New Books In Art

Black is the Day, Black is the Night by Amy Elkins is self-published (2016), with an essay by Gregory J. Harris and C.F., unpaged, 80 color and black-and-white illustrations. Black is the Day, Black is the Night started as an exploration into, what author and photographer has called, “extreme manifestations of masculinity,” but over time it evolved into a meditation on time and memory through personal correspondence with men serving life and death row sentences in some of the most maximum security prisons in the U.S., all of whom had served between 13-26 years at point of contact in 2009 when the project started. “Out of our letters a collaboration unfolded. I constructed images using formulas specific to each of their stories, age and years incarcerated. Through these formulas their portraits became more unrecognizable and their memories became more muddled, regurgitated and fictional with the endless passing years of their sentence. Stripped of personal context and placed in solitary cells, their sense of