Portrait

Liza Lou, an American artist and winner of a 2002 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, is known for her large-scale sculptures and environments made from glass beads. Lou’s brightly colored sculptures create tension between the sparkling beauty of their surfaces and their frequently dark themes, suggesting that America’s polished, projected image belies the nation’s underlying turmoil.

Birth of the Cool may be the coolest book you will ever see. In this 2008 exhibition catalog of his first retrospective, Barkley L. Hendricks (1945-2017) distills black identity into powerful three-quarter and full-length portraits that teem with style and attitude. His sitters are unapologetic in their self-presentation and the result is a phenomenal elevation of African Americans who would have otherwise gone unnoticed in the decades immediately following the civil rights movement.