[The] cogent, expansive essay by art historian Cherise Smith contextualizes Charles's provocative appropriation of stereotypical racial material.
~Sightlines Magazine
[Michael Ray Charles] documents 30 years of Charles' output and provides both an historical and contemporary context for his development. It further brings us up to the present both in terms of his work and the so-called post-racial America many hoped would truly exist with the election of Barack Obama.
~Print Magazine
Both clear-eyed and complex, this retrospective demonstrates the significant role that Michael Ray Charles's work has played in defining what art is today.
~Prairie View A&M's "TIPHC Newsletter"
Addressing many facets of Charles’s career, Smith’s monograph is a welcome addition to [the] renewed recognition of Charles’s significant standing in contemporary American art. Her scholarship reveals the complexity of his engagement with images and symbols of antiblack racism and helps readers gain a greater appreciation of his controversial body of work as it relates to a range of art historical, social, and political contexts...We are fortunate to have Smith’s monograph as a guide for thinking through Charles’s incredibly powerful body of work.
~caa.reviews
Michael Ray Charles is a consummate image maker, sampling and remixing a universe of popular signs and symbols, and seducing viewers into confrontations with their problematic sources. In this brilliant and timely book—part biography, part critical reading of the artist’s work and its times, and part cultural history—Cherise Smith examines the wide-ranging and evolving context for Charles’s work and its sources. Artists as varied as Betye Saar, Chris Rock, Kara Walker, and Spike Lee make appropriate guest appearances, and each contributes to a clear explication of the complexities of the art of our time. Smith is an elegant voice and capable guide in a sea of bombast, leading the reader through a minefield of controversy.
~Don Bacigalupi
A stunningly comprehensive, prodigiously researched, and thoroughly moving exploration of one of the crucial artists of our time. Scarifying, disturbing, truly beautiful.
~Eric Lott, City University of New York Graduate Center, author of Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism
