What we can see depends heavily on what our culture has trained us to look for.

Grigsby's marvelous exploration-a deep, wide, and beautiful inquiry into Sojourner Truth's use of technology-features more of her photographs than have ever been collected before. Among its many insights, I especially relished the analysis of Truth's illiteracy. Enduring Truths is art history with a wide-ranging concept of history left in. A terrific book, and one we've needed for a long time.

In places like Germany or France the idea of black-white is not so much black-white but "our people and them," and "them" can be people from the near east like Turks or Muslims or North Africans, all of whom might well be considered white in the United States.

The American sense of the importance, the fundamental importance of the black-white dichotomy, comes out of societies founded in the era of the African slave trade, so societies like ours, that is to say the western hemisphere, the Caribbean and so forth, we share a lot in common.

Before science, before the eighteenth century, religion answered the questions, and so in the nineteenth century for instance there was a real jostling between science and religion over the truth and this is why Darwin was so controversial.

What we can see depends heavily on what our culture has trained us to look for.

Making art for me is not fun in the sense of la, la, la, la, but it's something that I find very absorbing and very satisfying.