Countering conventional accounts of art history, which have often overlooked the artistic contributions of women of color, the exhibition “Out of Easy Reach” presents the work of twenty-four US-based, female-identifying artists from the black and Latina diasporas. The exhibition proposes myriad ways that artists are employing abstraction as a tool to explore histories both personal and universal, with focuses on mapping, migration, archives, landscape, vernacular culture, language, and the body. This catalog—which accompanies an exhibition opening in April 2018 at the DePaul Art Museum, Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Stony Island Arts Bank—includes full-color plates of the works on view; commissioned essays by exhibition curator Allison Glenn, and Cameron Shaw, executive director and founding editor of Pelican Bomb; and short-form contributions about each artist featured in the exhibition written by invited scholars, curators, writers, and artists.
