A rare document of the 1960s Black Arts Movement featuring Albert Ayler, Amiri Baraka, Milford Graves, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and many more, The Cricket fostered critical and political dialogue for Black musicians and writers. Edited by poets and writers Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, and Larry Neal between 1968 and 1969 and published by Baraka’s New Jersey–based Jihad productions shortly after the time of the Newark Riots, this experimental music magazine ran poetry, position papers, and gossip alongside concert and record reviews and essays on music and politics. Over four mimeographed issues, The Cricket laid out an anticommercial ideology and took aim at the conservative jazz press, providing a space for critics, poets, and journalists (including Stanley Crouch, Haki Madhubuti, Ishmael Reed, Sonia Sanchez and Keorapetse Kgositsile) and a range of musicians, from Mtume to Black Unity Trio, to devise new styles of music writing. The publication emerged from the heart of a political movement—“a proto-ideology, akin to but younger than the Garveyite movement and the separatism of Elijah Mohammed,” as Spellman writes in the book’s preface—and aimed to reunite advanced art with its community, “to provide Black Music with a powerful historical and critical tool” and to enable avant-garde Black musicians and writers “to finally make a way for themselves.” This publication gathers all issues of the magazine with an introduction by poet and scholar David Grundy, who argues that The Cricket “attempted something that was in many ways entirely new: creating a form of music writing which united politics, poetry, and aesthetics as part of a broader movement for change; resisting the entire apparatus through which music is produced, received, appreciated, distributed, and written about in the Western world; going well beyond the tried-and-tested journalistic route of description, evaluation, and narration.”

Contributors include: A.B. Spellman, Imamu Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Larry Neal, Cecil Taylor, Milford Graves, Sun Ra, Ben Caldwell, Clyde Halisi, Don L. Lee (Haki R. Madhubuti), Duncan Barber, Gaston Neal, Hilary Broadus, James Stewart, Norman Jordan, Roger Riggins, Ronnie Gross, Stanley Crouch, Albert Ayler, Askia Muhammed Toure, Donald Stone, E. Hill, Haasan Oqwiendha Fum al Hut, Ibn Pori 'det, Ishmael Reed, Joe Goncalves, Larry A. Miller (Katibu), Sonia Sanchez, Willie Kgositsile, Billy (Fundi) Abernathy, Dan Dawson and Black Unity Trio.

David Grundy is the author of A Black Arts Poetry Machine: Amiri Baraka and the Umbra Poets (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and coeditor, with Lauri Scheyer, of Selected Poems of Calvin C. Hernton (Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming). He is currently a British Academy Fellow at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom, where he is working on two manuscripts, Survival Music: Free Jazz Then and Now and Never by Itself Alone: Queer Poetry in Boston and San Francisco, 1943–Present (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), and a further edited collection on Umbra.

A.B. Spellman is a poet, music critic, and former director of the Arts in Education Study Project for the National Endowment of the Arts.

File under: Albert Ayler Milford Graves Sun Ra Cecil Taylor Black Unity Trio Amiri Baraka A.B. Spellman Larry Neal Stanley Crouch Haki Madhubuti Ishmael Reed Sonia Sanchez Keorapetse Kgositsile Blank Forms / New York Sound / Music Protest / Revolt Counterculture Fiction / Poetry Periodicals Group Shows / Collections

Black Art Notes

2021

Black Art Notes

2021, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 21 x 21 cm
Published by Primary Information / New York

$38.00 - In stock -

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Black Art Notes is a collection of essays edited by artist and organizer Tom Lloyd. Originally published in 1971, the book was conceived as a critical response to the Contemporary Black Artists in America exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art but grew into a “concrete affirmation of Black Art philosophy as interpreted by eight Black artists,” as Lloyd notes in the publication’s introduction.

Published on the 50th anniversary of the original printing, Black Art Notes features writings by Lloyd, Amiri Baraka, Bing Davis, Melvin Dixon, Jeff Donaldson, Ray Elkins, Babatunde Folayemi, and Francis and Val Gray Ward. “If there is one lesson the post–civil rights period has taught us, it is that those most likely to shape the destiny of Black Americans in the next decade are activists and artists, who may possess additional skills as organizers,” write Ward in “The Black Artist—His Role in the Struggle.”

The artists featured in the publication position the Black Arts Movement outside of white, western frameworks, and articulate the movement as one created by and existing for Black people. Their essays condemn the attempts of museums and other white cultural institutions to tokenize, whitewash, and neutralize Black art, and call for immediate political and institutional reform and the self-determination of Black cultural producers. While the publication was created to respond to a particular historicized moment, the systemic problems that it addresses remain pervasive, making the artists’ potent critiques both timely and urgent.

Tom Lloyd (1929–1996) was a kinetic artist and organizer whose electronically programmed light works were chosen for the inaugural exhibition at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 1968. In 1971, Lloyd founded the Store Front Museum in New York, a cultural center that hosted exhibitions, concerts, classes, and lectures for the predominantly Black community of Jamaica, Queens, for over a decade. The center acted in tandem with his call for the marriage of social action and aesthetics in Black Art Notes, published the same year.

File under: Tom Lloyd Amiri Baraka Bing Davis Melvin Dixon Jeff Donaldson Ray Elkins Babatunde Folayemi Francis and Val Gray Ward Primary Information / New York Art Theory / Essay Group Shows / Collections

Arthur Jafa

A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions

2018

Arthur Jafa
A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions

2018, English
Hardcover, 850 pages, 28.2 x 34.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by Walther König / Köln

$400.00 - In stock -

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First, only edition of the absolutely epic, award winning and now extremely rare 850 page Arthur Jafa book. Very quickly out-of-print.

Across three decades the American artist and cinematographer, Arthur Jafa (b. 1960, Tupelo, USA) has developed a dynamic, multidisciplinary practice ranging from films and installations to lecture-performances and happenings that tackle, challenge and question prevailing cultural assumptions about identity and race.

Jafa’s work is driven by a recurrent question: how might one identify and develop specifically Black visual aesthetics equal to the ‘power, beauty and alienation’ of Black music in American culture?

Building upon Jafa’s image-based practice, this enormous (over 840 pages) and now out-of-print volume comprises a series of visual sequences that are cut and juxtaposed across its pages. The artist has been collecting and working from a set of source books since the 1990s, seeking to trace and map unwritten histories and narratives relating to black life.

Punctuating this visual material is a series of commissioned texts partnered with a rich compendium of essays, short stories and poetry that has informed Jafa’s artistic practice and which together form an unprecedented resource.

Jafa's imagery is placed in conversation with texts by over 30 outstanding contributors including Hilton Als, Jean Baudrillard, Amiri Baraka, Judith Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Fred Moten, Dave Hickey, John Akomfrah, Tina Campt, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Cecil Taylor. Edited by Joseph Constable and Amira Gad.

Published after the exhibition, Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions at Serpentine Galleries, London (8 June – 10 September 2017), and at the Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (11 February – 25 November 2018).

Fine - In pristine new condition

File under: Arthur Jafa Cecil Taylor John Akomfrah Hilton Als Jean Baudrillard Judith Butler Dave Hickey Fred Moten Hans Ulrich Obrist Yana Peel Amira Gad Tina Campt Ernest Hardy Arthur Jafa Joseph Constable Samuel R. Delany Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari Amiri Baraka Walther König / Köln Art Film / Video Photography Out-of-print / Rare

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