THELMA GOLDEN
While I usually think of summer as a chance to indulge in fiction, this year I’ll be reading Huey Copeland’s Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (University of Chicago Press). Copeland will look through a twenty-first-century lens at the legacy of slavery and will offer the first in-depth examination of how four groundbreaking artists—Renée Green, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, and Fred Wilson—reimagine and represent the enslaved. His volume captures a moment of innovation spanning the late 1980s and early ’90s, unpacking the influences, challenges, and concerns that converged to inform the radical, large-scale installations his subjects created. An associate professor of art history at Northwestern University (and a frequent contributor to Artforum), Copeland has been an active voice in the discourse on contemporary art and an important participant in discussions about the work of artists of African descent. His book is sure to offer a fascinating perspective and invaluable insight.
Thelma Golden is the director and chief curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.