The Brooklyn Rail

Penned by an international group of scholars, artists, and activists, the following essays have been written in response to two decades of research culminating in the book The World Before Racism: An Art Story (The Artist Book Foundation, 2025). Some essays specifically address the content of the book or the contributors’ engagement with the material over time, especially the familial essays. Others speak to the intersection of art and race more globally as it relates to social and cultural realities, both historical and current. Still, others analyze the articulation of race in specific works of art or in their own artistic practice. Finally, two essays focus on the ways American museums address or avoid issues of cultural “truth” and artistic integrity.

The book itself, The World Before Racism, concerns the vicissitudes of racism as revealed through original, iconic, contemporaneous and, most importantly, immutable works of visual art spanning two thousand years. Such art is, perhaps, the most accurate representation of human relationships, because, unlike the spoken and written word (among the most ubiquitous—and flawed—vehicles for the telling of history, as evidenced by current claims of “fake news” and fictions proffered as absolute truths in the media), a painting or sculpture is a primary source document that cannot be altered through translation, rewriting, editing, abridgement, or misrepresentation; and with which its documentation of a specific truth can hardly be argued. In short, as truthsayers, visual art reveals the most accurate record of racial history available to us, and this record is astonishingly unlike what most of us believe or think we know.