Description: Here, with thirty-seven astonishing portraits, is a revisionist album of heroes of color. Starting with Montezuma, Pocahontas, and Toussaint L'Ouverture, Morgan Monceaux quickly moves into the 1800s and crosses the Mississippi River with newly freed slaves who became fur traders, stagecoach drivers, cowboys, soldiers, nurses, and mail-order brides. The story of African American settlers enjoying newfound freedom and opportunities in the West while Naive Americans were being systematically robbed of theirs is familiar and sad, but Monceaux's remarkable portraits of black settlers and Indian chiefs (executed in oil pastels, paint, markers, and collage) revisit it with playful innocence and exuberance. With accompanying biographical sketches and historical notes, Black and Red is an artist's totally fresh Look at winners and Losers in the Old West.

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