Art on My Mind

In Art on My Mind, bell hooks offers a searing yet tender suite of writings that remain potent in a world increasingly concerned with art and identity politics. This collection of essays—from ruminations on the fraught representations of Black bodies, to reflections on the creative processes of women artists, to analysis on the use of blood in visual art—covers both the obvious and obscure, each with art at its center.

Her essays are complemented by conversations with Carrie Mae Weems, Emma Amos, Margo Humphrey, and LaVerne Wells-Bowie, which have been “instrumental in cracking open the white, western canon for Black artists” (artnet). Featuring full-color artwork from giants such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lorna Simpson, and Alison Saar, Art on My Mind “examines the way race, sex and class shape who makes art, how it sells and who values it,” (The New York Times) to question how art can be instrumental for Black liberation. In doing so, hooks reaches inside the mind, and asks us to unravel the forces of oppression that colonize our imaginations.

With a new foreword from creative phenom and acclaimed contemporary artist Mickalene Thomas, this thirtieth anniversary edition passes the torch to the next generation of artists to capture hooks’s simple but evergreen affirmation: art matters—it is a life force in the struggle for freedom. Art on My Mind is essential reading for anyone looking to find lessons on liberation and creativity in the world of color, the free world of art. [publishers’ note]

First published in 1995 by The New Press.