Book Review
The Artist Who Taught James Baldwin to Write Like a Painter
The essays in Speculative Light explore the many ways in which Beauford Delaney, another queer Black man, revolutionized Baldwin’s cultural perspective and imagination.
James Baldwin
Art
Detroit Museum Celebrates 100 Years of James Baldwin
The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History features the work of Baldwin-obsessed artist Sabrina Nelson on the centennial of the famed author’s birth.
Art
Tracing James Baldwin’s Legacy Through His Friendships on His 100th Birthday
The exhibition This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance documents the writer and activist's life through archival media, photographs, and artwork.
Books
Celebrating James Baldwin's Radical Beauty
In God Made My Face, artists and critics reflect on seeing themselves through the late metamorphic writer’s work.
Interview
A New Archive Shows Where to Stream Hundreds of Classic Black Films
Hyperallergic speaks to Maya Cade, creator of the Black Film Archive, about showcasing an “abundance of Blackness across time.”
Interview
An Intimate Look at James Baldwin and His Rarely Discussed Suicide Attempts
Harmony Holiday wants to show “the Baldwin who was baffled and befuddled and wounded and perfectly real.”
Music
Listening to the Joy in James Baldwin’s Record Collection
Curator Ikechúkwú Onyewuenyi hopes to rouse a new generation of writers with “Chez Baldwin,” a 32-hour-long Spotify playlist based on Baldwin’s vinyl record collection.
Film
Barry Jenkins’s Tender Adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk
Jenkins brings a visual richness to the story, accentuating the emotional undertones of Baldwin’s words.
Art
A Collaborative Photobook by Richard Avedon and James Baldwin
Avedon and Baldwin's 1964 photobook, with a new introduction by Hilton Als, resonates profoundly today.
Art
I Am Not Your Negress: On Violence and American Necrophilia
I Am Not Your Negro is a spectacularly and explicitly violent film, and yet it's been described as having “implied” violence.
Art
A James Baldwin Documentary Raises Questions About America that May Never Be Answered
Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro delivers brutally honest polemics about white America from James Baldwin.
Film
A Documentary Envisions a Book James Baldwin Never Finished
Directed by Raoul Peck, I Am Not Your Negro is montage and meditation, a dialogue between the archive and the present.