Black Disabled Art History 101 – Book Review

Image of a black man in a room, a young black boy projected behind him on the wall

Guest blogger: Jackie Pilgrim is an advocate diagnosed with Asperger’s, mother to a young adult also on the Autism Spectrum, and an International Speaker on Autism and Intellectual Disabilities. You can find her on Facebook, as well as on her blog, AutismsLove.

A young Black boy born with a physical disability learns about Black disabled musicians from the album covers of his father’s record collection. Later, he would come to realize the strength he gained from seeing those images and listening to their music when having to face teachers and other adults constantly telling him there were no artists who were Black and disabled like him. Leroy Moore’s passion kindled when he was a little boy has come full circle as he draws from his childhood discovery of not being the only, but being one of many Black disabled artists.

Black Disabled Art History 101 will open airways and doorways for Black disabled children’s imaginations to soar as they aspire to become artists or whatever else they want to be. Like Leroy, they too will draw strength from the images, knowledge, music and written words about and born of disabled Black artists. Readers of all ages will enjoy discovering a genre of history little known, beautifully crafted with colorful portraits of artists and their work interwoven with poetry in an age old storytelling style.

Black Disabled Art History 101 is a chronicle of art history unlike any other.

This is only the beginning.

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Review of The 100 Greatest Console Video Games: 1977-1987

Erin reading the book, looking up at the camera

Cover of book, looks like a NES gameDo you remember the first console game you played? For me, it was probably Video Olympics (with Pong included) or Asteroids on the Atari 2600. Turning that knob to slide the paddles up and down, or pushing that joystick to avoid enemy fire was pure joy for my 5-year-old self. Those pixelated titles ushered in the Golden Age of video games, and it’s striking to see how far we’ve come since then. While we may scoff at console graphics of the late 70s and early 80s, we have to keep in mind how mind-blowingly advanced these systems were for their time. I’m sure 20 or 30 years down the line, PS4 games will pale in comparison to whatever technology has in store for us.

There’s a lot of interesting stories to tell about early console design that deserve attention, and Brett Weiss’ book, The 100 Greatest Console Video Games: 1977-1987, zooms in on this revolutionary era of gaming. It serves not only as a trip down memory lane, tapping into that nostalgia we so longingly crave, but it acts as an archive and provides a definitive history of popular titles.

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