Angela Davis - by Gerry Beegan & Donna Gustafson (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Inspired by a private archive and featuring contemporary work by artists who acknowledge the continued relevance of Angela Davis's experience and politics, the essays, interviews, and images in this book provide a compelling and layered narrative of her journey through the junctures of race, gender, economic, and political policy. Beginning in 1970 with her arrest in connection with a courtroom shootout, then moving through her trial and acquittal, the book traces Davis's life and work during the subsequent decades and her influential career as a public intellectual. Profusely illustrated with materials found in the archive, including press coverage, photographs, court sketches, videos, music, writings, correspondence, and Davis's political writings, the book also features interviews with Angela Davis and Lisbet Tellefsen, the archivist who collected those materials, as well as essays that touch on visibility and invisibility, history, memory, and the iconography of black radical feminism.

Review Quotes

"This wonderfully illustrated scholarly catalogue is a treasure trove. . . . Seize the Time successfully complicates and challenges our understanding of Angela Y. Davis and the visual culture (past and present) inspired by her ongoing fight for social justice."--Rebecca VanDiver "Woman's Art Journal"

"The book is both a piece of history and a piece of art." --Pendarvis Harshaw "KQED"

"It will be of great interest to readers involved with current activities on behalf of racial justice and to anyone interested in the political possibilities of visual imagery."-- "Artblog"

"Profusely illustrated with materials found in the archive, including press coverage, photographs, court sketches, videos, music, writings, correspondence, and Davis's political writings, the book also features interviews with Angela Davis and Lisbet Tellefsen, the archivist who collected those materials, as well as essays that touch on visibility and invisibility, history, memory, and the iconography of black radical feminism."-- "LA Weekly"

About the Author

Gerry Beegan is chair of the art and design department at Rutgers University. Donna Gustafson is curator of American art and Mellon Director for Academic Programs at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University and a member of the graduate faculty in Art History.