Overview
Life of the Party is an archive and annotation of Black music-performance culture—its poetics and its realities and its ruins, both seen and unseen. Produced concurrent with Black Backstage, Harmony Holiday’s first solo museum exhibition, the book acts as a blueprint, a script, and a ledger for this exhibition as well as a stand-alone record of the territory it covers. Holiday assembles artifacts from this tradition, especially found photographs taken of artists backstage, to tell the story of the culture within the culture, retrieving a secret history of the gestures, murmurs, shouts, and reversals that occur offstage and off the record. Colliding image, text, and even audio (in an album accompaniment to the book that Holiday will also produce as part of this series of works), Life of the Party reveals the backstage as by turns mundane, vulgar, and glorious: a site of sacred ritual behind the spectacle of performance.
This book title, Life of the Party, ISBN: 9781635902013, by Harmony Holiday, published by MIT Press (December 24, 2024) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
Unlike Amazon and other retailers who may also offer Life of the Party books on their website, we specialize in large quantities and provide personal service, from trusted, experienced, friendly people in Portland, Oregon. We offer a Price Match Guarantee, and QuickQuote form, to make purchasing quick and easy.
Prefer to work with a human being when you order Life of the Party books in bulk? Our Book Specialists are standing by Monday-Friday 8-5 PST, ready to help!