Al Loving, 69; African American Abstract Artist Worked in Many Forms

Posted on

Al Loving, an innovative abstract artist whose work evolved from geometric paintings to colorful collages and murals, has died. He was 69.

Loving died June 21 in New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of lung cancer.

The artist burst onto the abstract art scene as vibrantly as one of his paintings in 1969, when he was given a solo exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art — a year after moving to New York from his native Detroit to establish himself as an artist.

The show and his work proved a breakthrough, demonstrating that African Americans could hold their own in the abstract genre at a time when they were under public pressure to produce figurative art describing the black experience.

Loving soon became what one reviewer called “probably the leading figure in the hot African American Abstraction movement.”

The versatile artist remained in the forefront until his death, as his art evolved from painting cubes on canvas to draping strips of cloth across galleries, to assembling fabric and cut paper and working with glass and clay.

“Loving is demonstrating clearly that African American artists need not be pigeonholed in social-political subject matter or figurative-narrative angst,” a Seattle Times reviewer wrote earlier this year when his work was shown in Seattle.

As Loving developed a style traceable through his evolution — emphasizing color and forms like the spiral to illustrate constant growth — he never let his art become static. He moved surely from painting with brushes to stitching cloth to gluing corrugated cardboard and shaping glass, developing a singular genre he had recently described as “material abstraction.”

Collage, he once told the Detroit Free Press, “has a wonderful ability to make a string of extreme things go together.”

Loving’s works are included in the permanent collections of the Whitney and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Loving also created large commissioned public works, including a ceramic mural in one of Detroit’s People Mover stations and another in the David Adamany Library at Wayne State University. In 1996, he created a collage painting for the Sacramento Convention Center, and in 2001 he completed a large mosaic wall with 70 stained-glass windows for Brooklyn’s Broadway-East New York subway station.

Born Alvin Demar Loving Jr. on Sept. 19, 1935, in Detroit, Loving first began copying landscapes and watercolors under the tutelage of his father, a teacher and part-time sign painter. When the family spent a year in India, young Loving decided on a career in fine art rather than commercial art, which was considered more practical for blacks in that day.

He earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Illinois and a master of fine arts from the University of Michigan.

Loving taught briefly at Eastern Michigan University before establishing his studio in New York in 1968.

He is survived by his wife, the former Mara Kearney; three children from earlier marriages, Alvin Demar Loving III of Long Beach, Alicia Loving of New York and Anne Bethel of Eleuthera, Bahamas; a brother, Paul of Detroit; a sister, Pamela Copeland of Flint, Mich.; and eight grandchildren. Another daughter, Lauri Hurd, died in 2001.

Friends of African-American Art and Culture Celebrates Successful Inaugural Year

Posted on

COLUMBIA, SC – The Columbia Museum of Art membership affiliate group, Friends of African-American Art and Culture (FAAAC) celebrates its first anniversary at an annual meeting on Tuesday, March 12 at 5:30 p.m. The meeting is open to everyone and features speaker Dr. Terry K. Hunter, an artist and educator from Orangeburg, SC. $5 or free for FAAAC members. Details available here.

 

As the name indicates, FAAAC is a group of people across genders, ethnicities and ages brought together by their appreciation of the artistic and cultural contributions of African Americans.

 

“The excitement from the popular Chemistry of Color: Contemporary African-American Artists exhibition sparked a momentum that resulted in the creation of this dynamic group,” CMA Executive Director Karen Brosius said. “Their energetic board kept the spirit alive throughout a very productive first year.”

 

FAAAC launched with the exhibition, Our Time, Our Place: Photographs of the Black South by Richard Samuel Roberts, which opened to a record-breaking crowd eager to learn about the artist and his work. The FAAAC board and members of the community, including Mayor Steve Benjamin, selected the 24 photographs for the exhibition, which showcased a stunning visual history of the 20th-century African-American community in Columbia.

 

FAAAC’s passion for educating the community continued throughout the year with popular programs featuring and honoring artists like Allen Crite, Leo Twiggs and Cecil Williams.

 

Most notably, FAAAC explored the vibrant African-American art community in Orangeburg. Members privately toured the I.P. Stanbeck Museum and Planetarium and visited many Orangeburg artists’ homes and studios including Tolulope Filani, Terry Hunter, Kim LeDee, Alving and Bretta Staley, Leo Twiggs and Cecil Williams.

 

“We experienced a once in a lifetime opportunity to individually ask the artists questions and really understand the intricate details of their processes, what ignites their creativity and how original ideas are developed,” FAAAC president Brandolyn Thomas Pinkston said. “This was a grand experience and a first for all of the participants.”

