NEW YORK, NY.- On June 2, the New Museum and MIT Press will publish Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value, edited by C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp. The fourth installment in the New Museum’s Critical Anthologies in Art and Culture series, Saturation follows Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (2017), edited by Tourmaline, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton; Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good (2016), edited by Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson, and Dominic Willsdon; and Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (2015), edited by Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter.

Controversies involving race and the art world are often discussed in terms of diversity and representation—as if having the right representative from a group or a larger plurality of embodied difference would absolve art institutions of historic forms of exclusion. Saturation offers another approach, taking into account not only questions of racial representation but also issues of structural change. In essays, conversations, discussions, and artist portfolios, contributors confront questions at the intersection of art, race, and representation in new ways.

The book uses saturation as an organizing concept, in part to suggest that current paradigms cannot encompass the complex realities of race. The term “saturation” provides avenues to situate race in relation to perception, science, aesthetics, the corporeal, and the sonic. In color theory, saturation is understood in terms of the degree to which a color differs from whiteness. From a scientific perspective, saturation points describe not only the moment in which race exceeds legibility but also how diversity operates within institutions. Contributors consider how racialization, globalization, and the production and consumption of art converge in the art market, engaging such topics as racial capitalism, the aesthetics of colonialism, and disability cultures. They examine various methods for theorizing race and representation, including “aboutness,” in which artworks by racialized subjects are interpreted as being “about” race; modes of unruly, decolonized, and queer visual practices that resist disciplinary boundaries; and approaches to thinking with and alongside blackness and indigeneity.

Contributors: Evelyn Alsultany, Phanuel Antwi, Isolde Brielmaier, Johanna Burton, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Kandice Chuh, Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Aimee Meredith Cox, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Richard Fung, Jeffrey Gibson, Tiye Giraud, Anita Gonzalez, Gayatri Gopinath, Sarah Haley, Aimi Hamraie, Candice Hopkins, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Xandra Ibarra, Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Byron Kim, Homay King, Petra Kuppers, Marci Kwon, M. Lamar, Thomas J. Lax, Việt Lê, Ralph Lemon, Candice Lin, Lisa Lowe, D. Soyini Madison, Ricardo Montez, Derek Conrad Murray, Amber Jamilla Musser, Tavia Nyong’o, Lorraine O’Grady, Roy Pérez, Jay Prosser, Iván A. Ramos, Mark Rifkin, Dylan Robinson, Carrie Sandahl, Sarah Schulman, C. Riley Snorton, Hortense J. Spillers, Tina Takemoto, Tourmaline, Alexandra T. Vazquez, and Hentyle Yapp

C. Riley Snorton is Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017) and Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (2014).

Hentyle Yapp is Assistant Professor of Art and Public Policy at New York University, where he is also an Affiliated Faculty Member in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature, the Center for Disability Studies and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute.