Eye.

Back in the Days Photographs by Jamel Shabazz. Foreword by "Fab Five" Freddy Braithwaite PowerHouse Books, December 2001 $35.00, ISBN 1-576-87106-1

In the conspicuous absence of politically and socially positive images in today's hip-hop music, nostalgia for a more innocent time has taken root. Summer concert rosters are filled with old-school acts. And artists looking to bridge the generation gap are emphasizing the less commercial aspects of hip-hop music. Even younger artists are paying homage to hip-hop's elders. Jay-Z, one of the leaders of rap's new school, gives it up for the Cold Crush Brothers, citing the troubles they had to overcome. In some ways, hip hop, as a cultural revolution, is slowly retreating from its "bling-bling" aestheticism.

Call it a resurrection, or a neo hip-hop moment. Nevertheless, one of the most visible signs that this movement is taking place is in the nostalgic images, especially documentary photos of hip hop's early days, or "back in the days" as implied in the title of Jamel Shabazz's book of images.

Like the graffiti artists who ran short on money and even shorter on fame in the early '80s, Shabazz was swept up in the excitement of hip-hop culture. Even without formal training--which sometimes is an obstacle in the world of serious art--Shabazz manages to capture the essence of early hip hop with keen visual perception. His approach, like photographer Nan Goldin, brought him intimately close to his subjects--the generation of b-boys and b-girls. With a daring and inventive eye, he captures some of the most beautiful images of an era.

This past March, Shabazz exhibited the photos in a same-titled show, "Back in the Days," to a packed house at the Kravets/ Whevy Gallery in New York City.

Along with a discerning foreword by "Fab Five" Freddy Brathwaite, one of hip hop's early pioneers, Back in the Days offers valuable insight for those trying to make sense of hip hop's origins, or those looking for a new perspective, rather than the pop-pop, fizz-fizz of what is now passing for hip-hop culture.

--Franklin Sirmans is a writer and curator of One Planet Under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art

Africas: The Artist and the City Essays by Pep Subiros, Simon Njami, Kobena Mercer, Yacouba Konate, Kan-Si and Akinbode, Actar, February 2002 $39.95, ISBN 8-492-73861-1

Like the idea that all African art is tribal, westerners tend to cling to the notion that all Africans still live in small villages, even though many countries throughout the continent are urbanized. It is within these urban areas that much of the contemporary art production is taking place. Beginning with its title, Africas: The Artist and the City, this catalog decisively informs the reader of an array of cultures and artistic practices from the continent. It presents the work of 20 artists from several cities within various African countries including Dakar, Abidjan, Lagos, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Harare as well as from 'outposts' of Africa's varied diaspora cultures in Paris and London.

The artists featured here are influenced by both contemporary global art movements and by their urban environments. Along with color reproductions of the works of art, the catalogue includes photographs of the major African cities and insightful essays by historians and cultural critics Simon Njami, Kobena Mercer, Yacouba Konate, Kan-Si and Akinbode Akinbiyi.

Not to be overlooked is the series of essays by exhibition organizer Pep Subiros. In these essays Subiros introduces the reader to the dynamics of African cities today and to the many tensions and challenges that face the contemporary African artists' work. Africas: The Artist and the City provides a remarkable introduction to contemporary African artists and their works.

--Kira Harris New York-based artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Authentic/Ex-Centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art Edited by Salah M. Hassan and Olu Oguibe. Essays by Siemon Allen, Sally Berger, Annie E. Coombes, Rory Doepel, Okwui Enwezor, Maryline Lostia, Gilane Tawadros and Christian Viveros-Faune Forum for African Arts, Inc., January 2002 $19.95, ISBN 9-076-16206-9

When most of us think of African art we view it a century or more behind the current aesthetic developments. Usually, we envision tribal masks, fetish figures or ceremonial altars among some of the familiar art forms.

But what of African artists today? Many are educated in Europe or in the Americas and even when their education takes place on the continent, these African artists are informed by western and African art and art history.

Coedited by art historian and curator Salah Hassan and artist-curator Olu Oguibe, Authentic/Ex-Centric presents the work of several African and African diaspora contemporary artists, and was published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at the 49th Venice Biennale.

Expanding upon conventional ideas of African artists, this catalogue includes the work of artists from various ethnicities across the continent, as well as artists of African descent born in the West and in Europe. While Authentic focuses on such artists as Willem Boshoff, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Godfried Donkor, Rachid Koraichi, Berni Searle, Zineb Sedira and Yinka Shonibare, the book includes the work of a wide range of African artists.

