Overview

A career retrospective of a singular voice in contemporary American art, featuring six decades of artwork that chronicles his vision of the Black American experience

New Orleans–based artist, community organizer, and cultural provocateur Willie Birch (b. 1942) has dedicated his career to telling stories about Black America. Over the past six decades, he has created incisive work across a wide variety of media—including paintings, large-scale drawings, wood and papier-mâché sculptures, installations, and public works—which draw on sources as diverse as Egyptian numerology, American folk art, and jazz music. This book showcases more than one hundred of Birch’s artworks alongside essays by eminent scholars and curators Russell Lord, Lowery Stokes Sims, Grace Deveney, and Leslie King Hammond.

This book showcases more than one hundred of Birch’s artworks alongside essays by eminent scholars and curators. Russell Lord provides an introduction to the artist’s life and work; Lowery Stokes Sims writes about Birch’s use of papier-mâché, for which he garnered acclaim during his time in New York City, and situates Birch within the New York art scene of the 1980s and ’90s; Grace Deveney considers the ways Birch gives visual form to the complex relationship between Black Americans and mass media; and Leslie King Hammond discusses how the city of New Orleans—its history and its communities—has shaped Birch’s work.

Russell Lord is chief of curatorial affairs at the Norman Rockwell Museum. Grace Deveney is the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago. Leslie King Hammond is professor emerita, former graduate dean, and founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Lowery Stokes Sims is former executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem and curator emerita at the Museum of Arts and Design.