Taking its title from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, exhibition Black Is, Black Ain't (April 20 – June 8, 2008) explored a shift in the rhetoric of race from an earlier emphasis on inclusion to a present moment where racial identity is being simultaneously rejected and retained. Curated by the Renaissance Society's Associate Curator and Education Director Hamza Walker, the exhibition brought together works by twenty-seven black and non-black artists whose work collectively examines a moment where the cultural production of so-called "blackness" is concurrent with efforts to make race socially and politically irrelevant. The publication features essays by Huey Copeland, Darby English, Greg Foster-Rice, Amy M. Mooney, Kymberly N. Pinder, Krista Thompson, Hamza Walker, and Kenneth Warrren. Huey Copeland is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh. Copeland is an editor of the journal OCTOBER ; coeditor of the award-winning essay collection Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World ; and author of Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America , also published by the University of Chicago Press. Greg Foster-Rice  is professor of art history in the Photography Department at Columbia College Chicago. Hamza Walker became the second director of The Brick in Los Angeles after twenty-one years as curator and director of education at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. Walker was the recipient of the 1999 Norton Curatorial Grant, the 2005 Walter Hopps Award for curatorial achievement, and a 2006 Emily Hall Tremaine Award for the exhibition Black Is, Black Ain't . In 2010, Walker was awarded the Ordway Prize as a mid-career curator whose writings and exhibitions have had significant impact on the field of contemporary art. In addition to serving on panels and juries throughout Europe and the United States, he has written for numerous artists' monographs and publications such as Artforum and Parkett . Kenneth W. Warren is a professor of English at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism .