Jacob Lawrence, The Life of Harriet Tubman, Panel 7: "Harriet Tubman worked as water girl to field hands. She also worked at plowing, carting, and hauling logs." 1940.

Now you can follow the UC Press arts program on Twitter @educatedarts. UC Press publicist Heather Vaughan, who has a master’s degree in visual culture from NYU, unites art and scholarship to bring you the latest in arts news, plus exhibits and events, interviews with artists and authors, and lessons to sharpen your art history expertise.

Many of our art books accompany museum exhibits, like the Twilight Visions exhibit at the International Center of Photography, opening January 29. This spring, don’t miss the Home Lands: How Women Made the West show at the Autry National Center, and the Christo and Jeanne-Claude exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Follow Heather @educatedarts for updates on these and other shows.

The Jacob Lawrence exhibition at the DC Moore Gallery runs through February 6, and features paintings, prints and drawings from across Lawrence’s career. In her book Painting Harlem Modern, Patricia Hills explores Lawrence’s life and art from the Harlem Renaissance through the Great Depression, the Cold War, Jim Crow segregation, the civil rights movement, and beyond, and traces how his paintings transformed daily life into art, and art into social change.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibit What’s It All Mean: William T. Wiley in Retrospect closes January 24, and will open at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive on March 17. In this interview in Smithsonian Magazine, William T. Wiley describes the exhibit as an archaeological site: “There can be one bone sticking out, but you dig a little bit and discover more.”

In this Smithsonian video, Wiley reflects on being an artist, the role of mystery in his life and work, and why after 50 years of making art, he is still a beginner.

(Video available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license)

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