Collection: bell hooks

bell hooks (1952–2021) was a writer, cultural critic, and public intellectual whose work crossed the boundaries of feminist theory, race, class, pedagogy, and aesthetics. Her writing consistently addressed the relationship between art and power, beauty and resistance, visibility and erasure.

Her essay subversive beauty: new modes of contestation, published in the 1994 Félix González-Torres catalogue for the Hirshhorn Museum, is among her most focused engagements with contemporary visual art — situating González-Torres's practice within a broader politics of intimacy, grief, and public space.

Publications gathered here include exhibition catalogues and printed matter in which bell hooks appears as an essayist, interlocutor, or subject — documents that carry her critical voice into the institutional record of contemporary art.

Original period items.