With texts by Anna Arabindan-Kesson and Macarena Gómez-Barris
15 May 2025 | 235 illustrations | £50.00
A vibrant contemporary art anthology that explores the complex ties between race, climate crisis and colonialism by 100 leading artists of African diasporic, Latin American and Native American identity.
Featuring over 200 contemporary art works across a range of mediums, Black Earth Rising seeks to address vital questions of land, presence, climate crisis, and social and environmental justice against the historical backdrop of European settlement of the New World.
Complex and intertwined concepts are explored: forced migration and slavery, the environmental consequences of colonialism, the occupation of Native lands, the urban plight of Black and Brown communities, and how cultural practices and knowledge systems of indigenous peoples can change our perspectives of the natural world.
Split into three thematic sections: Reckoning, Reimagining and Reclaiming, Black Earth Rising presents a discourse around climate change that situates the voices of people of colour at the active centre rather than on the passive periphery. It expands our understanding of aesthetic perspectives on climate change through artworks that reach to the poetic and lyrical rather than the didactic.
Ekow Eshun is a writer, curator, journalist and broadcaster based in London, whose writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, the Financial Times, the Guardian and Vogue. Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, from 2005 to 2010, and a frequent contributor to BBC radio and television programmes, his previous books include Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa, published in 2005, and In the Black Fantastic, published in 2022.
