Radcliffe Bailey: Memory As Medicine

Author: Carol Thompson | Contributors: René Paul Barilleaux, Manthia Diawara, Michael Rooks | Published on July 25, 2011 | ISBN-10: 3791351540 | ISBN-13: 978-3791351544 | This book offers the first mid-career survey of work by emerging American artist Radcliffe Bailey. Ceaseless experimentation is the driving force behind Radcliffe Bailey's extraordinarily diverse body of work. In the past decade alone he has created sculptures, paintings, installations, and works on paper, incorporating everything from coffee to glass to sheet music to tobacco leaves. This volume reproduces more than 70 works, many of which have never been published before, and considers Bailey's work in a major essay and four shorter discussions. In these large- and small-scale pieces Bailey explores ideas of ancestry, race, memory, struggle, and sacrifice, including the artist's own engagement with African sculpture in connection with an investigation into his family's DNA.