The Observer
UK newspaper
November 30, 2003

Books of the Year

Tori Amos
Musician

Gwen Everett's little gem entitled African American Masters: Highlights from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Abrams Books) has me humming something different every time I look through it. The book focuses on black artists from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who explored the social and spiritual landscape of African or African American experience. From Evening Rendezvous, which at first glance seems a nod to patriotism but which takes on a sinister tone as the viewer realises that the red, white and blue is an ominous procession of the Klu Klux Klan on horseback, to The Bitter Nest, Part II: The Harlem Renaissance Party, I was completely drawn in.