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    A Black Gaze

    Artists Changing How We See

    Author Tina M. Campt
    Ebook
    The MIT Press
    On sale Aug 24, 2021 | 232 Pages | 9780262365673
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    This contemporary art coffee table book celebrates the work of 9 Black artists who are dismantling the white gaze—and demanding we see Blackness anew.

    “Offers a license to be at home in one’s own skin . . . [and] issues an invitation to action, not of a performative sympathy but of rigorous reflection.” —Washington Post Book World

    In this stunning art coffee table book, Tina Campt examines contemporary Black 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 Kahlil Joseph’s films and Dawoud Bey’s photographs to the embodied and multimedia artistic practice of Okwui Okpokwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson—requires viewers to do more than simply look; it solicits visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity.

    Campt shows that this new way of seeing shifts viewers from the passive optics of looking at to the active struggle of looking with, through, and alongside the suffering—and joy—of Black life in the present. These 9 Black artists challenge the fundamental disparity that defines the dominant viewing practice: the notion that Blackness is the elsewhere (or nowhere) of whiteness. They create images that flow, that resuscitate and revalue the historical and contemporary archive of Black life in radical ways. Writing with rigor and passion, Campt celebrates Black art and describes the creativity, ingenuity, cunning, and courage that is the modus operandi of a Black gaze.
    Prelude to a Black Gaze 1
    Verse One
    The Intimacy of Strangers 27
    Verse Two
    Black (Counter)gravity 43
    Verse Three
    The Visual Frequency of Black Life 77
    Verse Four 
    The Slow Lives of Still-Moving-Images 109
    Verse Five
    Sounding a Black Feminist Chorus 145
    Verse Six
    Adjacency and the Poethics of Care 167
    Reprise 
    The Haptic Frequencies of Radical Black Joy 193
    Acknowledgments 203
    Notes 207
    Index 215
    Tina M. Campt, a Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and a Research Associate at the VIAD (Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre) at the University of Johannesburg. She is the author of Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe, Listening to Images, and other books.
    Tina M. Campt View titles by Tina M. Campt
    "Tina M. Campt’s A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See is deeply invested in visibility. Through close engagement with the work of nine lens-based artists variously picturing Blackness, the book boldly articulates a new way of apprehending the visual order of everyday life....For her, a Black gaze is both a way of understanding how artists work and a term for the active modes of engagement demanded of attentive viewers...The signal contribution of A Black Gaze is its call to active engagement with art that depicts Black people not as objects but as agents. For Black viewers, it offers license to be at home in one’s own skin. For non-Black viewers, it issues an invitation to action, not of a performative sympathy but of rigorous reflection. Personal identifications, Campt argues, are not the only bridges viewers can build between themselves and a work of art. One can bear witness. One can trust the vision of those who can see what you may never see."
    —the Washington Post Book World

    "Contemporary artists from all disciplines (Khalil Joseph, Deana Lawson, Dawoud Bey) reveal the shifting role of the viewer, from onlooker to participant — engaged, even implicated in the pain and wonder of Black life."
    —New York Times Book Review

    "Tina M. Campt’s A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See offers a profound reconceptualization of the politics of visibility and spectatorship within contemporary art. The book features nine artists who work across media anddemonstrates how each proposes new ways of visualizing Black experiences in complex and dynamicways...She contributes the expansive theory of aBlack gaze while enacting a new and refreshing way to write about, to, and with art."
    —caa.reviews

    "Campt’s new book, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (MIT Press), elevates the theoretical examination of visceral and unsettling art through a deeply personal and fresh perspective...With every meticulous, sincere description and explanation, Campt reveals how and why we must dismantle the White gaze to uncover the profusion of a Black gaze. She forces us to embrace the sounds and vibrations of disconcerting art, a practice that is requisite for genuine study and appreciation."
    —Art in America

    "Tina M. Campt’s A Black Gaze helped me see Black visual art anew."
    —Bookforum

    "Campt’s new book, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (MIT Press), elevates the theoretical examination of visceral and unsettling art through a deeply personal and fresh perspective. By sharing her experiences, Campt brought me closer to my own relationship with disconcerting art, forcing me to reconsider how I gaze and how I use the term. "
    —Black Art in America

    “In this beautiful volume, Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art Tina M. Campt disrupts the normative passivity applied to art and artistry to build an (inter)active, intimate, radical and necessary Black gaze. “
    —Ms. 

