By Staff Reports
Published: January 27, 2016, 11:33 am

Passionate, beautiful and full of soul. That’s what you can expect during the 20th anniversary of Art & Soul: A Celebration of African American Art and Artists in Indiana at the Indianapolis Artsgarden. Since its inception in 1996, Art & Soul has become a highly anticipated annual tradition celebrating Black History Month. This year’s theme is A Journey to Freedom and commemorates the impact of arts on the journey to freedom.

Here are the event details:

Every event is at 12:15 pm at the Indianapolis Artsgarden.

The Art & Soul Kickoff Celebration on Saturday, January 30 at 12:15 pm will lift every spirit, set the stage for the month-long celebration, and feature a procession of artists, arts leaders, and worship arts ministers. The event will also present an inspirational gospel choir, an Art & Soul artist showcase, a tribute to Amos Brown, an African American food and vendor fair, along with a student art exhibition highlighting the talents of Indianapolis students.

Mariah Ivey featured on February 3
Spoken word: HEALing and HILLing Towards FREEdom

To learn more, visit www.indyarts.org or on social media at:

Social media: #ArtSoul
Twitter: @artscouncilindy
Facebook:
www.facebook.com/indyarts/
www.facebook.com/artsgarden/

By Katie Rife@futureschlock
Jan 29, 2016 9:52 AM

Fifty Shades Of Black is one of those instances where a parody deviating from its inspiration would have been fine. Most of the people who see it will probably be Wayans brothers fans rather than Fifty Shades Of Grey fans (the overlap can’t be that big, can it?), and neither group has the most discriminating taste to begin with. Yet Fifty Shades Of Black follows the plot of Fifty Shades Of Grey beat by beat, taking an oddly paced story full of baffling characterizations and warped moralizing and layering a bunch of crude sex and race humor on top of it. It’s an uphill battle if there ever was one.

Basically, if you’ve somehow managed to avoid E.L. James’… let’s call it “vision” up to this point, these movies are about a virginal college student, here named “Hannah” (Kali Hawk, evoking Dakota Johnson in bangs and mousy cardigans), who meets a mysterious, handsome billionaire, Christian Grey/Black (Marlon Wayans, with more facial expressions at any given moment than Jamie Dornan in the entire original film), who, as it turns out, is into some kinky shit in the bedroom thanks to an early experience with an older woman. He says he doesn’t do romance, she says she doesn’t do genital clamps, they have a creepily intense affair anyway. Helicopters, rain, and minimalist interior design feature prominently. Fifty Shades Of Grey ends with the lovers making eye contact as elevator doors close. Fifty Shades Of Black ends with Hannah getting her head smashed in those doors.

But even as it takes jabs at its source material’s quality, Fifty Shades Of Black suffers from similarly half-baked writing. Dialogue scenes between Wayans and Hawk all feel like abandoned stand-up bits, like an extended exchange of Cuba Gooding Jr. quotes that culminates with the line, “I’ve got to stop bingeing on Netflix.” Many of the scenes in the movie follow this same formula: elaborate setup based around a recent movie, repetitive physical gag/African-American oriented pop-culture reference, lame punchline, repeat. If comedy is like sex, all about buildup and release of tension, then this movie can’t get it up.

And that’s too bad, because when Wayans allows himself to deviate from his formula there are a few effective moments of un-self-conscious slapstick, like when he surprises Hannah by hiding in the laundry hamper in her bedroom. (There’s a reason Wayans has had such a long movie career. He’s a talented physical comedian.) Speaking of, this movie really plays up the stalker aspect of Christian Grey’s—sorry, Christian Black’s—personality, albeit not toward any sort of feminist end. In fact, Fifty Shades Of Black has something to offend everyone, including jokes about drugging women’s drinks, jokes about Woody Allen and Bill Cosby unrelated to the roofie joke, Black Lives Matter jokes, white women talking in exaggerated “urban” accents as a joke, and jokes about tricking a blindfolded woman into unprotected sex. And let’s not even talk about poor Jane Seymour’s racist adoptive mother character.

