A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See

By Tina M. Campt, published by The MIT Press 2021

Examining the work of contemporary Black artists who are dismantling the white gaze and demanding that we see–and see Blackness in particular–anew.

In A Black Gaze, Tina Campt examines Black contemporary artists who are shifting the very nature of our interactions with the visual through their creation and curation of a distinctively Black gaze. Their work–from Deana Lawson’s disarmingly intimate portraits to Arthur Jafa’s videos of the everyday beauty and grit of the Black experience, from Khalil Joseph’s films and Dawoud Bey’s photographs to the embodied and multimedia artistic practice of Okwui Okpakwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson–requires viewers to do more than simply look; it solicits visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity.

Hardcover, 232 pages, 6" x 8"