Description

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The first comparative history of African American and Black British artists, artworks, and art movements, Stick to the Skin traces the lives and works of over fifty painters, photographers, sculptors, and mixed-media, assemblage, installation, video, and performance artists working in the United States and Britain from 1965 to 2015. The artists featured in this book cut to the heart of hidden histories, untold narratives, and missing memories to tell stories that "stick to the skin" and arrive at a new "Black lexicon of liberation."

Informed by extensive research and invaluable oral testimonies, Celeste-Marie Bernier’s remarkable text forcibly asserts the originality and importance of Black artists’ work and emphasizes the need to understand Black art as a distinctive category of cultural production. She launches an important intervention into European histories of modern and contemporary art and visual culture as well as into debates within African American studies, African diasporic studies, and Black British studies.

Artists featured:
Larry Achiampong
Hurvin Anderson
 Benny Andrews
Rasheed Araeen  
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Zarina Bhimji
Sutapa Biswas
Frank Bowling
Sonia Boyce
Vanley Burke
Chila Kumari Burman
Eddie Chambers
Thornton Dial 
Godfried Donkor
Kimathi Donkor
Sokari Douglas Camp
Melvin Edwards
Mary Evans
Nicola Frimpong
Joy Gregory
Bessiey Harvey
Mona Hatoum
Lubaina Himid
Lonnie Holley
Gavin Jantjes
Claudette Johnson 
Tam Joseph
Roshini Kempadoo
Juginder Lamba
Hew Locke
Steve McQueen
Chris Ofili
Keith Piper
Ingrid Pollard
Thomas J. Price
Noah Purifoy
Faith Ringgold
Donald Rodney
Betye Saar
Joyce J. Scott 
Yinka Shonibare
Gurminder Sikand
Marlene Smith 
Maud Sulter
Barbara Walker
Kara Walker
Carrie Mae Weems
Deborah Willis
Hank Willis Thomas
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

About the Author

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Celeste-Marie Bernier is Professor of US and Atlantic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of African American Visual Arts; Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination; Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin; and (with Andrew Taylor) If I Survive: Frederick Douglass and Family in the Walter O. Evans Collection.

Praise For…

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"...[A] welcome new volume . . . . [and] a Herculean effort of naming and contextualizing an array of vital and frequently overlooked practices and methods. Its power as an intellectual project and teaching resource is to work inductively, sidestepping theory and allowing artists’ words to elaborate the specificity of art making as a form of individual exploration and collective intervention."
— caa.reviews - College Art Association

". . . a timely contribution to the field of Black diasporic art history. . . . Celeste-Marie Bernier offers respite from seemingly interminable institutional tendencies that continue to limit Black British and African American art to particular curatorial and art-historical jurisdictions. Whereas the former is often expediently defined within the historical parameters of the 1980s, the latter is rarely viewed in relation to other art histories, not least those of the United States. Stick to the Skin challenges these conventions and pathologies, bringing as it does a comparative study of the work of over fifty artists spanning half a century. . . . we can be grateful to Bernier who, as a UK-based academic, has taken it upon herself to produce a very tangible and substantial study on contemporary Black visual arts practice."
— Burlington Magazine

"Throughout, Bernier examines how art can dismantle, disrupt and challenge the status quo. It can be a form of radical protest, used to confront racism and white privilege in a world that continues to be threatened by outsiders and “others”. This remarkable book makes very clear how and why this is important, more so today than ever."
— Times Higher Ed