Reviewed by: We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985: A Sourcebook ed. by Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley Suné Woods, Artist Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, eds. We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985: A Sourcebook. Durham: Duke UP, 2017. 320 pp. $24.95. There is much to be mined in a lacuna of twenty years. What is found within We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985: A Sourcebook, edited by Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, is a bound archive of republished articles, documents, ephemera, new essays, and a deeply thoughtful compilation of prolific artists, cultural critics, writers, and art historians. The Sourcebook is an essential resource that adds to the complexity of the very important and ambitious exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–1985, curated by Morris and Hockley, which was organized at the Brooklyn Museum in 2016 and is traveling through September 2018. Black women artists carved spaces for themselves and future generations often in solidarity and in support of each other’s work despite the matrix of obstacles that they faced in domestic and public space during this time period. “Yet, is ‘obstacles’ a kind of lie?” Cultural theorist Gloria Anzaldúa asserts in the Sourcebook, “We cannot transcend the dangers, can’t rise above them. We must go through them and hope we won’t have to repeat the performance.” Many institutions would prefer to love women artists of color in retrospect. I visited the exhibition at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles in 2017. Both the exhibition and the Sourcebook counter narratives of scarcity and the historical erasure of contributions by women artists of color to contemporary art practice. In doing so, the accompanying Sourcebook creates an ideological space for dialogue, cultural response, and expanded black consciousness. Sourcebook circumvents expectations of a conventional exhibition catalogue by being an accompanying compilation of sources to foster more in-depth understanding of the sociopolitical terrain that women of color traversed in the United States. Texts by Connie Choi, Carmen Hermo, Rujeko Hockley, Catherine Morris, and Stephanie Weissberg are organized into thematic sections with writing that gives historical overview. Sources are indexed and easily referenced throughout. The collection of material includes reproductions in facsimile form such as (teenage) art historian and curator Linda Goode Bryant’s 1967 handwritten letter to her parents in Columbus, Ohio while on a school trip to New York in which she writes, “I find myself suffocating from whiteness, with no place to escape,” or Lorraine O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeoise Noire Goes to the New Museum in The Women Pages of the 1982 publication Heresies: A Feminist Publication of Art and Politics (with photo by Coreen Simpson). Also included is an announcement card for Senga Nengudi’s Freeway Fets, an unchoreographed performance that Nengudi wants to have feel like “talismanic objects with undefined expressive power.” This work was also documented by Barbara McCullough’s 1979 film, Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space. This impressive Sourcebook is also evidence to a legacy of womanist, feminist, lesbian, and queer groups and organizations working to end gender and hegemonic oppression. (Arguably, the activism in which women of color were engaged during [End Page 59] this time led to the socially conscious, landmark 1993 Whitney Biennial.) Hockley writes about The Combahee River Collective as the “most significant contribution to both the history and theory of black feminism is its articulation of the interconnection of race, class, gender, and sexuality in an individual’s life.” Throughout, its archival materials give context to the conceptual and aesthetic considerations artists in the exhibition worked through, the issues they found most urgent. It seems to me that the groundwork they laid helped to precipitate the culture wars of the 1990s. Morris and Hockley, co-editors and curators, describe their exhibition as “a timely historical corrective: a presentation of radical approaches to feminist thinking that were developed by women of color simultaneously with, and often in opposition to, the more widely acknowledged views promoted by second-wave feminism.” This point of opposition that Morris and Hockley describe is acutely driven through Toni Morrison’s 1971 essay “What the...