“Sharp and persuasive.” — The New York Times Book Review on the original publication of Art on My Mind

Art on My Mind, “one of the country’s most influential feminist thinkers“ (Artforum) offers a tender yet potent suite of writings for a world increasingly concerned with art and identity politics. This collection of bell hooks’s essays, each with art at its center, explores both the obvious and obscure: from ruminations on the fraught representation of Black bodies, to reflections on the creative processes of women artists, to analysis of the use of blood in visual art.

bell hooks has been “instrumental in cracking open the white, western canon for Black artists” (Artnet), with searing essays complemented by conversations with Carrie Mae Weems, Emma Amos, Margo Humphrey, and LaVerne Wells-Bowie. Featuring full-color artwork from giants such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lorna Simpson, and Alison Saar, Art on My Mind “examines the way race, sex and class shape who makes art, how it sells and who values it” (The New York Times), while questioning how art can be instrumental for Black liberation. In doing so, hooks urges us to unravel the forces of oppression that colonize our imaginations.