Stuart Hall’s work on culture, politics, race, and media is familiar to readers throughout the world. Equally important was his decades-long commitment to visual art. As the first collection to bring together Hall’s work on the visual, this volume assembles two dozen of Hall’s essays, lectures, reviews, catalog texts, and conversations on art, film, and photography. Providing rare insights into Hall’s engagement with the “radically different” intellectual and aesthetic space of the visual imaginary, these works articulate the importance of the visual as a site of contestation at the same time as it is a space in which Black artists and filmmakers reframe questions about diaspora, identity, and globalization. Selected Writings on Visual Arts and Culture demonstrates the breadth and range of Hall’s thinking on art, film, photography, archives, and museums. In so doing, it enables us to arrive at radical and innovative ways of understanding the world.

"“This collection corrects the widespread misperception that Stuart Hall’s late-career art writings were a mere add-on to the heavy lifting accomplished by his 1970s work on Marxism and sociology. Gilane Tawadros’s panoramic selection reveals how extensively Hall turned his attention to art, photography, film, museums, and architecture to examine questions of diaspora, identity, and globalization. This volume is of enormous significance.”" - Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s

"A rich group of texts, addressing global capitalism, race and diaspora and how ‘the language of the imaginary’ can be a framework for developing new insights into political and economic relationships of power." - Frieze

"Gilane Tawadros . . . is an attentive and appreciative reader who assembled these essays that date back decades yet are still relevant and readable. . . . While every narrative of cultural studies acknowledges Stuart Hall’s importance, this is a good collection of his writing on visual art and a document of urban creativity he witnessed in the last three decades of the 20th century." - Leonardo