Barbara Bullock: Chasing After Spirits honors the life and work of Philadelphia artist Barbara Bullock. Born in 1938, Bullock has actively pursued an artistic career since the early 1960s. In the 1970s she worked as the Artistic Director at the Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center in North Philadelphia. In 1988 the African American Museum in Philadelphia mounted a major retrospective of her work entitled Spirit Rain. Since then, Bullock has continued to develop as an artist; and her mature work tends towards sculptural abstractions. Her work is characterized by an ongoing experimentation that allows her to look backward as well as forward, and ultimately to thrive creatively in the present.
Barbara Bullock: Chasing After Spirits was originally published in 2016 by La Salle University Art Museum, with lead sponsorship from the Petrucci Family Foundation. The book features a preface by Leslie King Hammond; a poem by Linda Goss; interpretive essays by Lewis Tanner Moore, A.M. Weaver, Klare Scarborough, and William R. Valerio; and documentation including Nannette Acker Clark’s 1988 Spirit Rain exhibition essay and a 2014 interview with the artist. 176 pages, 155 illustrations.
This 2026 reprint edition was published by the Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, which seeks to bring focus to the full range of African American visual creativity and its essential place in the history and discourse of American art. The Petrucci Family Foundation’s mission of fostering a more complete understanding of African American art holds great promise for cross-cultural understanding and reconciliation through a specific lens of the American experience.
