Views of the the Black Melancholia Reading Room in the CCS Bard Library. ⁠ ⁠ The Reading Room presents a selection of books that were formative for the conceptualization of the exhibition Black Melancholia.⁠ ⁠ Curation is a research-based practice, some curators dive into a years-long engagement with a subject before an exhibition is actualized—such was the case with this show. ⁠ ⁠ The selection on the left side derives from a research seminar called Melancholia as Critical Practice which took place in the Spring 2021 semester at CCS Bard and was led by exhibition curator and faculty Nana Adusei-Poku. The seminar was centered around two subjects – the history of the term melancholy and its relationship to Blackness. A copy of the syllabus and its readings are included in the display. ⁠ ⁠ The selection of books also has a deeper engagement with the genealogy of the concept of Black Melancholia. Featured are exhibition precedents such as Melancholy: Genius and Madness in Art (2005), Five Centuries of Melancholia (2014), Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (2021), as well as other foundational texts such as Laurinda Dixon’s The Dark Side of Genius: The Melancholic Persona in Art as well as Simon Gikandi’s Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2014). ⁠ ⁠ An engagement with the psychoanalytic concept of melancholy is represented by Sigmund Freud, Anne Cheng, and Hortense Spillers. The latter complicates the narrative through a racial perspective, whilst David Eng and David Kazanjian stress the potential of melancholy in their anthology Loss: The Politics of Mourning (2002). Kevin Quashie’s Sovereignty of the Quiet (2012), Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments (2019), Scenes of Subjection (1997), Nathalie Etoké’s Melancholia Africana (2019), and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake (2016) engage with the complexity of Black life in the face of history and hence have been intrinsic of Black Melancholia. Each artist in the exhibition is represented either with a book chapter or monograph so that visitors can gain insight into the different artists' individual practices.⁠ ⁠ Library Hours: Monday - Friday, 10am-5pm