NBAF SUGGESTS …

COLLECTING AFRICAN AMERICAN ART: WORKS ON CANVAS AND PAPER
Halima Taha
Hardcover: 288 pages

Art enthusiasts and lovers of African American art have long considered collecting art a hobby reserved solely for the wealthy. This book effectively dispels this misconception. In these pages, lavishly illustrated with almost two hundred works by a wide range of artists, readers will find practical guidelines for becoming an informed collector, including specific criteria for working with dealers. By providing succinct advice on framing, insurance, tax and estate planning, as well as pointers on how to care for one’s collection, author Halima Taha makes collecting an enjoyable — and affordable — pastime for everyone.
_____________________________________________________________

SECRETS OF A SOAP OPERA DIVA: A NOVEL
Victoria Rowell
Paperback: 400 pages

Description
Calysta Jeffries is the hottest black actress in daytime and the diva of the soap opera world, known for her role as Ruby Stargazer on television’s most popular soap opera, “The Rich and the Ruthless.” After fifteen years, three returns from the dead, two failed pregnancies, one alien abduction, and overcoming retrograde amnesia, Calysta still hasn’t managed to snag the biggest award in daytime drama: the Sudsy. Now is supposed to be her moment. But Calysta’s onscreen/offscreen rival Emmy Abernathy wins the award for the fourth time. The drama begins when journalist Mitch Morelli asks Calysta for a quote after the award show and her true feelings for her costar slip out.

Ripped from the headlines of Soap Opera Digest and straight off of the television screen, Secrets of a Soap Opera Diva will give readers plenty to talk about as they try to guess where the real world ends and Rowell’s imagination begins.
_____________________________________________________________

THELONIOUS MONK: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL
Robin Kelly
Hardcover: 608 pages

“The piano ain’t got no wrong notes!” So ranted Thelonious Sphere Monk, who proved his point every time he sat down at the keyboard. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of “bebop” and establishing Monk as one of America’s greatest composers. Yet throughout much of his life, his musical contribution took a backseat to tales of his reputed behavior. Writers tended to obsess over Monk’s hats or his proclivity to dance on stage. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. But these labels tell us little about the man or his music.

In the first book on Thelonious Monk based on exclusive access to the Monk family papers and private recordings, as well as on a decade of prodigious research, prize-winning historian Robin D. G. Kelley brings to light a startlingly different Thelonious Monk — witty, intelligent, generous, politically engaged, brutally honest, and a devoted father and husband. Indeed, Thelonious Monk is essentially a love story. It is a story of familial love, beginning with Monk’s enslaved ancestors from whom Thelonious inherited an appreciation for community, freedom, and black traditions of sacred and secular song. It is about a doting mother who scrubbed floors to pay for piano lessons and encouraged her son to follow his dream. It is the story of romance, from Monk’s initial heartbreaks to his lifelong commitment to his muse, the extraordinary Nellie Monk. And it is about his unique friendship with the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, a scion of the famous Rothschild family whose relationship with Monk and other jazz musicians has long been the subject of speculation and rumor. Nellie, Nica, and various friends and family sustained Monk during the long periods of joblessness, bipolar episodes, incarceration, health crises, and other tragic and difficult moments.

Above all, Thelonious Monk is the gripping saga of an artist’s struggle to “make it” without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century. Elegantly written and rich with humor and pathos,Thelonious Monk is the definitive work on modern jazz’s most original composer.
____________________________________________________________

LET FREEDOM REIGN- THE WORDS OF NELSON MANDELA
Henry Russell
Hardcover: 144 Pages

On 10 May 1994, Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black president, uttering the words ‘let freedom reign’ as part of his famous inaugural address. More than 100,000 people turned up to hear him speak. Mandela’s great skill as an orator has enabled him to use the power of words as an important weapon in his fight against discrimination and injustice in the world.

This collection, which marks the 20th anniversary of Mandela’s release from prison in February 1990, explores how his electrifying speeches and impressive rhetoric helped bring about social and political change in South Africa, through, among other things, the dismantling of the apartheid system. Throughout his lifetime, Mandela has spoken about and written on such issues as global warming, HIV/AIDS, human rights, racism and discrimination and women’s rights, and some of these are showcased in ‘Let Freedom Reign’. In this book, author Henry Russell analyses the linguistic features, content and context of Mandela’s speeches, revealing the oratory skill behind this great man’s most inspiring words.
________________________________________________________________

CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ART SINCE 1980
Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu
Paperback: 320 pages

Contemporary African Art Since 1980 is the first major survey of the work of contemporary African artists from diverse situations, locations, and generations who work either in or outside of Africa, but whose practices engage and occupy the social and cultural complexities of the continent since the past 30 years. Its frame of analysis is absorbed with historical transitions: from the end of the postcolonial utopias of the sixties during the 1980s to the geopolitical, economic, technological, and cultural shifts incited by globalization. This book is both narrower in focus in the periods it reflects on, and specific in the ground it covers. It begins by addressing the tumultuous landscape of contemporary Africa, examining landmarks and narratives, exploring divergent systems of representation, and interrogating the ways artists have responded to change and have incorporated new aesthetic principles and artistic concepts, images and imaginaries to deal with such changes.

