[An] attractive volume. . . . English offers a dynamic and comprehensive study of colour as a sociopolitical tool, and how this affected the way that colour was more widely negotiated by the wider cultural context.
Aesthetica English argues that modern art in the form of abstraction gave black artists the intellectual freedom to develop beyond the confines of ... Read morethematic representations of African American history and allowed artists to present their work to those it appealed to and who dared to encounter it. Through this critical analysis, he gives a different perspective to color painting
a more diverse narrative, one determined to give a public face and a voice to those artists politically informed and forced to evolve by circumstance.
ARLIS/NA Reviews 1971 clears space for art historians, curators, and cultural producers to complicate black artists' participation in modernism as a multicultural process, not as a separate or oppositional endeavor. . . . [This book] captures quite concretely a shared moment in the art world when color defied any singular narrative.
Hyperallergic What is more urgently demanded, for current art and its histories, than the rethinking of how activism, identity, and art interact? Perhaps only an understanding of the particular complexity of black American identity, which in 1971: A Year in the Life of Color reveals a radical oppositionality within modernism that many had already given up on. Profoundly lucid, intensely felt, archivally deep, and utterly persuasive, English's book reorients our understanding of both that time and our own.
Rachel Haidu, University of Rochester 1971: A Year in the Life of Color is a powerful, polemical, and much-needed work. It forces us to rethink the terms of politics and abstraction, African American art, representation, and modernism in a way that is at once historically rigorous and theoretically expansive, no small thing indeed.
Pamela M. Lee, Stanford University More than a study of African American engagement with modernist aesthetics, Darby English's 1971: A Year in the Life of Color is an intelligent and provocative call for the necessity of abstraction, idiosyncrasy, and unexpected forms of rebellion in the production of art and the development of cultural studies. English crosses the most sacrosanct ideological boundaries as he argues for the necessity of untamed and previously unimagined forms of creativity.
Robert F. Reid-Pharr, CUNY Graduate Center Show Less