12 Books on Black Space, Memory, and Belonging

This September, Los Angeles will welcome Black Portraiture[s]: Los Angeles: The Black Built Environment, a conference cohosted by New York University, Getty, and UCLA.

Taking place from the 28th to the 30th, this event is designed to explore the rich history and tapestry of the Black built environment—both literally and conceptually. The convening will weave together conversations on architecture, urban planning, and visual culture in an effort to conceive of physical and spiritual Black spaces and how they function in practice.

In celebration of Black Portraiture[s], we’ve compiled a list of book recommendations from conference contributors, and we invite you to explore the titles to guide your thinking and ground you in the ideas that will be presented across the meeting’s panel discussions.

Black Curators Matter: Conversations on Art and Change

Edited by Kellie Jones and Tumelo Mosaka

Historically, Black curators and artists have been noticeably absent from museum culture and collections, resulting in several significant protests and coalitions calling for change. Since the late 1960s, there has been a profound increase across the country in exhibitions centering Black artists and institutional positions filled by Black curators. This book traces the long undersung impact these individuals have had on American art museums since the 1970s by compiling conversations between legendary curators like Lowery Stokes Sims and Franklin Sirmans, who laid the groundwork for this change, and newer curators, like Ashley James and LeRonn P. Brooks, who continue to uphold this legacy of transformation.

These reflections not only spotlight historical milestones that have been made in the curatorial field by Black professionals but also offer insight, strategies, and guidance for a new generation to use as they continue to blaze a trail in art institutions—and offer a more diverse, honest portrait of America through the visual arts.

Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers: 1840 to the Present

Deborah Willis

Originally published in 2000, the 25th anniversary edition of Deborah Willis’s acclaimed collection of Black photography features more than 100 images from 21st-century artists, in a move that Robin D. G. Kelley notes in a new foreword “overturns many common ideas about black life during the last century and a half, and in so doing rewrites American history.”

Upon publication, this was the first single-volume work of its kind; a gathering of pictures—from daguerreotypes of the 1840s to digital art of the 1990s—made by African American photographers. This reissued edition sees Willis, a curator, author, and photographer herself, adding 130 new images in an effort to honor the strides that have been made in the last 25 years.

Featuring the contributions of photographers such as Albert Chong, Lorna Simpson, and Hank Willis Thomas, this updated volume widens its lens to include work that veers into the territory of multimedia and conceptual art.

Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985

Edited by Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis Preface by Angela Davis Contributions by Makeda Best, Margo Natalie Crawford, Romi Crawford, Cheryl Finley, Sarah Lewis, and Audrey Sands

Featuring more than 100 contributors, this landmark book charts the significant role photography played in the broader Black Arts Movement, which brought together writers, filmmakers, and visual artists who used their creative expression to advocate for Black self-determination. Photojournalism, community building, and political messaging also manifested themselves as ways to champion civil rights.

Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, this illustrated exhibition catalogue includes work by Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Kwame Brathwaite, and Carrie Mae Weems and allows its authors and essayists to consider the rich connections between American artists, the African diaspora, and the dynamic interchange of Pan-African ideas that propelled the movement.

South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s

Kellie Jones

Scholar Kellie Jones’s examination of Los Angeles’s Black communities during a pivotal era of expansion and experimentation in the local art scene was named a Best Art Book of 2017 by the New York Times and Artforum. Jones traces the importance of Black migration to the West and invokes Angeleno artists, including Betye Saar, Charles White, and Noah Purifoy, to illustrate the vibrant and engaged activism and artistic production during the civil rights era and beyond. Jones also situates the Black Angeleno community of this time as trailblazers in LA’s urban renewal and responsible for the proliferation of independent, Black-led arts spaces in a time when many establishment museums were just opening across California.

Of Interest to the General Public: About a Coronation Cloak from Ethiopia (Objects Talk Back series)

Maaza Mengiste

This multimedia narration came about during Maaza Mengiste’s time spent in the African collections at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, where she discovered an elaborate coronation cloak from Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia) on display. Drawing upon the history of the 1868 British expedition to Abyssinia and the burning of the palace fortress at Magdala, this book charts the journey of the royal mantle to Berlin, using a collection of voices, images, and objects to tell a fuller story.

