A Black Gaze

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.