The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) will launch a powerful new publication, Reckoning: Protest. Defiance. Resilience. Sept. 3 that showcases visual art’s dynamic and potent role in African American history and culture. Featuring nearly 100 artworks, this 224-page hardcover book explores how visual art has provided a rich outlet for protest, commentary, escape and perspective for African Americans. The publication is based on the museum exhibition of the same name, which opened in the museum’s Rhimes Family Foundation Visual Arts Gallery in 2021.
“Visitors emerge from the ‘Reckoning’ exhibition have found it a transformed and transformative space,” said said Kevin Young, the museum’s Andrew W. Mellon Director. “‘Reckoning’ provides a testament to how artists and photographers have used their work to chart over a century of change, from the Harlem Renaissance to our current moment. The show journeys from defiance to acceptance, from racial violence and cultural resilience to grief and mourning, hope and promise.”
The exhibition and book consider art that exemplifies resilience in times of conflict, the ritual of creation and the defiant pleasure of healing. This visually stunning publication includes a wide range of mediums featuring Black artists such as Amy Sherald, Benny Andrews, Sheila Pree Bright, Bisa Butler, Charles Alston, Elizabeth Catlett, Shaun Leonardo, David Hammons and many more.
“The Reckoning project is a profound and beautiful invitation for us to see and bear witness—not just to the pain under and through which Black people have languished, but the expansive ways that Black people and a range of artists have insisted on Black humanity and survival,” said Michelle D. Commander, the book’s editor and NMAAHC’s deputy director.
The book’s foreword is by Young. Contributors include Commander; Aaron Bryant, curator of photography at NMAAHC; Bisa Butler, textile artist; Tuliza Fleming, curator of visual arts at NMAAHC; Amy Sherald, painter and portraitist; and Deborah Willis, university professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
Published by Rizzoli Electa, Reckoning: Protest. Defiance. Resilience. retails for $55 and will be available online at nmaahc.si.edu/publications.
About the “Reckoning: Protest. Defiance. Resilience.” Exhibition
The exhibition space explores the ongoing struggles Black Americans have faced in their pursuit to enjoy the fundamental rights and freedoms promised in the Constitution. Visitors to the exhibition can view the nation’s complex history of race and class through the artwork and images depicting a broad African American response to racism, systems of oppression and the ongoing reckoning in America. Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection, the featured works respond to the dual crises of COVID-19 and systemic racism that shaped 2020, a period that has been called one of reckoning, as the world witnessed the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other African Americans, leading to some of the largest protests in U.S. history. For more details, visit nmaahc.si.edu/Reckoning.
