Amalia Amaki: Boxes, Buttons, And the Blues - Hardcover

Andrea D. Barnwell is director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. Other contributors include Pearl Cleage, Gloria Wade-Gayles, Judy Larson, and Alvia Wardlaw.

Atlanta-based Amaki makes art with materials usually put to more prosaic use, creating mixed-media quilts, collages, and elaborate, button-encrusted objects, including candy boxes and handheld fans, the type used in black churches in the south, symbols of spirituality and power. Published in conjunction with Amaki's first retrospective exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, this richly produced monograph displays her finely detailed work and offers insights into her inspirations and motivations in essays and an interview. As Amaki explores the iconography of black women and the resonance of images of black southern life, she infuses portraits of women blues singers and a striking series of photographs of a boy and a girl demonstrating the cakewalk with complex emotions. Amaki's intricately patterned assemblages purposefully resemble folk art, reliquaries, and shrines, and, thanks to her use of the Stars and Stripes, make clear the fact that African American culture is as American as apple pie. Donna Seaman
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