Black Artists Shaping the World: 14 Stories of Creativity

Gr 3-5–This shorter, picture book version of a previous edition, shows young readers examples of how l4 different Black artists have created their own views of the world. An illustration shows each artist in the process of creating art, and one artwork is shown and discussed. The power of this collection is how it shows the many ways artists create art to illuminate their past and present. For example, artist Lubaina Himid took people out of earlier museum paintings that showed them as slaves or servants and created life-sized, painted cut-outs of them. She wrote poems and placed on their backs, giving them names, sharing their stories, and allowing them to share their stories for themselves. A second example is artist Kehinde Wiley. He used portraits of powerful, rich, white people to “borrow” their stance and use it to portray a black person as powerful. He used a painting of Napoleon Crossing the Alps to show a powerful black man in the same setting, wearing colorful clothing and in the same pose. Back matter includes a glossary and a list of artworks.