by Kellie Jones
Duke University Press | 2011
A daughter of the poets Hettie Jones and Amiri Baraka, Kellie Jones grew up immersed in a world of artists, musicians, and writers in Manhattan’s East Village and absorbed in black nationalist ideas about art, politics, and social justice across the river in Newark. The activist vision of art and culture that she learned in those two communities, and especially from her family, has shaped her life and work as an art critic and curator. Featuring selections of her writings from the past twenty years, EyeMinded reveals Jones’s role in bringing attention to the work of African American, African, Latin American, and women artists who have challenged established art practices.
Interviews that she conducted with the painter Howardena Pindell, the installation and performance artist David Hammons, and the Cuban sculptor Kcho appear along with pieces on the photographers Dawoud Bey, Lorna Simpson, and Pat Ward Williams; the sculptor Martin Puryear; the assemblage artist Betye Saar; and the painters Jean-Michel Basquiat, Norman Lewis, and Al Loving.
Reflecting Jones’s curatorial sensibility, this collection is structured as a dialogue between her writings and works by her parents, her sister Lisa Jones, and her husband Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. EyeMinded offers a glimpse into the family conversation that has shaped and sustained Jones, insight into the development of her critical and curatorial vision, and a survey of some of the most important figures in contemporary art.
About
Kellie Jones is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She is the author of several books and exhibition catalogues, including Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964–1980; Basquiat; and (with Thelma Golden and Chrissie Iles) Lorna Simpson.
Praise
“Kellie Jones, supported by a remarkable family of artists and intellectuals, has provided a plethora of razor-sharp insights and creative testimonials to the greater arts and scholarly communities for years. As this important book makes amber clear, Professor Jones’ astute observations and in-depth analyses of African American art are invaluable resources to contemporary studies and, arguably, equivalent to the notable essays of art history’s earlier, admired critics and chroniclers.”—Richard J. Powell, author of Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture
“EyeMinded is an impressive collection of essays by Kellie Jones, a much sought after scholar, prolific writer, and extraordinary curator whose works I have admired for many years. She began her career in the mid-1980s, uncovering and recovering African and African American artists by organizing exhibitions, writing essays, and lecturing on some of the then lesser-known artists. I believe that she was instrumental in introducing to a larger and contemporary public the works of black artists of the African diaspora, including some of the most noted artists working today.”—Deborah Willis, author of Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present
“This extraordinary collection reveals Kellie Jones as a discerning architect of the multicultural art landscape of the last few decades. Informed by her keen eye and incisive intellect, Jones’s definitive takes on artists, including Lorna Simpson, Martin Puryear, and David Hammons, make this book a must-read for anyone interested in American art from the 1980s forward. And then, on top of Jones’s own shimmering intellectual accomplishment in these pages, EyeMinded is something else as well: a conversation between an American family of arts and letters as illustrious as the Lowells or the Jameses. This book will stand apart for that reason alone, for few American families have contributed so richly to the arts, letters, and sounds of their generations as the Joneses. Here comes Dr. Kellie Jones, ‘eye-minded,’ and she’s bringing her people with her.”—Elizabeth Alexander, Yale University