The book is rich in color reproductions of works by the artists who, for the most part, focus on the body as the site of race, culture and class representation. In their essays, writers Siemon Allen, Sally Berger, Annie E. Coombs, Rory Doepel, Okwui Enwezor, Maryline Lostia, Gilane Tawadros, and Christain Viveros-Faune, as well as the book's editors demonstrate that while the body is the focus, all of the artists are using contemporary conceptual practices to critique the legacies of colonialism.

This catalogue and the works within form a compelling argument that Africa and Africans, far from remaining in some romanticized past, are engaged in a challenging and critical present and future.

--Kira Harris a New York-based artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Allan Rohan Crite: Artist-Reporter of the African American Community Essays by Julie Levin Caro, Mark Pomerantz, Barbara Earl Thomas, Edmund Barry Gaither The Frye Art Museum in association with the University of Washington Press, July 2001 $24.95 paperback, ISBN 0-962-46024-9

It is probably true that every African-American community has within it at least one painter or sculptor of talent and significance whose work and reputation is unknown beyond a limited artistic circle.

Allan Rohan Crite: Artist-Reporter of the African American Community introduces us to one such figure. Born in 1910, Allan Rohan Crite studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston at the time that Philip Hale was its director. Hale was a prominent American, Impressionist painter who had been a member of Monet's circle in Paris. Crite developed a style Caro calls "romantic-realism," through which he became an intriguing painter of everyday life in Boston's black community.

In its subject matter, he was unique. Crite's oil and watercolor paintings, as rendered in this catalog, demonstrate more than just a concern for the lives of a community. Here, there is also an intense scrutiny of public space in local African-American neighborhoods that is rare among mid-20th century black painters.

His Impressionist sensibility is only occasionally disrupted by themes depicting religious visions, or in interracial street scenes in which the figures seem to be sleepwalking. In works like these, he seems to anticipate the work of black American surrealist painter Hughie Lee-Smith.

In assembling Allan Rohan Crite: Artist-Reporter of the African American Community, which was published on the occasion of last year's exhibition of Crite's work at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Caro has produced an excellent introduction to the painter's work.

The essays by Caro, Thomas and Gaither are detailed and informative, and should help create a wider public for this fascinating, obscure artist.

--Geoffrey Jacques is a writer living in Brooklyn.

Truth & Lies Stories From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa By Jillian Edelstein, The New Press, April 2002 $30.00, ISBN 1-565-84741-5

Remembering what is unspeakable. Describing what happened, yet barely wanting to believe that it did. Remembering when it happened years ago, but only guessing how and by whom. Every word uttered is inadequate. Each fact seems impotent, unable to measure the horrible details of apartheid. Though language cannot translate the physical and emotional scars, perhaps by piecing together disparate tongues--English with Nkosa or Zulu--you can construct a metaphor that will suffice.

   "My son was eleven-years-old. He had come home during his school break at
   ten o'clock ... He got some peanut butter from the top shelf and spread it
   on his bread ... He ran out. He was still chewing his bread and holding it
   in his hand ... It wasn't long--I heard shots outside ..."

Thus begins one of roughly 21,000 testimonies from victims of apartheid during South Africa's wrenching Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings that took place from 1996 until last June. Headed by retired archbishop and Nobel Peace prizewinner Desmond Tutu, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to promote national healing by holding hearings throughout the country that would reveal the truth of apartheid-era atrocities. The testimonies, TRC hoped, would explore the nature, causes and extent of human rights violations sanctioned by the apartheid government.

The commission heard from the likes of Gideon Nieuwoudt, one of the five security police who confessed to beating and killing Steve Biko. He and about 7,000 other perpetrators applied for amnesty from the commission for the murders and disappearances they had committed on behalf of the state. Due in part to the protests of Biko's family, Nieuwoudt's request was denied.

Truth & Lies, a collection of photographs by Jillian Edelstein, presents the faces and words of some of the victims and the perpetrators. Included are essays by clinical psychologist, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, and historian Michael Ignatieff.

Edelstein is herself a white South African who left the country in 1985 at the height of the government oppression, but returned to document the hearings. And she includes some of her own diary entries.

The photographs are ordinary, but such an occasion needs no special effects to make the point. The faces are distant with guarded blank stares. There are also images of places like Post Chambers in the Eastern Cape or Vlakplaas, a farm outside Pretoria where countless South Africans were tortured and murdered. This was the South Africa uncovered by the TRC.

--Regina Woods is an editor at BIBR.