Carrie in the Salon photo by Deborah Willis. The experience of black hair salons and what this scared space actually means. Understood as a non-negotiable experience used to uplift and protect our crowns. This is my take on the art work.
...we had fun working together and that’s all that really matters. If you would like to encourage a little bit of creativity with your little one you can try this art project, Animal Handprints. Watch the video at https://youtu.be/FYequfwuL_E
Read more Lesson One – Animal Handprints for Kid’s – Part One
Dancing Figures by Richard Bruce
At the same time, Ethiopia's message was assimilationist in the way it was exhibited at a "melting pot" event, representing the emancipation of a people attempting to prove their value to a society that had long excluded blacks from full involvement as United States citizens.[2]
Read more “Making History: Meta Warrick Fuller’s Ethiopia,” by Renée Ater
If you haven't tried printing your artwork on canvas I highly recommend it. Your customers will appreciate it and you can keep your art. Queen Bee Art
I enjoyed this story so much that during college I almost got a tattoo of "poetic justice" in Arabic on my lower back. You know the kind and please don't ask me why? Why not? And Arabic? It was a phase and the written language so lovely. And I still don't have any tattoos but that's not what this is about!
I think it was summer when I first saw a painting by Ernest Watson. My brothers and I were staying with cousins in Texas, traveling from one cousins house to another, staying up all night watching movies and running through thick green grass under the piercing hot sun. Every few minutes someone would run back…
Speed Painting of Lipstick & My thoughts and experience with filming my work. Learning to let go, enjoy the process and PAINT....because that’s what it’s really about.
Richard J. Powell is John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History at Duke University, where he has taught since 1989. He studied at Morehouse College and Howard University before earning his doctorate in art history at Yale University. Along with teaching courses in American art, the arts of the African Diaspora, and contemporary visual studies, he has written extensively on topics ranging from primitivism to postmodernism, including such titles as Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), Black Art: A Cultural History (1997 & 2002), and Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008).[1]
I initially was attracted to her story because of the fact she didn't let her personal life overshadow her career. As a working woman with children it can be difficult to find that balance. Especially, as a working African American woman in the arts during a very difficult time period. She paved the way for artists of color, women and inspired many sculptors, painters and more. Augusta Savage was an artist, educator and activist, a true Renaissance woman.
My Soul Has Grown Deep considers the art-historical significance of contemporary Black artists and quilters working throughout the southeastern United States and Alabama in particular. See sources for more Information.
"Art is strange-looking stuff and most people don’t understand art. Most people don’t understand my art, the art of the Negroes, because most people don’t understand me, don’t understand the Negroes at all. If everybody understand one another, wouldn’t nobody make art. Art is something to open your eyes. Art is for understanding." ~Thornton Dial [1]
In South of Pico Kellie Jones explores how the artists in Los Angeles's black communities during the 1960s and 1970s created a vibrant, productive, and engaged activist arts scene in the face of structural racism. Emphasizing the importance of African American migration, as well as L.A.'s housing and employment politics, Jones shows how the work of black Angeleno artists such as Betye Saar, Charles White, Noah Purifoy, and Senga Nengudi spoke to the dislocation of migration, L.A.'s urban renewal, and restrictions on black mobility.
I think I’ve fallen in love with this art piece. Excerpt from Nasher, Motley was 70 years old when he painted the oil on canvas, Hot Rhythm, in 1961. This painting explores one of Motley’s favorite subjects, the jazz age. The artist loved to walk the streets of Bronzeville, a once-thriving neighborhood in Chicago’s South…
Read more Chorus Lines, Rhythm & Blues: Artist Archibald J. Motley Jr.
Elizabeth Catlett's "Glory" inspires music. The sculptures of the late African-American artist and civil rights activist Elizabeth Catlett are the inspiration for a new jazz composition. Rufus Reid, a bass musician who's been playing jazz for half a century, uses Catlett's artwork to explore the intersection between music and the visual arts. In his new project, called "Quiet Pride," Reid tries to convey Catlett's sculptures in sound. [1]
Read more “Glory” inspires Quiet Pride: The Elizabeth Catlett Project
"Untitled" New Orleans Series by Gwendolyn Knight, 1941
Read more “Untitled” New Orleans Series by Gwendolyn Knight, 1941
Renee Cox continues to question society and the roles it gives to blacks and women with her elaborate scenarios and imaginative visuals that offend some and exhilarate others.[2]
Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence's first formal study of art came at Howard University, where she studied with the painter Lois Maillou Jones and with printmaker James Lesesne Wells. During the Harlem Renaissance, Knight became a daily participant in the workshop of sculptor Augusta Savage, director of the Savage Studio of Arts and Crafts and later of the Harlem Community Arts Center. Throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Knight became an itinerant artist of sorts, accompanying her husband, Jacob Lawerence, as he pursued new opportunities.
Harriet Powers used traditional techniques in her quilts to record local legends, Bible stories and astronomical events on her quilts. One of the panels on Powers quilts illustrate the “dark day” of May 19, 1780 (which is now known as dense smoke over North America caused by Canadian wildfires) and the November 13, 1833, as the “night of falling stars” that convinced many terrified Americans that Judgment Day had come, but was later identified as the Leonid meteor storm. Two of her quilts are on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC; Bible Quilt of 1886 and Pictorial Quilt of 1898.[2]
Some of Burke’s most notable sculptures include Temptation (1938), Despair (1951), Fallen Angel(1958), Mother and Child (1968), and Together (1975). A nine-foot statue of Martin Luther King, Jr. she completed while in her eighties is on display in Marshall Park in Charlotte, North Carolina. She received numerous awards and honors which included three honorary doctorate degrees. In 1979 Burke was recognized by President Jimmy Carter for her contribution to African American art history.[4]
In the 1920s Augusta Savage received commissions to create portrait busts of W.E.B. Du Bois and black nationalist Marcus Garvey; both pieces were hailed for their power and dynamism. On the strength of these works and especially the poignant Gamin (1929)—a portrait bust of a streetwise boy and one of Savage’s few extant pieces—she received a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship that enabled her finally to study in Paris in 1929–31.**