    "Campt writes with elegance and probing intellect."
    —the Boston Globe

    "I devoured Tina Campt’s scholarly, yet accessible A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See."
    —    Natasha Gural, contributor to Forbes

    "Tina Campt examines what it means to exist within a Black gaze and how our interaction with visual art and curation nurtures that existence. Visual artists such as Deana Lawson, Arthur Jafa, Khalil Joseph and Dawoud Bey form their work in such a way that the viewer is forced to reassess the way they see Black art, but how it makes them feel. 
    —The Root

    "Contemporary Black artists are dismantling the white gaze. This book is an exploration of that process, through the lens of contemporary Black artists like Deana Lawson and Kahlil Joseph. Curated by Tina Campt, a professor of humanities and modern culture and media at Brown University, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See demands that we see Blackness anew."
    —    Fast Company

    “Campt argues for the experiential over the historical, and in doing so, offers a comprehensive survey of contemporary Black artists…throughout the book, Campt skillfully unpacks the ‘labor’ of reading Black perspectives (it’s ‘a’ not ‘the’ Black gaze) challenging the canonical view of art that prevents real and tangible connection.”
    —Aesthetica Magazine

    “A Black Gaze demands that we deal with the difficulties that some art produces in us, asking us to think about the vastness of contemporary Black experiences, encouraging us to sit with them and reckon with what they stir up in us...a lyrical academic text that is alive, multidirectional and clear, even while asking readers to work with the tensions inherent in the theory she builds over the book’s seven verses.”
    —New Frame

    About

    This contemporary art coffee table book celebrates the work of 9 Black artists who are dismantling the white gaze—and demanding we see Blackness anew.

    “Offers a license to be at home in one’s own skin . . . [and] issues an invitation to action, not of a performative sympathy but of rigorous reflection.” —Washington Post Book World

    In this stunning art coffee table book, Tina Campt examines contemporary Black 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 Kahlil Joseph’s films and Dawoud Bey’s photographs to the embodied and multimedia artistic practice of Okwui Okpokwasili, Simone Leigh, and Luke Willis Thompson—requires viewers to do more than simply look; it solicits visceral responses to the visualization of Black precarity.

    Campt shows that this new way of seeing shifts viewers from the passive optics of looking at to the active struggle of looking with, through, and alongside the suffering—and joy—of Black life in the present. These 9 Black artists challenge the fundamental disparity that defines the dominant viewing practice: the notion that Blackness is the elsewhere (or nowhere) of whiteness. They create images that flow, that resuscitate and revalue the historical and contemporary archive of Black life in radical ways. Writing with rigor and passion, Campt celebrates Black art and describes the creativity, ingenuity, cunning, and courage that is the modus operandi of a Black gaze.

    Table of Contents

    Prelude to a Black Gaze 1
    Verse One
    The Intimacy of Strangers 27
    Verse Two
    Black (Counter)gravity 43
    Verse Three
    The Visual Frequency of Black Life 77
    Verse Four 
    The Slow Lives of Still-Moving-Images 109
    Verse Five
    Sounding a Black Feminist Chorus 145
    Verse Six
    Adjacency and the Poethics of Care 167
    Reprise 
    The Haptic Frequencies of Radical Black Joy 193
    Acknowledgments 203
    Notes 207
    Index 215

    Author

    Tina M. Campt, a Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art, is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and a Research Associate at the VIAD (Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre) at the University of Johannesburg. She is the author of Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe, Listening to Images, and other books.
    Tina M. Campt View titles by Tina M. Campt