But beyond the initial “ew,” there’s really no need to get worked up about any of that, because they are dumb jokes even more so than offensive ones. It’s really pretty mind-blowing to think about all the time and money that went into hiring the crew and lighting the sets and decorating them—the art department did a great job re-creating the sets from Fifty Shades Of Grey, by the way—and all the photocopying and emailing and phone calls and spreadsheets that went on behind the scenes of this movie, just so Marlon Wayans could make a “vaginas are gross” joke. It doesn’t take a comedy genius to write this stuff; when lines like “I’d like to bite that lip” or “this is my playroom” from Fifty Shades Of Grey are invoked, the resulting gag goes exactly where you think it would. So if you think weird tongue stuff and exaggerated genital protheses are hilarious, this might be a mildly amusing 92 minutes. Just be quick about it—those Whiplash jokes aren’t getting any fresher.

Photo: Matthew Arnett.

Sarah Cascone, Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Thornton Dial, a prominent outsider artist from Emelle, Alabama, is dead at 87, the Associated Press reports. Dial had previously suffered from numerous strokes, but the cause of death has not yet been identified.

Born to African American sharecroppers in 1928, Dial was self-taught as an artist, creating paintings and sculptures from found materials like sail cloth, wire, and discarded doll parts. He rose to prominence in 1987 thanks to collector Bill Arnett, who later founded the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting self-taught African American artists.

In a statement, Arnett recalls first discovering Dial’s work, which the artist had been storing inside a chicken coop:  “I didn’t know at the time that it wasn’t simply the sculpture that was special. The man who had created it was a great man, and he would go on to become recognized as one of America’s greatest artists. I can’t think of any important artist who has started with less or accomplished more.”

Prior to adopting art as his full-time career, Dial held numerous jobs, including working for the Pullman railcar company, carpentry, and pipe fitting. He received his first solo museum exhibition in 1993 (a joint-showing at the New Museum and the American Folk Art Museum), and had a showing of his work at during the 1996 Olympic Games, held in Atlanta.

Nevertheless, Dial’s ascent was not without controversy. Arnett has been accused of exploiting and controlling him, most prominently in an episode of 60 Minutes that aired shortly after the New Museum exhibition opened. Almost all the scholarship on Dial, who reportedly could not read or write, has been done by Arnett, and he has spoken at length about the themes he believes to be present in Dial’s work.

 

A 2013 New Yorker profile pointed out that most quotes widely attributed to Dial actually come from Arnett’s books. “It seem like some people believe that, just because I ain’t got no education, say I must be too ignorant for art,” Dial was quoted in one publication. “I believe I have proved that my art is about ideas, and about life, and the experience of the world. . . . I ain’t never been much good at talking about stuff. I always just done the stuff I had a mind to do. My art do my talking.”

But for all his work to bring art by Dial and other self-taught African Americans to the mainstream market, Arnett claims not to have financially benefited from his arrangements. “I haven’t made fifty cents total net profit on all that I’ve done on black culture in the past twenty-five years,” he insisted in the New Yorker.

Dial’s fame has continued to blossom in recent years as the High Museum of Art in Atlanta hosted “Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial,” a retrospective of his work, from 2011–2012, and New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery began representing him in October.

Boesky explained her decision to add Dial to her stable in a statement published by the New York Times: “[T]he boundaries between outsider and insider are shifting: I watch academically trained artists work hard to shake loose from all the scholarship and technique to channel their emotions and experiences in more immediate material and formal ways.”

In late 2014, ten of Dial’s works were among 57 pieces donated by Souls Grown Deep to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and will be shown in the summer of 2017. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, are among the other museums to include Dial in their collections.

Dial is predeceased by his wife Clara, who he married in 1951, and their daughter, Patricia. He is survived by his other children, Mattie, Thornton Jr., Richard, and Dan, as well as a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Follow artnet News on Facebook.According to the artnet Price Database, Dial’s auction record is $40,000, achieved just this past week at Christie’s first major auction of self-taught art, held January 22. Hard Labor, a 1998 painting that incorporates carpet, rope, and metal, among other materials, surpassed the 2003 sale ofWoman with Tiger Cat (1990), which fetched $33,460, also at Christie’s New York.

Thornton Dial.
Photo: Stephen Pitkin, courtesy Thornton Dial.