Bøger af Valerie Cassel Oliver

Dawoud Bey focuses on the landscape to create a portrait of the early African American presence in the United States. Renowned for his Harlem street scenes and expressive portraits, Dawoud Bey continues his ongoing series on African American history. Elegy brings together Bey's three landscape series to date-Night Coming Tenderly, Black  (2017); In This Here Place  (2021); and Stony the Road (2023)-elucidating the deep historical memory still embedded in the geography of the United States. Bey takes viewers to the historic Richmond Slave Trail in Virginia, where Africans were marched onto auction blocks; to the plantations of Louisiana, where they labored; and along the last stages of the Underground Railroad in Ohio, where fugitives sought self-emancipation. Essays by the exhibition's curator, Valerie Cassel Oliver, and scholars LeRonn P. Brooks, Imani Perry, and Christina Sharpe illuminate the work. By interweaving these bodies of work into an elegy in three movements, Bey doesn't merely evoke history, he retells it through historically grounded images that challenge viewers to go beyond seeing and imagine lived experiences. Copublished by Aperture and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond

This exhibition catalog to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse chronicles the pervasive visual and sonic parallels in the work of Black artists from the southern United States.

Published on the occasion of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston's 65th anniversary, Outside the Lines documents the conceptual framework of the institution's ability to act and think outside the norm. This publication, originally conceived as an ongoing curatorial dialogue, features six exhibitions on abstract painting, focusing on the legacies and contemporary manifestations of the genre. With text and analysis by museum director Bill Arning, curator Dean Daderko and senior curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, Outside the Lines details, in three sections, Arning's UIA (Unlikely Iterations of the Abstract) and Painting: A Love Story; Daderko's Outside the Lines and Rites of Spring; as well as Cassel Oliver's Black in the Abstract: Epistrophy and Black in the Abstract: Hard Edges/Soft Curves. Each section includes texts and images for the exhibitions featured, as well as information on over 90 artists whose works are highlighted.