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Legacies of Slavery

These artists’ books reckon with the legacies of slavery in the US, including the deep entrenchment of white supremacy in the nation’s culture and institutions. Whether documenting large conceptual projects and performances or using the aesthetic possibilities of the book form, they confront the brutality of enslavement and interrogate ways in which racism persists today. 

Fragments of the Peculiar Institution Fragments of the Peculiar Institution

Dread Scott
Fragments of the Peculiar Institution
New York: CPInPrint Cameron + Brown, 2016

Fragments of the Peculiar Institution presents an archive of artifacts and images related to the institution of slavery, curated by the artist. It is part of his larger project to stage a reenactment of the 1811 German Coast Uprising in Louisiana, the largest rebellion of enslaved people in US history.

Purchased using funds from the Boone Domestic Architecture Endowment.

UNC Library Catalog: https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb8562276

Transforming Hate

Clarissa Sligh
Transforming Hate
[Asheville, North Carolina]: Clarissa T. Sligh, 2016

In Transforming Hate Sligh shares the process of participating in an exhibition in which artists were asked to transform copies of The White Man’s Bible into works of art. “[T]hat exploration helped me understand more fully the many levels of oppression and violence at the intersections of race, gender, class and sexual orientation. Why do we keep each other from being who we really are? How can we begin to talk about what separates us?” (Quotation from Sligh’s Foreword to the book.)

Purchased using funds from the T. Henry and Penelope Clarke Library Fund in honor of Margaret Bland Clarke.

UNC Library Catalog: https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb8681679

Antillean Lacunae

Onajide Shabaka
Antillean Lacunae
[Ft. Lauderdale]: IS Projects, 2020

Antillean Lacunae is a product of Shabaka’s ethnobotanical research into food plants brought by enslaved people to the Americas from Africa, focusing on Suriname and the Lowcountry of Georgia. As he states in the introduction, “one legacy of the Atlantic slave trafficking era is the lingering failure to consider its victims as deliberate botanical agents."

Purchased using funds from the T. Henry and Penelope Clarke Library Fund in honor of Margaret Bland Clarke.

UNC Library Catalog: https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb7004407

Fred Hagstrom
Passage
[Saint Paul, Minn.]: Strong Silent Type Press, 2013.

In Passage Hagstrom layers text and images important to the abolitionist movement with archival photos of formerly enslaved people. The book’s size, its affecting content, and its frenetic visual design add up to an unsettling record of slavery’s brutal history and the struggle to end its practice.

UNC Library Catalog: https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb7639813

Tom Scarpino
Political Terms: Leaving Impressions
[Palo Alto, California]: [Tom Scarpino], 2017. Manufactured: [Berkeley, California]: Kala Art Institute

“Hollywood / Jews.” “Crime / Blacks.” “Americans / White Christians.” Through the inversion of inked and blind (or uninked) printing, the artist pulls out the white supremacist double-speak behind common dog-whistle terms through simple, effective, and chilling graphic design. 

UNC Library Catalog: https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/UNCb9127607