    Praise

    "Tina M. Campt’s A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See is deeply invested in visibility. Through close engagement with the work of nine lens-based artists variously picturing Blackness, the book boldly articulates a new way of apprehending the visual order of everyday life....For her, a Black gaze is both a way of understanding how artists work and a term for the active modes of engagement demanded of attentive viewers...The signal contribution of A Black Gaze is its call to active engagement with art that depicts Black people not as objects but as agents. For Black viewers, it offers license to be at home in one’s own skin. For non-Black viewers, it issues an invitation to action, not of a performative sympathy but of rigorous reflection. Personal identifications, Campt argues, are not the only bridges viewers can build between themselves and a work of art. One can bear witness. One can trust the vision of those who can see what you may never see."
    —the Washington Post Book World

    "Contemporary artists from all disciplines (Khalil Joseph, Deana Lawson, Dawoud Bey) reveal the shifting role of the viewer, from onlooker to participant — engaged, even implicated in the pain and wonder of Black life."
    —New York Times Book Review

    "Tina M. Campt’s A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See offers a profound reconceptualization of the politics of visibility and spectatorship within contemporary art. The book features nine artists who work across media anddemonstrates how each proposes new ways of visualizing Black experiences in complex and dynamicways...She contributes the expansive theory of aBlack gaze while enacting a new and refreshing way to write about, to, and with art."
    —caa.reviews

    "Campt’s new book, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (MIT Press), elevates the theoretical examination of visceral and unsettling art through a deeply personal and fresh perspective...With every meticulous, sincere description and explanation, Campt reveals how and why we must dismantle the White gaze to uncover the profusion of a Black gaze. She forces us to embrace the sounds and vibrations of disconcerting art, a practice that is requisite for genuine study and appreciation."
    —Art in America

    "Tina M. Campt’s A Black Gaze helped me see Black visual art anew."
    —Bookforum

    "Campt’s new book, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (MIT Press), elevates the theoretical examination of visceral and unsettling art through a deeply personal and fresh perspective. By sharing her experiences, Campt brought me closer to my own relationship with disconcerting art, forcing me to reconsider how I gaze and how I use the term. "
    —Black Art in America

    “In this beautiful volume, Black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art Tina M. Campt disrupts the normative passivity applied to art and artistry to build an (inter)active, intimate, radical and necessary Black gaze. “
    —Ms. 

    "Campt writes with elegance and probing intellect."
    —the Boston Globe

    "I devoured Tina Campt’s scholarly, yet accessible A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See."
    —    Natasha Gural, contributor to Forbes

    "Tina Campt examines what it means to exist within a Black gaze and how our interaction with visual art and curation nurtures that existence. Visual artists such as Deana Lawson, Arthur Jafa, Khalil Joseph and Dawoud Bey form their work in such a way that the viewer is forced to reassess the way they see Black art, but how it makes them feel. 
    —The Root

    "Contemporary Black artists are dismantling the white gaze. This book is an exploration of that process, through the lens of contemporary Black artists like Deana Lawson and Kahlil Joseph. Curated by Tina Campt, a professor of humanities and modern culture and media at Brown University, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See demands that we see Blackness anew."
    —    Fast Company

    “Campt argues for the experiential over the historical, and in doing so, offers a comprehensive survey of contemporary Black artists…throughout the book, Campt skillfully unpacks the ‘labor’ of reading Black perspectives (it’s ‘a’ not ‘the’ Black gaze) challenging the canonical view of art that prevents real and tangible connection.”
    —Aesthetica Magazine

    “A Black Gaze demands that we deal with the difficulties that some art produces in us, asking us to think about the vastness of contemporary Black experiences, encouraging us to sit with them and reckon with what they stir up in us...a lyrical academic text that is alive, multidirectional and clear, even while asking readers to work with the tensions inherent in the theory she builds over the book’s seven verses.”
    —New Frame

    Additional formats

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    General

    A Conversation Between Gabriela Bueno Gibbs and Victoria Hindley of the MIT Press Acquisitions Team on Tina Campt’s Newest book, A Black Gaze

    Last week, the MIT Press published A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See by Tina Campt, examining the work of contemporary Black artists who are dismantling the white gaze and demanding that we see—and see Blackness in particular—anew. Campt shows that this new way of seeing shifts viewers from the passive optics of “looking at”

    Read more

    A Conversation Between Gabriela Bueno Gibbs and Victoria Hindley of the MIT Press Acquisitions Team on Tina Campt’s Newest book, A Black Gaze

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