Features

Join the SVA Library in celebrating and centering Black History Month. Throughout February, the library’s main location at 380 Second Avenue is offering a curated display of art monographs, graphic novels, films and documentaries, novels, nonfiction, poetry and children’s books representing Black artists and writers of all disciplines. Read on for details about just a few of the many items from the selection.

Gail Anderson, Marian Wright Edelman Poster (2018)

Gail Anderson (BFA 1984 Media Arts), the 2018 recipient of the National Design Awards’ Lifetime Achievement honor, is the chair of the College’s BFA Advertising and BFA Design departments, a longtime SVA faculty member and creative director of the Visual Arts Press, the College’s in-house design studio. Her career has included turns at Vintage Books, The Boston Globe Magazine and Rolling Stone. A throughline in her work has been an affinity and passion for typography, exemplified here in a poster for the Chicago Design Museum, featuring civil-rights activist Marian Wright Edelman’s quote, “A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back—but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.”

James Van Der Zee, Portrait of a Woman (1927)

James Van Der Zee was a prominent street and portrait photographer in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance. He became well known for his portraits of middle-class Harlemites in the 1920s and ’30s, and his clientele included singer Florence Mills, Baptist minister Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., and the activist Marcus Garvey. The bulk of his work, however, was of everyday people and embraced a Pictorialist style that included soft focus, atmospheric effects and painted backgrounds. In 1982, a year before his death at age 96, Van Der Zee photographed a 21-year-old Jean Michel Basquiat for Interview magazine, marking a New York-centric career that spanned 70 years.

Faith Ringgold, Faith Ringgold (2022)

Faith Ringgold is an artist, teacher and author who has worked for over six decades in a wide range of mediums—from quilts to paintings to performances to children’s literature. In addition to her art and pedagogical practices, Ringgold, who has taught at SVA, is also an activist who organized and agitated for the inclusion of women in museum exhibitions in the 1970s and co-founded Where We At, a gallery dedicated to exhibiting the work of African American women in New York City. This monograph was published in 2022 by the Glenstone Museum on the occasion of Ringgold’s eponymous traveling exhibition. It contains photographs of over 70 of Ringgold’s works, as well as an interview with the artist and two contextualizing essays by author and scholar (and Ringgold’s daughter) Michele Wallace.

Tim Jackson, Pioneering Cartoonists of Color (2016)

This book is the research and preservation endeavor of cartoonist and illustrator Tim Jackson, who anticipated that on the 100th anniversary of the American comic strip, the contributions of African American artists would be all but excluded. He suspected that critics and scholars would plead ignorance of—or lack of access to information about—the work of African American cartoonists and dedicated himself to making this impossible for them. Through extensive research, combing historic periodicals and directories, he cataloged biographies of African American cartoonists, illustrators, and graphic designers, including examples of their work. From the publisher: “Revealed chronologically, these cartoons offer an invaluable perspective on American history of the black community during pivotal moments, including the Great Migration, race riots, the Great Depression, and both World Wars.” This book is additionally available online via Ebook Central.

Raoul Peck, I Am Not Your Negro (2017)

Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, the documentary I Am Not Your Negro is an examination of racism in America through the lens of James Baldwin’s unfinished book, Remember This House. The book was intended to be an account of the lives and assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.—each of whom Baldwin knew personally. Filmmaker Raoul Peck combines the unfinished 30-page manuscript with footage of depictions of African Americans throughout American history, using Baldwin’s words to illuminate the pervasiveness of American racism and efforts to curtail it. This DVD is available at the library and or may be streamed online via Kanopy (log in with your SVA credentials).

Black Freedom (online resource)

Can't make it to the SVA Library’s main location this month? Its online resources are available from anywhere at any time. Black Freedom is an online collection of approximately 1,600 primary sources (including congressional hearings, court records, FBI records, government documents, letters, photographs, and more) focused on six different phases of the movement for Black Freedom: Slavery and the Abolitionist Movement (1790 – 1860); the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era (1861 – 1877); the Jim Crow Era and the Great Depression (1878 – 1932); the New Deal and World War II (1933 – 1945); the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements (1946 – 1975); and the Contemporary Era (1976 – 2000). Use your SVA credentials to log in. 

Visit the SVA Library at 380 Second Avenue throughout February to see the full breadth of the Black History Month display. Location hours can be found at library.sva.edu. For questions or more information, write to library@sva.edu.