A daughter of the poets Hettie Jones and Amiri Baraka, Kellie Jones grew up immersed in a world of artists, musicians, and writers in Manhattan’s East Village and absorbed in black nationalist ideas about art, politics, and social justice across the river in Newark. The activist vision of art and culture that she learned in those two communities, and especially from her family, has shaped her life and work as an art critic and curator. Featuring selections of her writings from the past twenty years, EyeMinded reveals Jones’s role in bringing attention to the work of African American, African, Latin American, and women artists who have challenged established art practices. Interviews that she conducted with the painter Howardena Pindell, the installation and performance artist David Hammons, and the Cuban sculptor Kcho appear along with pieces on the photographers Dawoud Bey, Lorna Simpson, and Pat Ward Williams; the sculptor Martin Puryear; the assemblage artist Betye Saar; and the painters Jean-Michel Basquiat, Norman Lewis, and Al Loving. Reflecting Jones’s curatorial sensibility, this collection is structured as a dialogue between her writings and works by her parents, her sister Lisa Jones, and her husband Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. EyeMinded offers a glimpse into the family conversation that has shaped and sustained Jones, insight into the development of her critical and curatorial vision, and a survey of some of the most important figures in contemporary art.
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction “Art in the Family”
- Part One - On Diaspora
- 1. EyeMinded
- 2. Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
- 3. A.K.A. Saartjie: The Hottentot Venus in Context (Some Recollections and a Dialogue) 1998/2004
- 4. Tracey Rose: Postapartheid Playground
- 5. (Un)Seen and Overheard: Pictures by Lorna Simpson
- 6. Life’s Little Necessities: Installations by Women in the 1990s
- 7. Interview with Kcho
- 8. The Structure of Myth and the Potency of Magic
- Part Two: In Visioning
- 9. Seeing Through
- 10. In the Eye of the Beholder
- 11. To/From Los Angeles with Betye Saar
- 12. Crown Jewels
- 13. Dawoud Bey: Portraits in the Theater of Desire
- 14. Pat Ward Williams: Photography and Social/Personal History
- 15. Interview with Howardena Pindell
- 16. Eye-Minded: Martin Puryear
- 17. Large As Life: Contemporary Photography
- 18. Interview with David Hammons
- Part Three - Making Multiculturalism
- 19. Excuse Me While I Kiss the Sky & Then Fly and Touch Down
- 20. How I Invented Multiculturalism
- 21. Lost in Translation: Jean-Michelin the (Re)Mix
- 22. In the Thick of It: David Hammons and Hair Culture in the 1970s
- 23. Domestic Prayer
- 24. Critical Curators: Interview with Kellie Jones
- 25. Poets of a New Style of Speak: Cuban Artists of This Generation
- 26. In Their Own Image
- 27. Tim Rollins and K.O.S.: What’s Wrong with This Picture?
- 28. Blues to the Future
- Part Four - Abstract Truths
- 29. Them There Eyes: On Connections and the Visual
- 30. Free Jazz and the Price of Black Musical Abstraction
- 31. To the Max: Energy and Experimentation
- 32. It’s Not Enough to Say “Black is Beautiful”: Abstraction at the Whitney 1969–1974
- 33. Black West: Thoughts on Art in Los Angeles
- 34. Brothers and Sisters
- 35. Bill T. Jones
- 36. Abstract Expressionism: The Missing Link
- 37. Norman Lewis: The Black Paintings
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