To describe a life : notes from the intersection of art and race terror / Darby English.

New Haven : Yale University Press, March 2019.

1 online resource (160 pages) : 69 illustrations (chiefly color)

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"By turns historical, critical, and personal, this book examines the use of art-and of love-as resources amid the recent wave of shootings by American police of innocent black women and men. Darby English attends to a cluster of artworks created in or for our tumultuous present. Addressing themes of racial violence and representation, these idiosyncratic works neither offer solutions nor accommodate simplistic narratives about difference. In Zoe Leonard's Tipping Point, English sees an embodiment of love in the face of brutality; in Kerry James Marshall's untitled 2015 portrait of a black male police officer, a greatly fraught subject treated without apparent judgment; in Pope. L's Skin Set Drawings, a life project undertaken to challenge codified uses of difference, color, and language; and, in a replica of the Lorraine Motel-the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968-a monument to the unfinished business of the integrated nonviolent movement for Civil Rights. These works unsettle and refuse to satisfy any particular political demand. Powerful, challenging, and timely, To Describe a Life is an invitation to rethink what life in ongoing crisis is and can be-and, indeed, to discover how art can help"--Publisher's description.

Also known as: To describe a life : essays at the intersection of art and race terror

Print version: English, Darby, 1974- To describe a life

Books / Online

English

March 21, 2022

Richard D. Cohen lectures at Harvard University.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Yale University Press, publisher.