoted audience by brilliantly illuminating the history of modern Caribbean America through the personal stories of its people. As a Latina, as a poet and novelist, and as a university professor, Julia Alvarez brings her own experience to this exquisite story.

Born into a left-wing, politically active Jewish family in Chicago in 1939, Judy Cohen grew up in a household in which human rights and values were issues of principle, and the empowerment of the individual was an imperative rather than an aspiration. This environment, and the untimely death of her father, helped to shape the artist known today as Judy Chicago. A combination of talent, sheer will, vision, courage and ambition led her to became one of the most pioneering, daring and controversial artists of her generation. This fully illustrated book presents a unique perspective on the art of Judy Chicago, highlighting selected major themes from four decades, explored across a wide range of media including painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, film, performance and textile work. In contrast to the monumental series and large-scale works for which Chicago is best known, the publication reveals a more private and intimate side to her work, hitherto largely unfamiliar to the public. The authors explore recurrent themes which emerge from her art: autobiography, art as diary, erotica, feminism, the nude, self-portraiture and issues of power, birth and motherhood. Reproductions of Chicago’s work, drawn from the artist's archive and from public and private collections in the USA, and including a number not previously seen in public, are contextualized with works by Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin and Helen Chadwick, each of whom has addressed similar issues in their own distinctive fashion during the latter part of the 20th century.

Includes heartfelt profiles that chart the ups & downs of seven songbirds of the 1960s.

This work presents the Billie Holiday story - her rise to the top from the slums and the streets, to the eventual slide down.

In subtly lush paintings that charm viewers equally through their application of paint and their quirky iconography, Laura Owens touches on expressive abstraction, color field painting, and the occasional decorative glimpse of a monkey. Charged as one of the contemporary artists responsible for a revival of the painting, Owens has developed an enigmatic style all her own, moving from landscape to abstraction with energetic thick brush strokes, fanciful childlike doodles, or sophisticated fine-line drawings, culling her influences from any number of visual sources, including chinese landscape painting, japanese wood block prints, and patterned textiles. This volume includes new paintings created for her upcoming solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

The comprehensive narrative on Bourgeois' life is documented in over 100 photos from the artist's own archive, many of which have never been published before. These range from her youth in Paris, up to her famous performance, The Confrontation, in 1978.

A stunning mid-career retrospective of an important and influential contemporary Afro-Cuban artist With a diverse oeuvre ranging from painting to mixed-media installations to performance, video, and photography, María Magdalena Campos-Pons is one of the most significant artists to emerge from post-Revolutionary Cuba. Her evocative works probe questions of race, class, cultural hybridism, and national identities in African diasporic communities. María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Everything Is Separated by Water is the first full-scale survey of the artist's career. The title, borrowed from one of her works, evokes at once the dangerous sea crossings faced by her enslaved ancestors from Africa and her Cuban contemporaries seeking greater freedom in America, and the sense of dislocation felt when physical and geopolitical barriers divide family and friends, past and future. Lisa D. Freiman considers how Campos-Pons's practice, which is predicated on concepts of separation, memory, and fragmentation, developed and transformed from her artistic training and early production in Cuba in the 1980s through her move to the United States in 1991 and her subsequent recognition as a major figure in the international art world. Okwui Enwezor interprets Campos-Pons's expressive materials--reassembled fragments of lost traditions and symbols, and memories of personal and collective history, religion, and mythology--within the context of post-colonial theory. Handsomely designed and produced, this book offers an unprecedented opportunity to assess the significance and import of this challenging artist's work.

"Utilizing the way in which scientists and computers see our world, drawing on images based on sonar views of the ocean floor, to aerial and satellite views of the land, I have started to create artworks that translate that technological view into sculptural forms.” (Maya Lin) One of the most celebrated artists working in the United States, Maya Lin (b. 1959) came to prominence in 1981 with her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Generously illustrated and beautifully designed, Systematic Landscapes traces her continued fascination with geologic phenomena and topography, integrating natural contours and materials into evocative landscape sculptures such as Character of a Hill Under Glass (2002) and 11 Minute Line (2004). As the book reveals, Lin’s earthworks and public sculptures have always developed alongside small-scale, exploratory sculptures and monumental temporary installations, such as Avalanche (1998), through which Lin evokes the physical processes that shape the earth. This important volume also introduces three major new installation works created for the "Systematic Landscapes" exhibition, along with a series of related drawings and reliefs demonstrating the expanding scope of Lin’s creative process. The largest of these installations, 2 x 4 Landscape, is composed from more than 45,000 sections of lumber placed on end that from a distance take on a pixel-like image of a hill, and close up create a form that evokes both mound and wave, earth and water. Systematic Landscapes is of interest to newcomers to Maya Lin's work as well as to longtime enthusiasts of her unique artistic creations and stunning design work.