 

The first year also inspired a California art collector to give three works to the CMA in honor of FAAAC. Charlotte Sherman, the director of the Heritage Gallery in Los Angeles, gave two photographs and one work on paper by Charles White, one of America’s most renowned 20th-century African-American artists.

 

“I am so grateful to Charlotte for her generous gifts that will certainly inspire and educate visitors,” Pinkston said. “We are eager to continue providing a variety of programs, lectures and exhibits to educate our community on the importance of African-American art and artists.”

 

Based on the successes in the first year, FAAAC members are planning several learning opportunities for 2013, including a trip to Sumter for a gallery tour and artist discussion.
“FAAAC members have the privilege and pleasure of experiencing art in ways that move the body, soul and intellect,” FAAAC Board Member Michaela Pilar Brown said. “In 2013, our visit to Sumter will connect art and artists with art lovers and interesting people with interesting ideas.”

FAAAC board members include: Brandolyn Thomas Pinkston, president; Darion McCloud, vice-president; Suzanne Thorpe, Secretary and Waltene Whitmire, Treasurer. Board members are Michaela Pilar Brown, Allen Coles, Preach Jacobs, Jerry Dell Gimarc, Therese Griffin, Maria Krastsios, Javana Lovett, Karen Rutherford and Chelsea Washington.

 

For more information or to become a FAAAC member, visit columbiamuseum.org.

image of Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris Barkley Leonnard Hendricks (artist)

Posted on

Barkley Leonnard Hendricks (artist)
American, born 1945
Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris, 1972
oil on canvas
overall: 213.6 x 182.9 cm (84 1/8 x 72 in.)
William C. Whitney Foundation

Sir Charles, Alias Willie Harris offers a tripled image, its single subject captured as if in a time-lapse. Whether with eyes closed meditatively (on the left) or gazing into space (on the right), Sir Charles is alternately thoughtful and vigilant. More than life-size, this imposing figure clearly signals 1970s fashion, pop culture, and the assertion of black identity in the generation following the civil rights era. Barkley Hendricks casts his friends, lovers, family members, and men and women he meets on the street as portrait subjects. Stark and monumental against a monochromatic ground, his portraits fix acutely on the individuality and self-expression of his subjects.

Hendricks has said that a painting he saw in 1966 while visiting the National Gallery of Art in London—a portrait by Flemish master Anthony van Dyck featuring a red velvet coat—was a point of departure for this work. Intending to make a replica of the Van Dyck image, Hendricks received permission to paint as a copyist in the museum. But once in the process, he realized he could not copy another artist’s work, “no matter how much I like it,” he said. Years later he painted Sir Charles with Van Dyck’s red coat in mind. Other writers have likened Sir Charles to the iconic three graces—artistic muses (usually female) as portrayed by European old masters such as Botticelli and Rubens in three different attitudes, one usually with her back toward the viewer. It might be said that Hendrick’s artistic muses relate to classical Western art history as well as sources personal to the artist.

Hendricks, who was born in Philadelphia, studied there at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and earned BFA and MFA degrees from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. Since 1972 he has taught at Connecticut College in New London. The recipient of numerous awards and recognitions, he has exhibited his work at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum at Connecticut College; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University organized a career retrospective of Hendricks’ work, Barkley Hendricks: Birth of the Cool, to travel from 2008 through 2010 to the Studio Museum, Harlem; the Santa Monica Museum of Art; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston.

A Renaissance Man in Teaneck, NJ

Posted on

Danielle M. Bennett

Moses Groves was not always an artist. As a bass, baritone, and second tenor, he recorded with his group, Little Jimmy and The Tops, their hit singles, “Puppy Love” and “Say You Love Me” in 1959. Little Jimmy and The Tops were especially successful in Philadelphia. They also performed three times at the world famous Apollo Theater in Harlem. The group, however, eventually disbanded. One of their members, Sylvia Peterson, went on to sing with the Chiffons who recorded the hit song, “He’s so fine.” The lead singer, Jimmy Rivers, went solo and Groves was drafted to the Army in 1963 during the Vietnam War. He completed his time of service before he would have been deployed. A future filled with life, love, and art intertwined would ensue for this passionate artist.

———————————-

Groves began his art training in 1969, although his budding artistry started as a first grader with drawing. Groves continued his art training at the Art Students League of New York, at New York University on a one-year scholarship and at the National Academy Museum and School for sketching where he spent two years.

