Stick to the Skin

Celeste-Marie Bernier is Professor of US and Atlantic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of African American Visual Arts; Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination; Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin; and (with Andrew Taylor) If I Survive: Frederick Douglass and Family in the Walter O. Evans Collection.

• FOREWORD Lubaina HimidPREFACE “WE WILL BE / WHO WE WANT / WHERE WE WANT / WITH WHOM WE WANT”ACKNOWLEDGMENTSINTRODUCTION “Inside the Invisible”African American and Black British Artists and Art-Making Traditions1 “Do Something with It”The Search for a New Critical Language in African American and Black British Art2 “I’m Always Ready to Die”Memorializing Slavery and Narrativizing Freedom3 “Lifting, Hanging, Burning”Defiance, Dissidence, and to Destroy Is to Create4 “Branded, Raped, Beaten”Acts and Arts of Bearing Witness5 “How to Paint Suffering”Anti-Portraiture, Anti-Product, and Anti-Painting6 “Enter at Your Own Risk”Artist-as-Trickster-as-Prophet-as-Historianas- Witness-as-Freedom-Fighter-as-Artist7 “BURIED, HIDDEN, AND DISGUISED”“Storying” in a State of Shock8 “A FREAK IN THE BLIZZARD OF THE WHITE MAN’S GAZE”Black Absent Presences and Present Absences9 An “Indelible Mark”?Autobiographies, Archives, and Amnesia10 “I Was Branded”Spectacularized Histories, Serial Narratives, and Illicit Iconographies11 “Power to the Powerless”Tracing Black Lives in Protest Portraits, History Paintings, and Radical Installations12 “Hurting to Death”Struggle, Survival, and Storytelling in Salvaged Objects, Paint, Beads, and SteelCONCLUSION “Survivors of the Diasporic Journey”Past, Present, and Future Artists and Art-Making TraditionsNOTESBIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTELIST OF ILLUSTRATIONSINDEX

"...[A] welcome new volume . . . . [and] a Herculean effort of naming and contextualizing an array of vital and frequently overlooked practices and methods. Its power as an intellectual project and teaching resource is to work inductively, sidestepping theory and allowing artists’ words to elaborate the specificity of art making as a form of individual exploration and collective intervention."