A Black Gaze

Artists Changing How We See

Bibliographic Data

ID20004597
AuthorsTina M Campt (corresponding author)
Year2021
Publication date2021-08-24
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueA Black Gaze (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherThe MIT Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.7551/mitpress/13762.001.0001
OpenAlexW4230520770
ISBN9780262365666
LanguageEN
Citations received55
References cited1

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 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. The artists whose work Campt explores challenge the fundamental disparity that defines the dominant viewing practice: the notion that Blackness is the elsewhere (or nowhere) of whiteness. These artists 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 describes the creativity, ingenuity, cunning, and courage that is the modus operandi of a Black gaze

Computer vision · Gaze · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Computer Science · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Psychology