Arielle Bobb-Willis: Keep the Kid Alive

The first monograph by the New Black Vanguard’s Arielle Bobb-Willis is a vivid statement about color, gesture, and style.

Keep the Kid Alive, Arielle Bobb-Willis’s first book, invites audiences into a brightly imaginative world, filled with dynamic colors, gestures, and unusual poses of the artist’s own creation. Transforming the streets of New Orleans, New York, and Los Angeles into lush backdrops for her wonderfully surreal tableaus, Bobb-Willis makes unforgettable images that expand the genres of fashion and art photography. “I love the idea of seeing Black people represented in an abstract way,” Bobb-Willis says. “It’s important to me to continue to reject the notion that Black expression is limited—or limiting.” With a conversation between Bobb-Willis and a dynamic range of artists, stylists, and creatives who speak about keeping their “inner kid” alive, this book captures a definitive young artist’s unconventional worldbuilding.

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 172
Number of images: 90
Publication date: 2024-10-08
Measurements: 8.25 x 10.5 inches
ISBN: 9781597115704

“Bobb-Willis’s first monograph, Keep the Kid Alive, makes a statement about beauty, exuberance and cathartic expression—while not taking itself too seriously—with vibrant colour and conceptual image building.”—Guardian

“[Bobb-Willis’s] kinetic subjects twist their bodies, arch their backs, duck into their collars, and let their hair fall in their faces. Taken in the context of the conversations in the book—“How do you keep your inner kid alive?”—these movements are playful expressions of joy.”—Publishers Weekly

Arielle Bobb-Willis (born in New York, 1994) has published her photography in the New Yorker, I-D, W Magazine, British Journal of Photography, L’uomo Vogue, New York magazine’s The Cut, and the New York Times Magazine. Her work is featured in The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion (Aperture, 2019) and an accompanying exhibition, which traveled to the Museum of the African Diaspora, Rencontres d’Arles, Fotografiska Sweden, and other venues. She is currently based in Los Angeles.

Tiana Reid is an assistant professor of English at York University. Her research and teaching interests include black literature, gender, and labor. Her writing has appeared in American Quarterly, Art in America, Bookforum, Frieze, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and The Paris Review, among other places. She is a former editor at The New Inquiry and Pinko. In 2021, she received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Nicole Acheampong is the digital editor at T Magazine. A former editor at Aperture and the Atlantic, her writing has appeared in Art in America and the New York Review of Books.