Generously illustrated with paintings, drawings, photographs, sculpture, installation, and video stills, and containing a wide range of critical writing, poetry, and fiction, the catalog explores topics central to the blues—from articulations of daily life, modes of abstraction and repetition, and self-performance to ecstatic and cathartic expression and metaphors of memory and the archive. Both scholarly and unique, this reimagining of all things “blues” will draw audiences from across cultural and racial boundaries as it celebrates a uniquely American idiom that has made its mark on nearly every contemporary artistic medium.