Illustrated essays that broaden our understanding of modernism by centering Black artists and experiences, with a contribution featuring the work of Venice Biennale Golden Lion winner Simone Leigh

In this volume, ten leading scholars examine the contradictions of modernity and Black agency that continue to define the Western art world. Illustrated essays explore the work of artists such as Roy DeCarava, Ben Enwonwu, James Hampton, Norman Lewis, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, Augusta Savage, and Carrie Mae Weems, always with an eye toward reframing our understanding of Black artistic producers. The interdisciplinary avenues of inquiry remake the boundaries of modernist art—its notions time and again focused on the singular white male European or American artist—with another set of imperatives, ethics, and histories, broadening our understanding of the past and present of modernism.

Published by the National Gallery of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts/Distributed by Yale University Press

Winner of 2024 James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History

Steven Nelson is dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Huey Copeland is BFC Presidential Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.