A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See

Tina Campt examines contemporary Black artists who are dismantling the white gaze and demanding that we see Blackness in a new way. Their work challenges the fundamental disparity that defines the dominant viewing practice and creates images that flow, resuscitate, and revalue the historical and contemporary archive of Black life in radical ways.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 232 pages
Publication date: 21 March 2023
Publisher: MIT Press Ltd

Contemporary Black artists are challenging the white gaze and demanding that we see--and see Blackness in particular--anew. Tina Campt's "A Black Gaze" examines their work, which includes Deana Lawson's intimate portraits, Arthur Jafa's videos of the everyday beauty and grit of the Black experience, Kahlil Joseph's films, Dawoud Bey's photographs, and the embodied and multimedia artistic practice of Okwui Okpokwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson. These artists create images that flow, resuscitate, and revalue the historical and contemporary archive of Black life in radical ways, challenging the fundamental disparity that defines the dominant viewing practice: the notion that Blackness is the elsewhere (or nowhere) of whiteness. Campt describes the creativity, ingenuity, cunning, and courage that is the modus operandi of a Black gaze.

Weight: 386g
Dimension: 153 x 203 x 14 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780262546058