Yinka Shonibare / Kehinde Wiley / Mickalene Thomas

Fired Up! Ready to Go! , 2018

Author: Peggy Cooper Cafritz
Pages: 288
Format: Hardcover
Trim Size: 9-1/2 x 10-1/2
Publisher: Rizzoli Electa

€85.00

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About the work

Fired Up! Ready to Go! , 2018

Fired Up! Ready to Go!: Finding Beauty, Demanding Equity: An African American Life in Art.

The Collections of Peggy Cooper Cafritz After decades of art collecting, prominent Washington D.C.–based activist, philanthropist, and founder of the august Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Peggy Cooper Cafritz had amassed one of the most important collections of work by artists of color in the country. But in 2009, the more than three hundred works that comprised this extraordinary collection were destroyed in the largest residential fire in Washington, D.C. history.

The pioneering collection included art by Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas, Yinka Shonibare, Nick Cave, Kehinde Wiley, Barkley L. Hendricks, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems, among many others.

This beautifully illustrated volume features 200 of the works that were lost, along with works that she has collected since the fire, as well as important contributions by preeminent curators and artists. Hundreds of contemporary artworks by artists of African descent are illustrated.

Peggy Cooper Cafritz (1947-2018), the passionate and inveterate collector, purchased the works over two periods of time. (She lost her first art collection to a house fire in 2009, and soon began assembling another.) The book showcases her art collections and documents her life. She pens an engrossing biographical essay that spans growing up in Mobile, Ala., to her ascension as an influential Washington, D.C., lawyer, arts patron/advocate, and founder the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. In addition, her relationships with key figures are revealed and explored through contributions from artists, gallery owner Jack Shainman, and Studio Museum in Harlem Director Thelma Golden, who conducts an interview with Cafritz for the book.

Emerging artists are overwhelmingly represented in Cafritz’s more recent collection, artists such as Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Nina Chanel Abney, Derek Fordjour, Tschabalala Self, Titus Kaphar, and Simone Leigh, who she supported early and are coming into their own today.

Cafritz, who died at age 70, two days before the official publication of this book, bequeathed the majority of her vast collection to the Studio Museum (400+ works) and Duke Ellington (250+ works). The gesture will benefit generations to come, as will this volume, which Cafritz titled with her mantra: “Fired Up! Ready to Go!”

About The Author:

Written by Peggy Cooper Cafritz, Contribution by Thelma Golden and Kerry James Marshall and Simone Leigh and Uri McMillan

Peggy Cooper Cafritz is a Washington D.C.–based activist, philanthropist, art collector, and cofounder of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby is a Nigerian-born, Los Angeles–based visual artist, and a recipient of the 2017 MacArthur Fellowship. LaToya Ruby Frazier is a photographer, video artist, and educator, and is a 2015 MacArthur Fellow.
Thelma Golden is director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. Titus Kaphar is a visual artist, and cofounder of Elm City Postmasters project in New Haven, Connecticut.
Simone Leigh is a New York–based artist and curator exploring issues surrounding Black female subjectivity.
Kerry James Marshall is a Chicago–based artist, educator and author who focuses on the history of Black identity and the historical exclusion of Black subjects from the artistic canon.
Uri McMillan is a cultural historian and Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the Departments of English and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Tschabalala Self is a New York–based painter examining the nuances of Black femme identity.
Jack Shainman is one of New York City’s leading art gallerists.
Hank Willis Thomas is a New York–based artist and curator exploring identity, history, and popular culture.
William Villalongo is a painter, writer and curator, and an Assistant Professor at the Cooper Union School of Art. Reviews "THIS VOLUME IS A REAL TREASURE.

About artist

Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare CBE (b. London, UK, 1962 -) moved to Lagos, Nigeria at the age of three. He returned to the UK to study Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art, London and Goldsmiths College, London, where he received his Masters in Fine Art.

He has become known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the context of globalization. Through his interdisciplinary practice, Shonibare’s work examines race, class and the construction of cultural identity through a political commentary of the interrelationship between Africa and Europe, and their respective economic and political histories. Shonibare uses citations of Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities.

In 2002, he was commissioned to create one of his most recognised installations, Gallantry and Criminal Conversation for Documenta XI. In 2004, he was nominated for the Turner Prize and in 2008, his mid-career survey began at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; touring to the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. In 2010, his first public art commission Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle was displayed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, and was acquired by the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London.

In 2013, he was elected as a Royal Academician and in 2017, Wind Sculpture VI was featured in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of the Arts, London as part of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Shoni...

Kehinde Wiley

Los Angeles native and New York based visual artist, Kehinde Wiley has firmly situated himself within art history’s portrait painting tradition. As a contemporary descendent of a long line of portraitists, including Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, Ingres, among others, Wiley, engages the signs and visual rhetoric of the heroic, powerful, majestic and the sublime in his representation of urban, black and brown men found throughout the world.

By applying the visual vocabulary and conventions of glorification, history, wealth and prestige to the subject matter drawn from the urban fabric, the subjects and stylistic references for his paintings are juxtaposed inversions of each other, forcing ambiguity and provocative perplexity to pervade his imagery.

Wiley’s larger than life figures disturb and interrupt tropes of portrait painting, often blurring the boundaries between traditional and contemporary modes of representation and the critical portrayal of masculinity and physicality as it pertains to the view of black and brown young men.

Initially, Wiley’s portraits were based on photographs taken of young men found on the streets of Harlem. As his practice grew, his eye led him toward an international view, including models found in urban landscapes throughout the world – such as Mumbai, Senegal, Dakar and Rio de Janeiro, among others – accumulating to a vast body of work called, “The World Stage.”

The models, dressed in their everyday clothing most of which are based on the notion of far-reaching Western ideals of style, are asked to...

Mickalene Thomas

New York-based artist Mickalene Thomas is best known for her elaborate paintings composed of rhinestones, acrylic and enamel

Mickalene Thomas (lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) makes paintings, collages, photography, video, and installations that draw on art history and popular culture to create a contemporary vision of female sexuality, beauty, and power. Blurring the distinction between object and subject, concrete and abstract, real and imaginary, Thomas constructs complex portraits, landscapes, and interiors in order to examine how identity, gender, and sense-of-self are informed by the ways women (and “feminine” spaces) are represented in art and popular culture.

Thomas received a B.F.A. from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY in 2000 and an M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT in 2002. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at the Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO (forthcoming, 2019); The Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL (2019); The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD (2019); Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA (2019); Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, France (2019); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON (2018); The Dayton Art Institute, OH (2018); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2018); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2018); Pomona College Museum of Art (2018), Claremont, CA (2017); Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA (2017); Newcomb Art Museum, Tu...

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Rizzoli

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