We wanted to end our BOMB The Root series with a star, and so, we chose the late, great, June Jordan. A poet, writer, professor and opera fan—as we will learn—June Jordan was a fantastic and unique voice in African-American literature and social activism. Born to Jamaican parents in Harlem, Jordan spent her adolescent years…

Little known in the United States outside of academic circles, Evelyne Trouillot is one of Haiti’s most celebrated intellectual thinkers. A prolific writer, Trouillot has authored numerous children’s books, a collection of poetry and a collection of short stories, numerous plays, two novels, and countless essays and articles in both the mainstream and academic press.…

Performance artist and playwright Keith Antar Mason had his turn in the limelight in the early 1990s when he and his theatrical company, The Hittite Empire, were commissioned to perform 49 Blues Songs to a Jealous Vampire at Lincoln Center. The two-hour performance, described by New York Times critic Stephen Holden as “an interlocking series…

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, sculptor, teacher, and children’s book author Lorenzo Pace is the direct descendant of slaves. His great-grandfather, Steve Pace, was kidnapped and forcefully brought to the United States in the early part of the 19th century. Addressing our shared history of human enslavement is central to Pace’s work. In 1991 the New…

Like so many African-American artists, Carrie Mae Weems’ artistic career began at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In the mid-1970s, back when the museum occupied a loft “above a Kentucky Fried Chicken,” the museum hired established artists to teach local residents studio art. As Dawoud Bey tells it, on the first day of his class…

Camille Billops is nothing if not a character, from her ultra long hair to her eyes painted with thick Egyptian eyeliner. She spent years making documentaries about some of the most controversial and personal topics imaginable. Her first film, Suzanne, Suzanne, chronicled her niece’s heroin addiction, her follow-up, Older Woman and Love, told the story…

Yinka Shonibare MBE is an artist who works in layers. First you have comedy: Victorian era gentiles mid-orgy, oh my! Second, you have historical reproductions: Victorian era bustles, impeccable! Third, you have colonialism: This brightly colored cloth is African not British! And lastly, you have a whole new understanding of race, hierarchy and world history.…

Kara Walker is, hands down, one of America’s most well-regarded living artists. She has shown her cut-paper silhouettes and lurid, projected scenes at every major Arts Institution in America—MoMA, the Whitney, the Walker Art Center, SFMoMA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the name, but a few—and a slew of major arts museums internationally. In…

Kerry James Marshall is one of the most decorated contemporary African-American artists working today. His flat—almost two-dimensional—eerily utopian paintings have earned him entry into the Whitney Biennial, Documenta and the Venice Biennale; a solo exhibition at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; and most notably, a MacArthur “genius grant,” and yet relatively little…

While we were sifting through 28 years of BOMB interviews, we found a spate of interviews with African-American artists and thinkers conducted in the early to mid-1990s. Published in the wake of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings, the Rodney King beating trial and subsequent L.A. riots, and just prior to the O.J. Simpson trial, the…