Contextures

A 1978 argument for Black abstraction and conceptual art, written against a canon that had no place for either, and out of print for four decades until this facsimile.

Linda Goode Bryant — founder of the Harlem-born, 57th Street gallery Just Above Midtown — wrote the book with Marcy S. Philips and published it through JAM in 1978. It traces Black artists working in abstraction from 1945 to 1978 and the conceptual practices then emerging around them, combining extended critical writing with interviews and documentation of work by twenty-five artists across 58 black-and-white and 16 color images. The 2024 edition reproduces the original in full color at 112 pages and adds a newly commissioned afterword by Thomas (T. Jean) Lax, curator at the Museum of Modern Art; co-published by Pacific and Primary Information.

Just Above Midtown opened in 1974 as one of the few commercial galleries in New York to show Black artists as a matter of course, giving early platforms to David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, Howardena Pindell, Lorraine O'Grady and others, and was the subject of MoMA's 2022 exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces. Contextures is the gallery's own theoretical statement, and the clearest surviving account of what it thought it was doing.