Blackness Thirteen Ways

“Lyon spends her professional life studying how race has been painted, framed, and quietly written out of the canon, and in this hybrid memoir she turns that same attention on her own reflection. Across 13 chapters that move from old master paintings to contemporary film, she reads how racial mixing has been hidden, distorted, or made picturesque on canvas and screen, and lays that history alongside her own.” —Electric Literature

“A powerful, absorbing read… . [Lyon] has skillfully and effectively mixed insightful artistic analysis with intimate introspection.” —Allison Escoto, Booklist

“Bracing, nuanced and moving, Blackness Thirteen Ways is one of those books that will echo long past its final pages. Lyon’s essays are revelations and reckonings, and an unflinching account of one gifted writer’s necessary and urgent journey towards family and self.” —Maaza Mengiste, MacArthur Fellow and author of The Shadow King, Finalist for the Booker Prize

“An intimate and honest meditation on a historically charged subject. I’ve been waiting for this book my entire life.” —Isabel Strauss, Architecture professor and independent curator

“Blackness Thirteen Ways is a work of chiaroscuro genius. J. Vanessa Lyon’s prose is as pleasurable as it is inimitable.” —Myriam Gurba, author of Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings

“[Mingling] personal introspection with analyses of art and culture [Lyon] explores what black female ‘impassibility’ has meant for her and the many Western artists she has studied… [turning] her critically astute eye to renderings of the ‘passing problem’ … . A sharp-eyed book.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A poignant account of finding personal truth and ‘hopeful futurity’ reflected in the art of the past.” —Publishers Weekly

J. VANESSA LYON is the author of Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens, The Groves (an Audible Original), and Lush Lives (an NBC News Best LGBTQ Book of the Year). A James Baldwin Fellow at MacDowell and a Fulbright Scholar, Lyon holds a PhD in the history of art from UC Berkeley. She has received fellowships from the Yale Center for British Art, the Lewis Walpole Library, and the Huntington Library and Art Museum, among others. Her studies have appeared in Art History, Huntington Library Quarterly, Word & Image, Representations, and elsewhere. Lyon is professor of art history at Bennington College, where she has directed the Visual Arts Lecture Series since 2017. She and her cat divide their time between southern Vermont and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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