Kin

Tayari Jones

Oprah Winfrey referred to Tayari Jones’s latest bestseller—selected as an Oprah’s Book Club pick for 2026—as “a masterpiece of a novel that…will live with you long after you turn the last page.” The story of lifelong friends Vernice and Annie—two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, who end up taking different paths—examines the complexity of women’s lives in the American South and sisterhood writ large. A striking follow-up to Jones’s acclaimed novel An American Marriage, Kin offers an emotionally rich landscape for the mind to play in.

Fugitive Tilts: Essays

Ishion Hutchinson

This book of essays, the prose debut of poet Ishion Hutchinson, is a dedication to love in its many forms—of home, poetry, and artists and their works, including Jamaican music, John Coltrane, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Within it, the author moves across time and place. He recalls a trip to Senegal, meditates on a painting that reminds him of the memory of his grandmother, and uses the past to animate the present through a tender, vivid analysis of inheritances and influences.

Archive of Desire: A Poem in Four Parts for C. P. Cavafy

Robin Coste Lewis

Robin Coste Lewis, winner of a National Book Award, PEN/Voelcker Award, and NAACP Image Award, brings the archives of queer Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy to life through her experimental poem of a book. The work is divided into quadrants and originated as a musical, visual, and lyrical collaboration with composer Vijay Iyer, cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, and visual artist Julie Mehretu (joined by Lewis herself as a live narrator). Reaching across centuries, forms, and spaces, Lewis uses her poem to move throughout the late writer’s bedrooms and notebooks—and, at times, deepens the exercise by writing directly to Cavafy.

When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World (The Visual Arts of Africa and Its Diasporas series)

Leigh Raiford

In this book, Leigh Raiford asks a central question: How do Black people use photography to create home? The Black American activists and artists the writer invokes, including Marcus Garvey, James Van Der Zee, and Kathleen Neal Cleaver, illustrate the sometimes historically fraught relationship between Black subjects and photography as a medium. As a result, the reader can sense the delicate line between being observed and being truly seen. Photographs, which were used by these individuals as forms of self-determination and a means to carve out space, become essential tools for survival in Raiford’s examination of image-making practices.

Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation

Tiffany E. Barber

Tiffany E. Barber, assistant professor of African American Art at UCLA, has written an examination of how Black women’s visual art exists in an era of new and actively shifting race and gender-based meaning. Published in 2025, at a time when the contemporary art world was turning post-Black, Barber investigates how mainstream intersectionality has wrought new approaches to Black women’s art, which hinges on what she has termed “undesirable” representations of Black female bodies across contemporary sculpture, collage, photography, and dance-based performance art. These works challenge art history’s traditional understanding of Blackness and womanhood and help to upset our default understanding of representational ethics.

Devin Allen: Baltimore

Edited by Michal Raz-Russo and Peter W. Kunhardt Jr. Contributions by Peter W. Kunhardt Jr., Darnell L. Moore, Salamishah Tillet, and D. Watkins

Devin Allen—a self-taught artist whose photograph of the Baltimore uprising following the murder of Freddie Gray at the hands of police was published on the cover of Time in 2015—brings together his photojournalism work across the last decade in this book, which chronicles the never-ending fight for social justice in his hometown. Baltimore’s Black community has a long and local history of advocating for racial justice, particularly from the state, making Allen’s work a tribute to this lineage and a harrowing collection of images that tell the truth about how long the road toward true justice is. Awarded the 2023 Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book Prize, this influential text includes more than 100 of Allen’s photographs, many of which are published for the first time.

The Revelation of Dionne Daphne

Mara Brock Akil

This heartfelt debut novel about love and the titular character’s awakening is by Mara Brock Akil, the award-winning creator of such television shows as Girlfriends, Being Mary Jane, Love Is___, and Forever. It tells the tale of a woman with a seemingly perfect career, relationship, and overall life who is privately struggling with secrets revealed and a shifting existence that is not what she imagined it would become, shattering dreams and the innocence of her youth. Daphne embarks on a road trip to escape her reality and learns much about her family, the world, and herself along the way.

These publications are currently available at the Getty Library on the reserve shelf on the Plaza Level. The Getty Library has over a million books and periodicals, photographs, and artist archives that cover all eras of human history as it relates to art. We invite the public to get a Getty Library card and check out our offerings. It’s a learning journey together!