Organized in chronological order, the book covers all major artistic mediums: painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, installation, drawing, collage. It also covers aesthetic forms and genres, from conceptual to formalist, abstract to figurative practices. Moving between discursive and theoretical registers, the principal questions the book analyzes are: what and when is contemporary African art? Who might be included in the framing of such a conceptual identity? It also addresses the question of globalization and contemporary African art.

Contemporary African Art Since 1980 examines a range of ideas, concepts and issues that have shaped the work and practice of African artists within an international and global framework. It traces the shifts from earlier modernist strategies of the sixties and seventies after the period of decolonization, and the rise of pan-African nationalism, to the postcolonial representations of critique and satire that evolved from the 1980s, to the postmodernist irony of the 1990s, and to the globalist strategies of the 21st century.
The main claim of this book is that contemporary African art can be best understood by examining the tension between the period of great political changes of the era of decolonization that enabled new and exciting imaginations of the future to be formulated, and the slow, skeptical, and social decline marked by the era of neo-liberalism and Structural Adjustment programs of the 1980s. These issues are addressed in chapters covering the themes of “Politics, Culture, Critique,” “Memory and Archive,” “Abstraction, Figuration and Subjectivity,” and “The Body, Gender and Sexuality.” In addition, the book employs sidebars to provide brief and incisive accounts of and commentaries on important contemporary political, economic and cultural events, and on exhibitions, biennales, workshops, artist groups and more. Rather than a comprehensive survey, this richly illustrated book presents examples of ambitious and important work by more than 160 African artists since the last 30 years.

Okwui Enwezor, a leading curator and scholar of contemporary art, is the Dean of Academic Affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute, and founding publisher and editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art.
Chika Okeke-Agulu is Assistant Professor of Art and Archeology and African American Studies at Princeton University, and editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art.
_________________________________________________________________

WE ARE THE SHIP : THE STORY OF NEGRO LEAGUE BASEBALL
Words and Paintings by Kadir Nelson
Hardcover: 96 pages

IN OUR DAY baseball used to look a lot different than it does today. Back then there were separate leagues for white and black baseball Players. Each League had its share of superstars. The white leagues had talented players like, Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and Dizzy Dean; and we had our stars: Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and the great Satchel Paige. Although we couldn’t play in the White major leagues, we hoped to create a successful Negro major league that would one day rival the White majors. It took almost thirty years, but we did it. WE ARE THE SHIP IS OUR STORY.
_______________________________________________________________

CHILD OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Paula Young Shelton & Raul Colon
Hardcover: 48 pages

Paula Young Shelton, daughter of Civil Rights activist Andrew Young, brings a child’s unique perspective to an important chapter in America’s history. Paula grew up in the deep south, in a world where whites had and blacks did not. With an activist father and a community of leaders surrounding her, including Uncle Martin (Martin Luther King), Paula watched and listened to the struggles, eventually joining with her family—and thousands of others—in the historic march from Selma to Montgomery. Poignant, moving, and hopeful, this is an intimate look at the birth of the Civil Rights Movement.
_______________________________________________________________

BAD NEWS FOR OUTLAWS: THE REMARKABLE LIFE OF BASS REEVES, DEPUTY U.S. MARSHALL
Written by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson, Illustrations by R. Gregory Christie
Hardback: 40 pages

Sitting tall in the saddle, with a wide-brimmed black hat and twin Colt pistols on his belt, Bass Reeves seemed bigger than life. As a U.S. Marshal – and former slave who escaped to freedom in the Indian Territories – Bass was cunning and fearless.
When a lawbreaker heard Bass Reeves had his warrant, he knew it was the end of the trail, because Bass always got his man, dead or alive. He achieved all this in spite of whites who didn’t like the notion of a black lawman.

For three decades, Bass was the most feared and respected lawman in the territories. He made more than 3,000 arrests, and though he was a crack shot and a quick draw, he only killed fourteen men in the line of duty. Bad News for Outlaws reveals the story of a remarkable African American hero of the Old West.