Black is, Black Ain't

Author: Huey Copeland (Author), Darby English (Author), Greg Foster-Rice (Author), Amy M. Mooney (Author), Kimberly N. Pinder (Author), Krista Thompson (Author), Hamza Walker (Author), Professor Kenneth W. Warren (Author)
Publisher: Renaissance Society
Year: 2013
Pages: 196
ISBN: 978-0941548601

Taking its title from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, exhibition Black Is, Black Ain't (April 20 – June 8, 2008) explored a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and retained.

Curated by the Renaissance Society's Associate Curator and Education Director Hamza Walker, the exhibition brought together works by twenty-seven black and non-black artists whose work collectively examines a moment where the cultural production of so-called "blackness" is concurrent with efforts to make race socially and politically irrelevant.

The publication features essays by Huey Copeland, Darby English, Greg Foster-Rice, Amy M. Mooney, Kymberly N. Pinder, Krista Thompson, Hamza Walker, and Kenneth Warren.