Exploring Presence: African American Artists in the Upper South showcases a succinct selection of prolific visionaries who create from and are informed by the liminal realms between northeastern art metropolises and the South. Artists include Schroeder Cherry, Linda Day Clark, Oletha DeVane, Espi Frazier, Aziza Claudia Gibson Hunter, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Ed Love, Tom Miller, Joyce J Scott, and Paula Whaley.

Exploring Presence reviews the projects, interventions, activations, and constructions that each artist engaged between 1970 and the contemporary moment. This era is marked by significant ruptures, renaming, reclamation, and revision for BIPOC creatives in the country, across the diaspora, and in the Global South. The geospatial significance of this project is compounded by the sociopolitical tumult of the era which informs the subjects that each artist examines in this period and offers greater insight into some of the struggles each artist navigated to sustain their art practice. Selected artworks included in this collection also mark significant intervals of experimentation with process, material, and form for each artist.

Publisher: Merkaba Publications LLC

Edition Details: Limited edition of 200 copies, numbered and signed by all living artists

Curator and Editor: Angela N. Carroll.

Foreward: Dr. Leslie King-Hammond.