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  • Published: 10 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529963342
  • Imprint: Merky Books Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $35.00

Reframing Blackness

What’s Black about "History of Art"?

  • Alayo Akinkugbe




An original and wide-ranging riposte to the current understanding of Blackness in Western art and museums, from an upcoming curator and founder of @ABlackHistoryOfArt

Since the inception of mainstream art history, Blackness has been distinctly ignored.

In Reframing Blackness, art historian and founder of @ABlackHistoryOfArt, Alayo Akinkugbe challenges this void.

Exploring the presentation of Black figures in Western art, Blackness in museums, Blackness in feminist art movements, as well as Blackness in the curriculum, Alayo unveils an overlooked but integral part of our collective art history.

Refreshing and accessible, this promises to start a much-needed conversation in culture and education.

  • Published: 10 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529963342
  • Imprint: Merky Books Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $35.00

Praise for Reframing Blackness

A sparkling debut. Bold, eloquent, personal and clear-eyed, Alayo Akinkugbe is a major new voice in writing about art, museums and culture. Reframing Blackness shows us how addressing absences and erasures can be about so much more than just filling the gaps. This book is a manifesto, a manual and a toolkit all at once, focused on the urgent tasks of reimagining the canon, transforming the curriculum, and bringing art history into the 21st century. It will shift your frames of reference, expand your canvas, and give you hope for the future — changing how you look at art while also making you look again at your ways of seeing

Dan Hicks, author of THE BRUTISH MUSEUMS

Reframing Blackness is a testament to the necessity and vital importance of taking an active role in not only curating knowledge but challenging systems of knowing that have shaped our world view thus far. Alayo Akinkugbe illustrates exactly how structural education should never wholly substitute the learning that we must continue to do into adulthood. To explore a history of Black communities across centuries of art is a love letter to the practice, a gift of knowledge and an ode to those who’s creative expressions give us much to be inspired by today. To curate knowledge, is to understand and know ourselves better in a world we inherited, and a world that we contribute to in our short time here

Sofia Akel, cultural historian and founder of Free Books Campaign