From the Files

Dominic Molon ponders the meaning of waiting for Nick Cave’s Soundsuit to arrive.

Artists on Art

Akwaeke Emezi eats the sun, removing the shadow by removing the light.

Shuriya Davis sings from Butterfly Hymnals That Won’t Disturb the Pleasant: Complacency, and Other Lullabies.

Kelly Taylor Mitchell reminds you that Black people don’t owe you shit.

Double Takes

Rashayla Marie Brown and Matthew Shenoda celebrate the love in Ming Smith’s Romare Bearden, New York, NY, 1977

Leslie Wilson and Emanuel Admassu consider sideways glances and multiple meanings in Aïda Muluneh’s Age of Anxiety

Andrea Achi and Gina Borromeo grapple with racial types, missing handles, and the long lost history of an ancient bust of an African child

Kevin Quashie and Sade LaNay take a peep at Black privacy, gender, and sensuality in Toyin Ojih Odutola’s Last Portrait of the 18th Marquess

Portfolio

Radiant works and glorious shadows from across the RISD Museum’s collection

Object Lessons

Makeda Best highlights Calvin Burnett’s 1964 portrait of Sojourner Truth, and the photos Truth herself commissioned.

Melanee C. Harvey studies the preliminary works for and final version of Aaron Douglas’s Building More Stately Mansions.

Tayana Fincher casts new light on a 19th-century Nubian sandal, its largely obfuscated earlier history, and its purpose in a museum collection.

How To

Kate Irvin lays out how Harmonia Rosales and Fe Noel collaborated to Design the Black Imaginary to Counter Hegemony (B.I.T.C.H.).

Oluremi C. Onabanjo illuminates how Carrie Mae Weems haunts history.

RISD Museum Director: John W. Smith
Manual Editor-in-Chief: Sarah Ganz Blythe
Editor: Amy Pickworth
Art Director: Brendan Campbell
Graphic Designers: Jada Akoto, Everett Epstein, & Hilary Dupont
Photographer: Erik Gould (unless otherwise noted)
Printer: GHP