Over a period of several decades, Kellie Jones has carved out for herself a formidable career as an art critic, cultural commentator, exhibition curator and academic. This new book, EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art, is in some ways a résumé of Jones's work thus far, which draws our attention to (or reminds us) just how prolific, considered, and vital have been her multiple contributions in the aforementioned areas. EyeMinded is perhaps most easily understood as something of a family affair, consisting as it does of various groupings of texts by Jones, supplemented with contributions from her parents (Amiri Baraka, Hettie Jones), her sister (Lisa Jones), and her husband (Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.).

Not to put too fine a point on it, Jones is, in many ways, a lucky breeder. Her father Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones) rapidly earned a reputation as one of the most original, uncompromising and creative American writers of the twentieth century. In this regard, it is perhaps important to remember, or consider, that though Jones's/Baraka's work as a writer, poet, and cultural critic etc. reflected his long-standing and indeed ongoing commitment to the struggles of America's disadvantaged and marginalized peoples, he stubbornly remained something of a maverick figure, defying all attempts to categorize or pigeonhole him. Frequently regarded throughout his extraordinary life and career as a black-nationalist firebrand, at other times regarded as an incendiary revolutionary, Baraka was for a time married to Hettie Jones (née Cohen), an American writer and poet of Jewish background. EyeMinded, Kellie Jones's part autobiography, part memoir, part anthology, has something of a precedent in her mother's acclaimed memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones, which tells the story not only of her marriage and relationship with Baraka, but also of her friendships with iconic Beat-generation figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Joel Oppenheimer. Beyond this, How I Became Hettie Jones also tells of Hettie Jones's struggles, conflicts and costs of being a Jewish woman immersed in a world of black civil rights struggles and the dynamic new forms of black self-expression that existed during the years of her marriage. Kellie Jones and her sister Lisa were products of a union of two dynamic and highly motivated people from different and contrasting backgrounds, whose lifestyles, friendships, interests, and activism brought the girls and their parents into contact with many of the key artists and writers of the turbulent decade of the 1960s. As such, with familial credentials such as these, there was perhaps almost an inevitability that Kellie Jones's life's work would take the form it has.

Kellie Jones gained her professional experience and reached her maturity as an art critic, cultural commentator, exhibition curator and academic during the 1980s and 1990s, one of America's creative spurts that went hand in hand with profound social change and new ways of understanding identity. In this regard, EyeMinded provides invaluable pointers to understanding the cultural contributions, and indeed the cultural questioning, reflected in the work of artists such as Betye Saar, Howardena Pindell, Lorna Simpson, David Hammons, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The book is divided into four parts: Part One, “On Diaspora”; Part Two, “In Visioning”; Part Three, “Making Multiculturalism”; and Part Four, “Abstract Truths”. Whilst a number of Jones's texts would be well at home in more than one of the four groupings, the groupings nevertheless offer a useful means of appraising the breadth and depth of Jones's thinking and multiple practices.

In her introduction, “Art in the Family,” Jones sets out her stall as to why she has constructed EyeMinded in the way she has.

Jones puts these musings into a singular and arresting context. Her Introduction is prefaced by two visuals. The first is an archival family photograph showing Jones, a confident young girl of about ten, and her younger sister in a New York City gallery in 1969, very much at home, amongst the Ed Ruda paintings on display. Though the photographer is not credited, the portrait is both engaging and intriguing. It exists as compelling testimony to the erroneous assumption of an enduring and chronic disconnect existing between black people and visual art spaces such as the gallery in which the girls are pictured. Having grown up, from a young age, with such a proximity to both art and artists, Jones was ideally placed to use her familial experiences as a singular starting point for her professional practices. Growing up in Manhattan's Lower East Side in the 1960s and 1970s was indeed the most blessed and favoured of starts for Jones, albeit one that was to see her father move on, and embark on a new marriage while Jones herself was still a young girl. Incidentally, the other visual prefacing her Introduction is that of a portrait, LeRoi Jones and His Family, instantly recognizable to some as the work of American artist Bob Thompson, a brilliant and prolific young artist who died tragically, before he reached the age of thirty, in 1966, two years after his portrait of the Jones family was painted.

EyeMinded is compelling testimony to the ways in which Kellie Jones was able to both contribute to, and comment on, the astonishing quantum shifts in art and curatorial practices that the 1980s and 1990s gave rise to. It is no surprise that the first section of Jones's anthology centres on diaspora – that now ever-so-popular term that points to the layers and complexities of the contemporary black condition, as explored and framed by Paul Gilroy in his seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. It was the notion of diaspora which allowed the work of African American artists, particularly those of younger generations, to be additionally animated through the prism of international contexts that took account of such things as shared histories, multiple forms of migration, and fluctuating identities – or at least fluctuating and shifting attitudes to identity. Indeed, Jones, in her Introduction, regularly evokes and references Gilroy. In one sentence she refers to his call “for a certain distancing or estrangement from the familiarities of one's own situation, culture, and history.” In another sentence, Jones mentions that “Gilroy's conviviality is an expansion of activist or critical multiculturalism that is forward looking, political, and antiracist, and that intercedes in institutional structures of power relations and domination” (3).

The book's other sections, “In Visioning,” “Making Multiculturalism,” and “Abstract Truths” each afford us an opportunity to consider afresh the changes and the remarkable new talents that emerged during the past couple of decades, a number of whom Jones has worked with, in her capacity as curator, essayist, or critic. In recent years, Jones has emerged as a singular researcher and commentator on the intriguing work of African American artists who embraced non-figurative practices during the middle decades of the twentieth century. In this regard, one of Jones's most important works is her text It's Not Enough to Say “Black Is Beautiful”: Abstraction at the Whitney 1969–1974. The text, which first appeared in Kobena Mercer's Discrepant Abstraction, published in 2006 by inIVA and MIT Press, is, in EyeMinded, reproduced in the book's final section, “Abstract Truths.” In the text, Jones revisits and dispassionately critiques the series of exhibitions by black abstract artists at the Whitney Museum between 1969 and 1974, which Jones asserts “presented a generation of black practitioners whose complex approaches to abstraction involved serious and intense formal experimentation” (420). This from someone who, as a child or early teenager, may well have seen a number of these exhibitions, and who was certainly known, even back then, to a number of the practitioners on whom Jones so compellingly and convincingly writes.

Though this is in essence a collection of Jones's previously published writings, it is nevertheless a major contribution to aspects of art history that too often are relegated to the periphery within both the academy and contemporary art criticism. In this regard, we have much to thank Jones for, as this volume will be an indispensable aid to students, professors, and general audiences, many of whom might not have easy access to Jones's writings, in their original form and assorted contexts. Though Jones herself clearly sets great store by her familial connections and their contributions to EyeMinded, the book's structure is such that the reader can take or leave the familial embellishments, many of which, at the very least, provide unusual routes through which we can further consider the work of this hugely important art critic, cultural commentator, exhibition curator and academic.