Michael Armitage - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Highlighting powerful new paintings and sculptures by Michael Armitage, this catalogue showcases the artist's poignant, timely, and profoundly humanistic works.

Kenyan British artist Michael Armitage's work weaves real and imagined histories into powerful reflections on contemporary social and political life. Michael Armitage: Crucible presents a selection of recent works exploring journeys across borders and the broader experience of displacement. Many of the artist's paintings on Lubugo bark cloth--a traditional Ugandan textile used in funerary rituals, which he has employed for more than a decade--depict scenes from a migration route stretching from the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea toward Europe. These works, both intimate and epic, consider migration not only as movement across geography but as a condition that shapes identity, memory, and belonging.

The volume also features a series of bronze-relief sculptures inspired by the Stations of the Cross, reimagined to center migrants and the displaced--figures often marginalized within contemporary society--within a shared cultural and spiritual narrative. Armitage's direct, emotionally charged imagery invites viewers to reflect on how migrants are seen, represented, and understood today.

Published to accompany the exhibition at David Zwirner New York, the catalogue includes an essay by Marina Warner on the role of myth in Armitage's depictions of arduous journeys, and a text by geographer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro examining global and local patterns of migration. Two poems by Warsan Shire, including a newly commissioned work, offer lyrical responses to the themes of the artist's practice.

About the Author

The paintings and drawings of Kenyan British artist Michael Armitage (b. 1984) give shape to real and imagined histories, constructing deeply rooted impressions of the sociopolitical and cultural contexts that affect contemporary daily life in the region. These sweeping compositions combine visual references to recent events, the art-historical canon, the artist's East African artistic milieu, and his own memories, while also generating space for the spiritual and the symbolic.

Marina Warner writes fiction, criticism, and cultural history. Her award-winning books include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976), From the Beast to the Blonde (1994), and Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights (2011), among others. In 2015, she was awarded the Holberg Prize in the Arts and Humanities. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose books include Island People (2016), Names of New York (2021), Nonstop Metropolis (2016), and, most recently, Daylight Come: Harry Belafonte and the World He Made (2026). His work appears regularly in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among many other publications. Jelly-Schapiro teaches journalism at New York University and is Director of Publishing at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn.

Warsan Shire is a Somali British writer and poet born in Nairobi and raised in London. Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (2022) is her full-length debut poetry collection. She was awarded the inaugural Brunel International African Poetry Prize and served as the first Young Poet Laureate of London. She is the youngest member of the Royal Society of Literature and is included in the Penguin Modern Poets series. Shire wrote the poetry for the Peabody Award-winning visual album Lemonade (2016) and the Disney film Black Is King (2020) in collaboration with Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. Shire lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.