The first comparative history of African American and Black British artists, artworks, and art movements, Stick to the Skin traces the lives and works of over fifty painters, photographers, sculptors, and mixed-media, assemblage, installation, video, and performance artists working in the United States and Britain from 1965 to 2015. The artists featured in this book cut to the heart of hidden histories, untold narratives, and missing memories to tell stories that "stick to the skin" and arrive at a new "Black lexicon of liberation."

Informed by extensive research and invaluable oral testimonies, Celeste-Marie Bernier’s remarkable text forcibly asserts the originality and importance of Black artists’ work and emphasizes the need to understand Black art as a distinctive category of cultural production. She launches an important intervention into European histories of modern and contemporary art and visual culture as well as into debates within African American studies, African diasporic studies, and Black British studies.

Artists featured:
Larry Achiampong
Hurvin Anderson
Benny Andrews
Rasheed Araeen
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Zarina Bhimji
Sutapa Biswas
Frank Bowling
Sonia Boyce
Vanley Burke
Chila Kumari Burman
Eddie Chambers
Thornton Dial
Godfried Donkor
Kimathi Donkor
Sokari Douglas Camp
Melvin Edwards
Mary Evans
Nicola Frimpong
Joy Gregory
Bessiey Harvey
Mona Hatoum
Lubaina Himid
Lonnie Holley
Gavin Jantjes
Claudette Johnson
Tam Joseph
Roshini Kempadoo
Juginder Lamba
Hew Locke
Steve McQueen
Chris Ofili
Keith Piper
Ingrid Pollard
Thomas J. Price
Noah Purifoy
Faith Ringgold
Donald Rodney
Betye Saar
Joyce J. Scott
Yinka Shonibare
Gurminder Sikand
Marlene Smith
Maud Sulter
Barbara Walker
Kara Walker
Carrie Mae Weems
Deborah Willis
Hank Willis Thomas
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

About the Author

Celeste-Marie Bernier is Professor of US and Atlantic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of African American Visual Arts; Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination; Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin; and (with Andrew Taylor) If I Survive: Frederick Douglass and Family in the Walter O. Evans Collection.

FOREWORD Lubaina Himid
PREFACE “WE WILL BE / WHO WE WANT / WHERE WE WANT / WITH WHOM WE WANT”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION “Inside the Invisible”
African American and Black British Artists and Art-Making Traditions
1 “Do Something with It”
The Search for a New Critical Language in African American and Black British Art
2 “I’m Always Ready to Die”
Memorializing Slavery and Narrativizing Freedom
3 “Lifting, Hanging, Burning”
Defiance, Dissidence, and to Destroy Is to Create
4 “Branded, Raped, Beaten”
Acts and Arts of Bearing Witness
5 “How to Paint Suffering”
Anti-Portraiture, Anti-Product, and Anti-Painting
6 “Enter at Your Own Risk”
Artist-as-Trickster-as-Prophet-as-Historianas- Witness-as-Freedom-Fighter-as-Artist
7 “BURIED, HIDDEN, AND DISGUISED”
“Storying” in a State of Shock
8 “A FREAK IN THE BLIZZARD OF THE WHITE MAN’S GAZE”
Black Absent Presences and Present Absences
9 An “Indelible Mark”?
Autobiographies, Archives, and Amnesia
10 “I Was Branded”
Spectacularized Histories, Serial Narratives, and Illicit Iconographies
11 “Power to the Powerless”
Tracing Black Lives in Protest Portraits, History Paintings, and Radical Installations
12 “Hurting to Death”
Struggle, Survival, and Storytelling in Salvaged Objects, Paint, Beads, and Steel
CONCLUSION “Survivors of the Diasporic Journey”
Past, Present, and Future Artists and Art-Making Traditions

NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
INDEX

Reviews

"...[A] welcome new volume . . . . [and] a Herculean effort of naming and contextualizing an array of vital and frequently overlooked practices and methods. Its power as an intellectual project and teaching resource is to work inductively, sidestepping theory and allowing artists’ words to elaborate the specificity of art making as a form of individual exploration and collective intervention."
— caa.reviews - College Art Association

". . . a timely contribution to the field of Black diasporic art history. . . . Celeste-Marie Bernier offers respite from seemingly interminable institutional tendencies that continue to limit Black British and African American art to particular curatorial and art-historical jurisdictions. Whereas the former is often expediently defined within the historical parameters of the 1980s, the latter is rarely viewed in relation to other art histories, not least those of the United States. Stick to the Skin challenges these conventions and pathologies, bringing as it does a comparative study of the work of over fifty artists spanning half a century. . . . we can be grateful to Bernier who, as a UK-based academic, has taken it upon herself to produce a very tangible and substantial study on contemporary Black visual arts practice."
— Burlington Magazine

"Throughout, Bernier examines how art can dismantle, disrupt and challenge the status quo. It can be a form of radical protest, used to confront racism and white privilege in a world that continues to be threatened by outsiders and “others”. This remarkable book makes very clear how and why this is important, more so today than ever."
— Times Higher Ed

"A long-overdue comparative and interdisciplinary history of African American and Black British art and artists that gives critical voice and analytical exposure to those artists who have been alienated within their own marginalized status. Impressively thorough, praiseworthy, and necessarily bold."—James Smalls, Professor of Visual Arts, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

"Celeste-Marie Bernier's necessary and timely research fosters crucial bridging of African American studies and Black British studies, advancing our deeper understanding of the Black Atlantic."—Dr. Zoe Whitley, co-curator of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power

"Bernier has indeed produced a weighty study. Perhaps her greatest achievement in Stick to the Skin is the way in which she obliges us to see the merit, wisdom, and benefits of looking at Black artists in a range of wider contexts. Bernier emphatically overturns the insularity that has tended to be the hallmark of African American artists’ histories, and instead, proposes a bold and challenging set of new theoretical frameworks with which to consider the work of artists of the Black Atlantic over a period of half a century. This book will take its place as one of the most substantial tomes on the work of Black visual artists."—Eddie Chambers, Professor of Art and Art History, University of Texas, Austin

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews