Amalia Amaki: Boxes, Buttons, and the Blues Book

For more than three decades, Amalia Amaki has garnered critical acclaim for works that examine the beauty, music, experience, and contributions of African Americans. This volume brings together her photographs, quilts, souvenir fans, and mixed-media works. Incorporating fabric, beads, pearls, buttons, paint, glitter, and photographs with cultural symbols and visual puns, Amaki challenges and reconfigures American history in original and meaningful ways. Her artwork examines the breadth and overarching significance of heritage and American culture. This book focuses on the legacies of race and gender in the United States, contests one-dimensional ideas about black life, and debunks mainstream beliefs about African Americans. "My Funny Valentine" focuses on Amaki's candy boxes - a group of seemingly edible mixed media works made of buttons - that serve as metaphors for African Americans and love, and how it has historically been overlooked, misunderstood, and undervalued. "Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues," focuses on Amaki's signature series of quilts and fans that emphasize her ongoing fascination with African American women who sing the blues. "Your Blues Ain't Like Mine" features Amaki's most reflective works to date, recent mixed-media works that call attention to the ways that black life has traditionally been commodified and transported.Read More