Stick to the Skin: African American and Black British Art 1965- 2015

…This capacious study opens with an extensive preface and introduction, which provide a historical overview of the ways slavery and abolitionism, civil rights and Black Power, and migration and racial politics have played crucial roles in defining nations, but also in what Bernier describes as ‘art-making traditions of African diasporic women, children, and men’ (p.xi). Effusive and empathetic, these opening texts are essentially chronologies of Black American and Black British (art) histories. However, Stick to the Skin is by no means a conventional survey. In fact, the subsequent eleven chapters follow what Bernier calls an ‘anti-chronological framework’ (p.2), in which introductory texts spanning the period covered by the book are presented alongside entries on individual artists, based on copious quotation and published and unpublished interviews…

… Save for the conclusion, which considers the work of nine artists, each chapter typically focuses on works by between three to five practitioners. Fused together by Bernier’s interspersed vehement commentary, the result might in some respects be regarded as an eclectic corpus of polemical interpretation. Chapter 3, ‘Lifting, Hanging, Burning’, brings together the American artists Melvin Edwards and Noah Purifoy with the British artists Rasheed Araeen and Juginder Lamba. Traversing abstraction, minimalism and figuration, four more contrasting approaches to sculpture are difficult to imagine. For Bernier, these artists share a will to ‘break formal, aesthetic, social, and political “chains”’ to ‘forge new meanings, connections, and lineages’ (p.66). By contrast, chapter 4 brings a less differentiated artistic triumvirate in Marlene Smith, Carrie Mae Weems and the late Maud Sulter, artists who each ‘confront the racist myopia of a conservative white elite art world’ (p.85)…

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