Techniques of Abstraction in Black Arts

This review essay discusses recent exhibitions and accompanying art books published at the threshold of Black philosophy and aesthetics in relation to feminist mourning practices: Nicole Fleetwood’s book and exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020); Grief and Grievance, an exhibition (2021); a book (2020) conceived by the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor; and Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (2020), edited by C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp. These books and several others elucidate how relationships between transnational feminism, mourning, and Black works of art speak to Frantz Fanon’s idea of “the leap into existence,” Hortense Spillers’s “dialectics of a global new woman,” and David Marriott’s psycho-political analysis of invention.