Join Keep St. Pete Lit, a local organization that supports the literary community, for a book club connecting the visual and literary arts. Each month’s featured book will relate to the MFA’s collection or special exhibitions.

May 10: South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s by Kellie Jones

To celebrate Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction 1960s to Today, we explore how the artists in Los Angeles’s black communities during the 1960s and 1970s created a vibrant and engaged activist arts scene in the face of structural racism. Emphasizing African American migration, as well as L.A.’s housing and employment politics, Jones shows how the work of black Angeleno artists such as Betye Saar, Charles White, Noah Purifoy, and Senga Nengudi spoke to the dislocation of migration, L.A.’s urban renewal, and restrictions on black mobility. Kellie Jones is a 2016 recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and is Associate Professor of Art History at Columbia University.

Second Thursday of the month at 6:30 pm.
Free with Museum admission, which is only $5 after 5 pm on Thursday.