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2 books match the query 'Tillet, Salamishah'

cover of Dreamtime in Newark: Aljira and the Making of Global Contemporary Art

Dreamtime in Newark

Aljira and the Making of Global Contemporary Art

Alliyah Allen

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Dreamtime in Newark surveys the transition of Aljira from an artist-led studio space to a major arts institution in Newark, New Jersey, that abruptly closed in 2018 due to gentrification and financial pressure. Exploring the origins and milestones of the gallery, the book examines how Aljira became a space for the marginalized artist and curator and aligned with the trend of artists-led “alternative-art-spaces”—contributing to the rise of diverse art markets and breakthroughs in representation throughout the museum collections, exhibitions, and the broader art world. This volume offers a historical analysis of the relationship between Aljira and the Newark Museum of Art, given the many collaborations on exhibitions, residencies, and shared curatorial strategies. Along with providing a wider historicity, the book amplifies the museum’s role in preserving Aljira’s legacy—especially as the city’s arts ecosystem evolves. The book underscores the museum’s role in preserving Aljira’s history and legacy. Bringing together contributions from the extended community of artists, curators, critics, and art historians, the project works against the erasure of a vital part of contemporary art and cultural history. Before conversations of decolonizing the art world were commonplace, Aljira forged a free and open vision for the art world that cross-pollinated with the Newark Museum of Art’s egalitarian and populist roots and global collections. 

The book, which accompanies an exhibition, October 15, 2026–June 20, 2027, also considers the impact of Aljira, founded in the aftermath of the 1967 Newark Rebellion, on the city of Newark and how its thirty-five-year tenure driven by social engagement and community practice helped to crystalize Newark’s visual arts scene. 

Artists in the exhibition: Manuel Acevedo, Derrick Adams, David Ambrose, El Anatsui, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Firelei Báez, Amiri Baraka, Hugo X. Bastidas, Dawoud Bey, Camille Billops, Frank Bowling, Michael Paul Britto, Andy Brown, Nanette Carter, Willie Cole, Cicely Cottingham, Victor Davson, David Driskell, Dahlia Elsayed, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Chitra Ganesh, Jerry Gant, Jeffrey Gibson, Grace Graupe-Pillard, Carl E. Hazlewood, Duron Jackson, Ben Jones, Jayson Keeling, Donald Locke, Hew Locke, Franco Mondini-Ruiz, Olu Oguibe, Joe Overstreet, Nell Painter, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Judy Blum Reddy, Freddy Rodriguez, Kevin Sampson, Dread Scott, Fausto Sevila, Nyugen Smith, Helen Stummer, Mickalene Thomas, Noelle Lorraine Williams, Philemona Williamson

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cover of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination

Sites of Slavery

Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination

Salamishah Tillet

Duke University Press, 2012

More than forty years after the major victories of the civil rights movement, African Americans have a vexed relation to the civic myth of the United States as the land of equal opportunity and justice for all. In Sites of Slavery Salamishah Tillet examines how contemporary African American artists and intellectuals—including Annette Gordon-Reed, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Bill T. Jones, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kara Walker—turn to the subject of slavery in order to understand and challenge the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from the founding narratives of the United States. She explains how they reconstruct "sites of slavery"—contested figures, events, memories, locations, and experiences related to chattel slavery—such as the allegations of a sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the characters Uncle Tom and Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, African American tourism to slave forts in Ghana and Senegal, and the legal challenges posed by reparations movements. By claiming and recasting these sites of slavery, contemporary artists and intellectuals provide slaves with an interiority and subjectivity denied them in American history, register the civic estrangement experienced by African Americans in the post–civil rights era, and envision a more fully realized American democracy.
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