Children's health

For the benefit of the people I'll see soonish, I don't want to talk about the kids' health in front of them. Pearl is certainly old enough to understand and Ruby is, I think, getting the idea. I mentioned her legs the other day and she lifted her legs up.

2.45 Lisa Gail Collins, The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past (2002)

This book is really interesting - it considers the elision of visual culture in most histories of African American culture. There's plenty of emphasis on music, some on literature, but art is generally overlooked.

The book focuses on art echoing through time. The most interesting sections for me are the case studies which examine the reappropriation of an image. For instance, Louis Agassiz, the nineteenth-century evolutionary biologist, took photos of some slaves on a plantation which he used as 'evidence' for his theory of multiple strands of evolution. I was fascinated to learn that Carrie May Weems took these images and reworked them in the 1990s.

This is an interesting book - the only draw back is the really low quality of the reproductions, all black and white and not very many of them and not good quality. Frankly, I expect more in an art book.