Black History Month February 2024: Home

Accompanying a major traveling exhibition, this first-ever survey of the rarely seen notebooks of Basquiat features the artist's handwritten notes, poems, and drawings, along with related works on paper and large-scale paintings.

Drawing from contemporary journalism, reviews, program notes, memoirs, interviews, and other sources, Keeping Time lets you experience, first hand, the controversies and critical issues that have accompanied jazz from its very birth.

"What is Hip-Hop?" In order to answer this question, author Andrew J. Rausch interviewed 24 individuals whose creative expressions are intimately associated with the world of hip-hop music and culture. Those interviewed include emcees, DJs, producers, graffiti artists, poets, and journalists.

Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent seven years on chain gangs. During that time he met the undaunted Patsy, who would become his wife. Years later, at the age of fifty-one and with Patsy's encouragement, he started drawing and painting scenes from his youth using leather tooling skills he learned in prison.

"... more than 120 selections from the political writings and arts of the period, each depicting the meaning of blackness and the nature of African-American art and its relation to social statement." Oxford University Press

A landmark anthology that brings together the work of 120 writers in the most comprehensive collection of African American writing available.

[v.1.] Harlem renaissance : five novels of the 1920s. Cane / Jean Toomer ; Home to Harlem / Claude McKay ; Quicksand / Nella Larsen ; Plum bun / Jessie Redmon Fauset ; The blacker the berry / Wallace Thurman -- [v.2.] Harlem renaissance : four novels of the 1930s. Not without laughter / Langston Hughes ; Black no more / George Schuyler ; The conjure-man dies / Rudolph Fisher ; Black thunder / Arna Bontemps.

Spanning the gamut of literary genres, from autobiographical short stories to poetry, journalism, and novelettes, this is a comprehensive collection of one of America's most seminal women writers.

African-American Plays for the 21st Century

Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet--at the center of the "Harlem Renaissance."

Clockers; Jungle Fever; Do the Right Thing; Mo' Better Blues; Crooklyn

The neighborhoods of Fifth Ward, Fourth Ward, Third Ward, and the Southside of Houston, Texas, gave birth to Houston rap, a vibrant music scene that has produced globally recognized artists such as Geto Boys, DJ Screw, Pimp C and Bun B of UGK, Fat Pat, Big Moe, Z-Ro, Lil' Troy, and Paul Wall. Lance Scott Walker and photographer Peter Beste spent a decade documenting Houston's scene, interviewing and photographing the people--rappers, DJs, producers, promoters, record label owners--and places that give rap music from the Bayou City its distinctive character.