We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 196585: A Sourcebook

About this book

A landmark exhibition on display at the Brooklyn Museum from April 21 through September 17 2017 We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women 196585 examines the political social cultural and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism. It showcases the work of black women artists such as Emma Amos Maren Hassinger Senga Nengudi Lorraine OGrady Howardena Pindell Faith Ringgold and Betye Saar making it one of the first major exhibitions to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color. In so doing it reorients conversations around race feminism political action art production and art history in this significant historical period. The accompanying Sourcebook republishes an array of rare and little-known documents from the period by artists writers cultural critics and art historians such as Gloria Anzalda James Baldwin bell hooks Lucy R. Lippard Audre Lorde Toni Morrison Lowery Stokes Sims Alice Walker and Michelle Wallace. These documents include articles manifestos and letters from significant publications as well as interviews some of which are reproduced in facsimile form. The Sourcebook also includes archival materials rare ephemera and an art-historical overview essay. Helping readers to move beyond standard narratives of art history and feminism this volume will ignite further scholarship while showing the true breadth and diversity of black womens engagement with art the art world and politics from the 1960s to the 1980s. We Wanted a Revolution will also be on display at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles from October 13 2017 through January 14 2018; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo New York from February 17 2018 through May 27 2018; and at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston from June 26 2018 through September 30 2018. Published by the Brooklyn Museum and distributed by Duke University Press