Art on My Mind
  • Published: 5 August 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241711491
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $30.00

Art on My Mind

Visual Politics

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Paperback
5 Aug 2025
EBook
8 May 2025
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A rich, thought-provoking collection of essays, critiques and interviews from the influential author of Ain't I a Woman and All About Love

'There must be a revolution in the way we see, the way we look'

In a collection of essays, critiques and interviews, bell hooks responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting and criticizing art and aesthetics in a world increasingly concerned with identity politics. hooks shares her own experience of the transformative power of art whilst exploring topics ranging from art in education and the home to the politics of space and imagination as a revolutionary tool. She positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be empowering within the Black community.

Speaking with artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Alison Saar, and examining the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Art on My Mind is a generous and expansive body of work that has become increasingly relevant since it was first published in 1995. Here is an essential tool for understanding the contemporary moment, and a fundamental text for any reader concerned with making and sustaining a democratic artistic culture.
  • Published: 5 August 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241711491
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $30.00
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Praise for Art on My Mind

In an art world obsessed with identity politics, Art on My Mind is a long-overdue rescue of the liberating, rather than confining, power of art

Paper Magazine

Sharp and persuasive

The New York Times Book Review

[Art on My Mind] is a guide to the ways that political meaning and esthetic pleasure may be discovered, bound together, in many works by contemporary artists of color

Art America

[hooks] brings a welcome clarity to such issues as received art and the development of a Western canon

San Francisco Examiner

Passionate and highly personal

Publishers Weekly

When truth teller and careful writer bell hooks offers a book, I like to be standing at the bookshop when it opens

Maya Angelou

As erudite and sophisticated as hooks is, she is also eminently readable, even exhilarating

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