Black Women Artists from Perpich Library

February 21, 2025

In honor of Black History Month, the library is highlighting some of our books featuring incredible Black women artists.

All items on this list are available at the Perpich library. Click on titles for more information.

1. Alma W. Thomas: Everything Is Beautiful edited by Jonathan Frederick Walz & Seth Feman
Achieving fame in 1972 as the first Black woman to mount a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Alma W. Thomas (1891–1978) is known for her large abstract paintings filled with irregular patterns of bright colors. This insightful reassessment of Thomas’s life and work reveals her complex and deliberate artistic existence before, during, and after the years of commercial and critical success, and describes how her innovative palette and loose application of paint grew out of a long study of color theory.

2. Amy Sherald: The World We Make by Amy Sherald
This major publication – the first widely-available monograph on Amy Sherald – accompanies the artist’s exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London, marking Sherald’s first solo show in Europe. Significant newly-commissioned texts include an art historical analysis by Jenni Sorkin, a mediation on the aesthetics and politics of Sherald’s portraiture by Kevin Quashie, and a conversation between the artist and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Beautifully reproducing Sherald’s recent paintings with an attention to their poignant details, this publication also illustrates a wide selection of earlier work alongside the essays and includes a series of in-the-studio photographs that provide an intimate glimpse into her process and practice.

3. Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman by Jeffreen M. Hayes
This is a timely, visual, exploration of the fascinating life and lasting legacy of sculptor Augusta Savage (1892-1962), who overcame poverty, racism, and sexual discrimination to become one of America’s most influential twentieth-century artists. Her story is one of community-building, activism, and art education. This ground-breaking volume features fifty works by Savage, and those she mentored or influenced, as well as correspondence and period photographs.

4. Bisa Butler: Portraits edited by Erica Warren
Bisa Butler (b. 1975) is an American artist who creates arresting and psychologically nuanced portraits composed entirely of vibrantly colored and patterned fabrics that she cuts, layers, and stitches together. Often depicting scenes from African American life and history, Butler invites viewers to invest in the lives of the people she represents while simultaneously expanding art-historical narratives about American quilt making. Situating her interdisciplinary work within the broader history of textiles, photography, and contemporary art, contributions by a group of scholars–and entries by the artist herself–illuminate Butler’s approach to color, use of African-print fabrics, and wide-ranging sources of inspiration. The first monograph on one of America’s most innovative contemporary artists, this volume will serve as a primary resource that both introduces Butler’s work and establishes a scholarly foundation for future research.

5. Deborah Roberts: Twenty Years of Art/Work by Deborah Roberts
Deborah Roberts: 20 Years of Art/Work provides the definitive look at the artist’s practice over the past two decades. With newly commissioned texts and a thorough dive into Roberts’ archive, this monograph offers a comprehensive view of one of today’s most significant artists and social observers.

6. Kara Walker: A Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be by Kara Walker
A unique opportunity to encompass the celebrated and impacting universe of Kara Walker, this publication gathers together 600+ works on paper realized by the artist between 1992 and 2020–almost all of them being reproduced for the first time, as they come out from her until now zealously-guarded private archive. Renowned for her recent monumental installations, drawing on paper remains the foundation of Walker’s creative practice, offering an air of spontaneity and unfiltered emotion which make this volume an unprecedented insight into Walker’s world, influences, and topics.

7. Lorna Simpson Collages by Lorna Simpson
Using advertising photographs of black women (and men) drawn from vintage issues of Ebony and Jet magazines, the exquisite and thought-provoking collages of world-renowned artist Lorna Simpson explore the richly nuanced language of hair. Surreal coiffures made from colorful ink washes, striking geological formations from old textbooks, and other unexpected forms and objects adorn the models to mesmerizingly beautiful effect. Featuring 160 artworks, an artist’s statement, and an introduction by poet, author, and scholar Elizabeth Alexander, this volume celebrates the irresistible power of Simpson’s visual vernacular.

8. Mickalene Thomas: Femmes Noires edited by Andrea Andersson and Julie Crooks
Mickalene Thomas’s vivid paintings, collages, and photographs explode off the wall. Their larger-than-life women stare back and down at the viewer, confronting them head on. Over the course of her prolific career, Thomas has created a body of work that expands notions of beauty, gender, sexuality, and race, offering a complex vision of what it means to be a Black woman. In Femmes Noires, Thomas moves breezily between pop culture and the long history of Western and African art, inserting images of Black women into iconic paintings.

9. Simone Leigh edited by Eva Respini
Over the past two decades, Simone Leigh has created artwork that situates questions of Black femme-identified subjectivity at the center of contemporary art discourse. Her sculpture, video, installation and social practice explore ideas of race, beauty and community in visual and material culture. Leigh’s art addresses a wide swath of historical periods, geographies and traditions, with specific references to materials across the African diaspora, as well as forms traditionally associated with African art and architecture.This publication includes substantial new scholarship addressing Leigh’s work across mediums and topics. The volume, timed with the artist’s first museum survey and national tour, includes contributions by her longtime collaborators, new scholars who add diverse insights and perspectives, and a conversation highlighting Leigh’s voice.

10. Wangechi Mutu: I Am Speaking, Are You Listening? by Claudia Schmuckli, Wangechi Muti, & Isaac Julien
Wangechi Mutu takes viewers on journeys of material, psychological and sociopolitical transformation; this volume explores her most recent groundbreaking work. Over the past two decades, Mutu has created chimerical constellations of powerful female characters, hybrid beings and fantastical landscapes. With a rare understanding of the need for powerful new mythologies beyond simple binaries and stereotypes, Mutu breaches common distinctions between human, animal, plant and machine. An artist who calls both Nairobi and New York City home, Mutu moves voraciously between cultural traditions to challenge colonialist, racist and sexist worldviews with her visionary projection of an alternate universe informed by Afrofuturism, posthumanism and feminism.

All items on this list are available at the Perpich Library.

Title descriptions are provided by Amazon and/or the publisher.