Any Day Now: Toward a Black Aesthetic

by Larry Neal and Allie Biswas

Writer, educator, and activist Larry Neal (1937-1981) was a seminal figure and catalyst of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) during the 1960s and 1970s. Viewing that movement as the “spiritual sister of the Black Power concept,” Neal envisioned unearthing a “Black aesthetic” from Black life-worlds to form a spiritual (& polemical) opposition to the Eurocentric aesthetic reigning and raiding in the arts of the world. Any Day Now offers probing essays on Black art and aesthetics, including illuminating notes on now legendary key figures of music and literature, such as Albert Ayler, Zora Neale Hurston, and Archie Shepp, among many others. The book was compiled, edited, and introduced by Allie Biswas, and published as part of David Zwirner Books’s great ekphrasis series of paperback resurrections of rare and important texts on visual culture. — Herbert Pföstl, Book Consultant for the New Museum Store.

Larry Neal, a poet, dramatist, and critic, was a founding figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 1970s in New York. Writing as the arts editor for Liberator magazine, a radical journal published in Harlem, Neal called for Black artists to produce work that was politically oriented, rooted in the Black experience, and written for the Black community. Engaging with fiction, music, drama, and poetry in his texts, he challenged the dominance of the Western art-historical canon and charged Black artists and writers with reshaping artistic traditions according to their own history. As he proclaimed in his essay “The Black Writer’s Role,” written in 1966, “Black writers must listen to the world with their whole selves––their entire bodies. Must make literature move people. Must want to make our people feel, the way our music makes them feel.”

The writer Allie Biswas, who selected the texts Neal wrote from 1964 to 1978 included here, introduces the volume, illuminating the rich and varied context in which he produced his work.

2024; paperback; 4.25 x 7 inches; 112 pages; ISBN: 9781644231203.