Cover Reveal...

Hi y’all,

I’ve been out of town for a few days, doing some much needed Cherokee things with Cherokee people.

And while that was happening, we got the permissions back for the cover design, finalized it, and the cover is now up on Duke’s site for Speculative Relations, where you can, ahem, pre-order the book.

Drumrollllllllllllllll

Ta daaaaaaaaa!!!!!

The cover is based on a painting by Jeffrey Gibson. Jeffrey really needs no introduction, but the painting might. It’s from a 2021 exhibition called “Sweet Bitter Love” that was held at the Newberry Library. The painting, Chief Pretty-Eagle, features the Crow leader of the same name, and is based on a portrait of him made by E. A. Burbank in 1897. That portrait was part of a series made by Burbank, along with the likes of Geronimo (about whom I have more to say in the book), Christian Naiche, Boneta, etc. Burbank’s diminutive portraits in the Newberry collection were hung directly across from Gibson’s expansive, kaleidoscopic reimaginings.

The work incorporates several vintage objects like a red pin that says “Question Reality,” a beaded American flag, a cut out of the Skookum Apple Company mascot, and a beaded frame around Pretty Eagle.

One of the things I love about this picture is that it asks the viewer to twist and turn along with the geometric patterns that stripe in vertical lines and which cluster at the bottom of the work. These geometries are part of what I describe as the “twist” that Gibson is requiring of the viewer. Twist. Turn. We have to look at what is there, and then what is behind, a haunting layer of the same portrait upside down, at a different angle, again, and again. These contours are part of the density that gives the work both historical depth (reaching back to Burbank and Pretty Eagle), and a sense of multiplicity—a proliferation of images that are the same one, but each time, slightly shaded, slightly reframed. We get a pattern, and then it shifts.

This is an example of what I call speculation in the book—a play of sight and insight. To look at a distance and then at oneself as in a mirror. This speculative painting brings the past into the future, dragging, twisting its sinews into a new body, a new shape that resists the attempt to see in it a simple echo or restating of the past. This is not a picture ‘of’ the past, but a method of reinhabiting that past so as to bring it into the future.

I’ll stop there. But I’m so excited to share this. I love the cover. LOVE IT. A bright yellow book with a glimmering, glittery speculation in multicolor fabulousness. Thanks to Jeffrey for this gift. And I’m looking forward to hearing what y’all think.