In a Hollywood landscape where lighter-skinned black women are generally more successful than darker ones, Saldana's casting stood as a reminder that in Hollywood, dark-skinned black women are not even deemed good enough to play themselves on screen. .
A 19th-century lithograph of the coconut palm (Cocos nucifera) — from a book about the Philippines — is joined by a hand-colored lithograph, done after Leopold Rottmann in the 19th century, in which a dark-skinned man in a lush, bucolic landscape raises a stone above his head, preparing to kill a snake.
The black content of Hughie Lee-Smith's "Stranger" (1957-58), wits itscenene of a pale-skinned man standing alone against a bleak landscape, was retrospective.
"Two Nudes in a Forest" (1939) depicts a light-skinned woman resting her head in the lap of a dark-skinned one, watched by a monkey in a landscape of tropical plants, some thriving and some dying.
Illustrations include 3 complete skeletons, 5 diagrams of veins and nerves, 13 drawings of the skull and brains and 14 pages of skinned muscle-men standing in front of verdant landscapes that, when lined up, comprise a panorama of Italy's Euganean Hills.
Ms. Thomas has translated its pair of embracing women — a blonde and a brunette — into a dark-skinned black woman and a light-skinned one, transporting them from a silken bed to an Edenic landscape whose fault lines are highlighted in fluorescent orange.
The first of them, in the front room, is a sci-fi tableau of Wookie-like creatures, black-skinned but covered with white fleece and set in an arctic landscape, their heads swiveling this way and that.
But the briny, rough-skinned pickle that was once such an integral part of the city's landscape is in danger of becoming a memory.
"Fat Snowball's Chance" pictures a red-skinned devil shin-deep in a frigid pool in an icy, blue and white landscape.
Dice the skinned tomatoes.
