Books for Black History Month: Artists & Performers

Each week during Black History Month, we’re highlighting a selection of books on an important Black history topic. This week, we’re focusing on the important impact of Black dancers, choreographers, musicians, and painters.

Use code BHM22 for discount prices on these books and others through February 28.

Rooted Jazz Dance
Africanist Aesthetics and Equity in the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Lindsay Guarino, Carlos R.A. Jones, and Wendy Oliver

In this volume, jazz dance scholars, choreographers, and educators discuss how Eurocentric techniques and ideology have obscured jazz’s origins in African American vernacular dance and offer ways to re-center Africanist aesthetics when teaching, performing, and studying jazz dance.

Dancing in Blackness
A Memoir
Halifu Osumare

In this memoir, Halifu Osumare reflects on what Blackness and dance have meant to her life and international career.  The book covers her journey over four decades and reveals the overlooked ways that dance has been a vital tool in the Black struggle for recognition, justice, and self-empowerment.

Florida Soul
From Ray Charles to KC and the Sunshine Band
John Capouya

From Ray Charles’s Florida upbringing to how Tampa dancers inspired Hank Ballard to write “The Twist,” John Capouya emphasizes the Black musicians who, despite working in a segregated Southern state, contributed to some of the most electric, emotive soul music America has ever heard.

Harold Newton
The Original Highwayman
Gary Monroe

Harold Newton not only captured the beauty of the Florida landscape but transformed it with an artistry that invoked its drama of light, color, and form while hinting at its dark, primordial forces. This volume features vivid plates of his paintings alongside biographical details and reminiscences from family members, customers, and fellow Highwaymen about the painter who shaped the romantic imagery and identity of modern Florida.

Alfred Hair
Heart of the Highwaymen
Gary Monroe

Alfred Hair’s paintings, reproduced here in vivid color plates, were foundational to the success of his fellow African American artists during the era of Jim Crow segregation.  Gary Monroe describes Hair’s upbringing, growth as an artist, romance, and marriage. Though killed at age 29, Hair lived his short life with a zest and intensity that informed his art and made a deep impact on his fellow Highwaymen.