Lessons of the Hour — Frederick Douglass was conceived as an artwork, with sumptuously illustrated pages that depict both Isaac Julien’s artworks and the archival images, some of which have never been printed in a book before.

Lessons of the Hour — Frederick Douglass is also a reader, and it features a range of essays by the most prominent scholars on Frederick Douglass, photography, art history, cultural studies, and race and gender studies: Celeste-Marie Bernier, professor at the University of Edinburgh and author of numerous books on Douglass who worked closely with Julien on Lessons of the Hour artwork; Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic and the winner of the 2019 Holberg Prize for his outstanding contributions to humanities; Vron Ware, photographer and academic, author of Beyond the Pale and numerous other publications on racism and feminism; the world-renowned Henry Louis Gates, Jr., from Harvard University, the preeminent Douglass scholar and art historian; film scholars Kass Banning and Warren Crichlow, who have followed Isaac’s work since the mid-1980s, write about the aesthetics of the film installation; Susan Solt, distinguished professor and former dean of the University of California, Santa Cruz, writes about Douglass’s relationship to language, Shakespeare, and Othello; visual artist and historian of photography Deborah Willis created three special inserts throughout the book dedicated to nineteenth-century African American photographer James Presley Ball, Douglass’s relationship to photography, and his aesthetic theory; John G. Hanhardt, American film and video curator, remembers the inception of the work and its curatorial beginnings; Jonathan P. Binstock, the work’s commissioner for the Memorial Art Gallery at University of Rochester, reflects upon Douglass’s relationship to Rochester; Douglass’s great-great-great grandson, Kenneth B. Morris, Jr., made an incredibly moving text for the preface of the book; and the book concludes with an extensive interview with Julien by Jennifer A. González, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and theorist of contemporary art.