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Robert Earl Paige is one of the most iconic artists and designers from Chicago’s South Side. A multidisciplinary artist and arts educator, he works across textile design, painting, collage, and sculpture. During the 1970s, he brought West African–inspired patterns to U.S. shoppers through the Dakkabar fabrics collection available at Sears, Roebuck, leading to the inclusion of Black culture in home design.
In addition to exploring Paige’s personal and artistic practice, through essays by Dr. Romi Crawford and Dr. Gervais Marsh, The United Colors of Robert Earl Paige contextualizes his work in relation to social and artistic movements, from the minimalism and abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s to AFRI-COBRA and the Black Arts Movement in Chicago and across the United States. Curator Allison Peters Quinn collaborates with Paige to offer inspiration and tools for younger artists to develop lifelong creative practices. An interview between Paige and fiber artist Anne Wilson traces his career path, starting as a young designer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; his travel to West Africa, South Africa, and Milan; his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago; and features insights into Paige’s influences; his friendships with important cultural figures such as James Baldwin; his interest in blurring boundaries between design, art, and craft; and his teaching philosophies.
Published in conjunction with Paige’s exhibition at Hyde Park Art Center in 2024, this fully illustrated book includes reproductions of the artist’s hand-painted scarves, collages, and rugs made during the past sixty years, along with new ceramic tiles, collages, and textiles.
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Part memoir, part manifesto, part Black speculative novella, The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful blurs boundaries between this world and an imagined future whose overlapping wisdoms make cooperation with our natural environment a central concern for collective thriving. Extending her ongoing musical project Mandorla Awakening, Nicole Mitchell Gantt explores inequity, the musical legacies of jazz, creative music, and intercultural collaboration to guide readers towards an alternative society that disrupts binaries, hierarchies, and western ideas of progress. Paying homage to artists, musicians, and writers that have inspired her, Mitchell Gantt opens channels for artistic proliferation that is integral to the collective survival of our planet.
“The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful is an astonishing literary accomplishment by one of our contemporary jazz greats. Through experimental jazz thought, Mitchell Gantt brightens the possibilities for who we, as humans, might become.” —Dawn Lundy Martin, Toi Derricotte Chair in English, Director, Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, University of Pittsburgh
“Nicole Mitchell Gantt’s soulfully inventive guidebook for bold, positive futures is alive with the songs of ancestors, the courage of self-creation. Part memoir, part spectral-cosmic jazz and blues tale, epistolary and remarkably candid, free, this wildly original work offers fresh layers of meaning no matter from when and where you enter.” —Sheree Renée Thomas, Author of Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future
“Nicole Mitchell Gantt has penned an Afrofuturist masterwork, unearthing her musical lens and process through a multi-voiced narrative that invokes cosmic identity. A nonlinear weaving, she maps her imagination through the prism of critical thought, experience, and ancestral inspirations that brings her music to life. This is a must-read for those seeking to understand the star seeds through which Black Experimental Music and creativity at large is born.” —Ytasha L. Womack, Author of Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi & Fantasy Culture
“Epistolary speculation as memoir; performance document as romance; theory of collaborative composition as extended koan; notebook of a return to native land as otherworldly exit visa—The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful is unfathomably rich in praise and mourning and morning and impossible arising in devoted grounding and emphatic sounding.” —Fred Moten, Author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
About the Author: Nicole Mitchell Gantt is an award-winning creative flautist, conceptualist, and composer who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh as the Williams S. Dietrich II Chair and Director of Jazz Studies. She is a former chairwoman of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and Founder of the Black Earth Ensemble. The Mandorla Letters: for the hopeful is her first book.
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“There goes the poet Salvador Novo aboard a sleepless taxi. Did you notice his lips? The intense red of his closed lips? Pray he doesn’t open them. People say he has a sharp, poisonous tongue. They say he’s a snake. They say he’s a bitch. They say he’s a whore. I don’t know him personally. I’ve only read his poems, the ones he has written, the ones he’ll write soon.”
Luis Felipe Fabre’s Writing with Caca essays a lyric investigation of the Mexican modernist writer Salvador Novo. Translated with verve by JD Pluecker, the book centers around an investigation and reclaiming of Los Anales, the original, derogatory nickname given to Novo and his compadres in the modernist group Los Contemporáneos. Through Novo, Fabre conjures a poetics of the anus: It is not in vain that the sphinx and the sphincter share a single etymological origin, he writes. Similar to Robert Duncan’s HD Book, Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson, and Pierre Michon’s Rimbaud the Son, Fabre’s Writing with Caca is as much biography as auto-biography, and brings to the US an important work by an important contemporary Mexican writer.
Praise for the book:
A page-turner biography of the poet and writer Salvador Novo whose queer shoulder pushed every wall open. In here is Novo’s deviant knowledge of what the shit and anus reveal of life, yet “resists is sublimation.” This book is not for the timid, or maybe it is precisely for them! —CAConrad
Luis Felipe Fabre, one of the most exciting and virtuosic Mexican poets of his generation, knows a lot of good shit. He knows a lot about Salvador Novo, the scatalogical Mexican poet of the early 20th century who, according to Octavio Paz, wrote “not with blood but with caca.” This terrific book (translated with acrobatic brilliance by John Pluecker), is a work of literary history, literary criticism, poetry, and excretory theory that travels from the Aztecs to Sor Juana to the Mexican Revolution and to contemporary times. Fabre makes a compelling argument for the importance of Novo’s writing with caca, and for the importance of celebrating writers who are driven by the “urge to take a crap on all universal literature.” —Daniel Borzutzky
