The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo Feelings, Tom; Clarke, John Henrik (introduction) essay,fine press,illustrated,signed

Signed limited first edition, one of 350 copies, of this harrowing cycle of paintings documenting the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade, a visual narrative that took Brooklyn-born artist and activist Tom Feelings (1933-2003) almost twenty years to complete. The project was inspired by a question from an African friend: "What happened to all of you when you were taken away from here?" In response, Feelings produced a wordless series of images that depict the organized capture, enslavement, and transport of African men and women to the New World: "time was the essential thing I needed to tell the story completely in pictures the kind of time one associates with the form of a long novel." His hope was that "those chains of the past, those shackles that physically bound us together against our wills could, in the telling, become spiritual links that willingly bind us together now and into the future." Feelings s original artwork for The Middle Passage is now at Yale University; the book would be reissued in 2018 with expanded introductory essays. This signed limited first edition is one of 350 copies, housed in the publisher s slipcase within the original numbered shipping box. A fine signed copy. Oblong folio, measuring 10.25 x 13.5 inches: [80], [2]. Original black cloth lettered in blind and silver, black textured endpapers, original unclipped black and white pictorial dust jacket. Introductory text followed by uncaptioned black and white illustrations. Numbered 253 (of 350) in ink and signed at colophon. Housed in original black cloth slipcase titled in blind with pastedown illustration to front panel, in publisher s shipping box.