This highly acclaimed book on the leading contemporary artist Paula Rego (b.1935) was first published in 1992, but since then Rego has produced an impressive range of new work. Bringing together a wealth of paintings, drawings and prints, alongside revealing documentary illustrations, a second edition of this book was published in 1997 and included three new chapters and a revised chronology, bibliography and list of exhibitions. This third edition brings this major monograph completely up-to-date and includes a selection of Rego’s latest works from her critically praised collections, including Little Red Riding Hood, Jane Eyre and the remarkable Triptych and Abortion series. This new edition also includes fully revised and extended endmatter.

In this illuminating book, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and acclaimed poet Alice Walker reveals her remarkable philosophy of life. Curiously, this labor of love started with the author’s signature: Faced with the daunting task of providing autographs for multiple copies of one of her poetry collections, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth, Walker turned an act of repetition into an act of inspiration. For each autograph became something more than a name: a thoughtful reflection, an impromptu sketch, a heartfelt poem. The result is this spontaneous burst of the unexpected. A Poem Traveled Down My Arm is a lovely collection of insights and drawings—by turns charming and humorous, provocative and profound—that represent the wisdom of one of today’s most beloved writers. The essence of Walker’s independent spirit emanates from words and images that are simple but deep in meaning. An empowering approach to life...the inspiration to live completely in the moment...the chance to nurture one’s creativity and peace of mind—all these beautiful elements are evoked by this unusual and original book.

The fifteen Native women writers in Reckonings document transgenerational trauma, yet they also celebrate survival. Their stories are vital testaments of our times. Unlike most anthologies that present a single story from many writers, this volume offers a sampling of two to three stories by a select number of both famous and lesser known Native women writers in what is now the United States. Here you will find much-loved stories, many made easily accessible for the first time, and vibrant new stories by well-known contemporary Native American writers as well as fresh emergent voices. These stories share an understanding of Native women's lives in their various modes of loss and struggle, resistance and acceptance, and rage and compassion, ultimately highlighting the individual and collective will to endure against all odds.Reckonings features short stories by: Paula Gunn Allen, Kimberly M. Blaeser, Beth E. Brant, Anita Endrezze, Louise Erdrich, Diane Glancy, Reid Gómez, Janet Campbell Hale, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Misha Nogha, Beth H. Piatote, Patricia Riley, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Anna Lee Walters.

Popular music grew out of ragtime, vaudeville and the blues to become global mass entertainment. Women like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith were the original pop divas, yet eighty years after they blazed a trail, have their successors achieved the recognition and affirmation they deserve? Or has the only way to success been to slot into saleable images of the cute baby or sexy chanteuse?

The Magic and the Real Celia Correas de Zapata, an internationally recognized expert in the field of Latin American fiction written by women, has collected stories by thirty-one authors from fourteen countries, translated into English by such renowned scholars and writers as Gregory Rabassa and Margaret Sayers Peden. Contributors include Dora Alonso, Rosario Ferre, Elena Poniatowska, Ana Lydia Vega, and Luisa Valenzuela. The resulting book is a literary tour de force, stories written by women in this hemisphere that speak to cultures throughout the world. In her Foreword, Isabel Allende states, "This anthology is so valuable; it lays open the emotions of writers who, in turn, speak for others still shrouded in silence."

Long before "women in rock" became a media catchphrase, Rosetta Tharpe proved in spectacular fashion that women could rock. Born in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, in 1915, she was gospel's first superstar and the preeminent crossover figure of its "golden age" (1945-1965). Everyone who saw her perform said she could "make that guitar talk." Shout, Sister, Shout! is the first biography of this trailblazing performer who influenced scores of popular musicians, from Elvis Presley and Little Richard to Eric Clapton and Bonnie Raitt. An African American guitar virtuoso, Tharpe defied categorization. Blues singer, gospel singer, folk artist, and rock-and-roller, she "went electric" in the late 1930s, amazing northern and southern, U.S. and international, and white and black audiences with her charisma and skill. Ambitious and relentlessly public, Tharpe even staged her own wedding as a gospel concert-in a stadium holding 20,000 people! Wald's eye-opening biography, which draws on the memories of over 150 people who knew or worked with Tharpe, introduces us to this intriguing and forgotten musical heavyweight, forever altering our understanding of both women in rock and U.S. popular music.

The author presents a collection of short fiction loosely based on her own life, including To My Young Husband, which describes life amid the turbulence of the Deep South at the dawn of the civil rights movement.

Women have been making art for centuries, yet their work has been seen as secondary or has gone unrecognized altogether. Women Making Art asks why this is so, and what it would take for us to realize the extent of women's extraordinary contribution to the arts. Marsha Meskimmon mobilizes contemporary feminist thinking to reconsider how and why women have made art. She examines work by a wide range of women artists from different cultures and historical periods, including Rebecca Horn, Rachel Whiteread, Shirin Neshat and Maya Lin, emphasizing the diversity of women's art and the importance of differences between women.