His first instructor was Joe Hing Lowe, 79, an instructor at Ridgewood Art Institute in Bergen County, N.J. Groves studied under Lowe for five years at Lowe’s 6th avenue studio in Manhattan. Lowe remembered his former pupil after so many years and offered his thoughts as an instructor on what it took to create any type of art. “You have to have patience and skill,” Lowe said. Lowe owned his Manhattan studio for 14 years.

Groves agreed with his former teacher. “You have to be very patient. You have to almost like be alone,” said Groves. An artist had to have a plan as well. “First of all, you have to form it in your mind,” he said about the process. An artist had to decide if he or she wanted to leave a legacy behind with the painting. “I feel I want to leave a legacy.”

Groves managed to do just that. A few years after he closed the Bronx studio he owned for 20 years with two artist friends, he opened up a second studio with his wife and youngest daughter, Lisa, in Englewood. N.J. He realized it was important to include his wife into his art world. “We, as artists, don’t realize the spouse is being neglected,” said Groves. The entire family helped to run the business.

Groves and his family no longer own the art studio but have had a great deal of support from community churches and especially from patrons of Brooklyn, N.Y. “That’s the Black experience. They come out,” said Groves. Support has also come from organizations such as the Urban League who commissioned Groves to paint a portrait of Robert Johnson, the first African American District Attorney in New York’s history. Groves’ other accomplishments included showcases up and down the east coast and a feature on NY1.

————————————

Inspiration can come from unlikely places. For Groves, who is now 71, it was on one of the most famous streets in America. His subject — a homeless man on 125th Street. Groves would later explain to me that the homeless man, whose hood and overall appearance reminded Groves of the biblical figure, had been an admirer of Groves’ street display. One day, the man gave him a photograph of himself. The man told Groves that he would make a lot of money. “And I did,” said Groves. Groves reproduced the image as a charcoal print of Moses on Mount Sinai in his most elemental role — delivering the 10 Commandments in Hebrew lettering.

The African American subjects of Groves’s paintings are portrayed with great detail and vivacity. It is seen in his portrayals of religious themes, female basket weavers, saxophone players, and in my favorite, four pre-pubescent girls sitting together outside hair braiding while one girl directs her indignant, facial expression at the hair braider. Groves’s use of blended hues of blue, red, yellow, orange, green, and their ancillary pigments in this painting and others remind me of the works of Jacob Lawrence and Ellis Wilson.

I sat down with Groves at his home in Teaneck, N.J., to find out what was the inspiration for some of his artwork. For our meeting, Groves was dressed conservatively — black slacks, shiny black dress shoes and a brown belt. The yellow of his square-printed shirt appeared more brilliant against his dark skin and salt n’ pepper hair. The shirt was a perfect complement to his golden-framed glasses. From head to toe, his attire was pressed and orderly. Groves, with an iPad in one hand and his wife, Anne, 67, by his side, seemed ready to talk art.

We started our conversation with the sweetgrass basket weavers. He told me the oil paintings of the sweetgrass basket weavers were inspired by his trip back to his home of Charleston, S.C. To develop these paintings, he took photographs of the area and added the female subjects. He spoke of the history of these basket weavers — how the community had mobilized in Charleston to preserve the African folk art. Grove is still completing one of the paintings of the Charleston basket weavers and wants to focus on more themes in his art. He is currently working on another Charleston scene.

The painting of the four girls captured images of young girls his family knew, one being his granddaughter at age 9. The painting, “Good Hair” was originally named “I was Next!” He explained to me that the girl was frowning because she wanted her hair braided next but he made an artistic choice to change the painting’s name because the little girl’s pigtail hairstyle looked done.

Being able to communicate a feeling that Groves captured with “Good Hair” is what he learned to do with his training and experience, and especially with his passion for art. “It just comes out of you. When the spirit hits you, you have to paint.”

To get more information on the artwork of Moses Groves, go here.
See samples of Moses Groves’s artwork:

2013-01-23-Mosesimage.jpg
A charcoal print of the Hebrew prophet, Moses, on Mount Sinai, by Moses Groves, dated 2000, is featured on Black Art in America.
2013-01-23-Basketweaversimage.jpg
Moses Groves’s “Sweetgrass baskets,” dated 2010, is featured on Black Art in America.
2013-01-25-GoodHair.jpg
Moses Groves’s “Good Hair,” dated 2003, is featured on Black Art in America.

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated since it was first published.

From Black Power to Migrants’ Power

Posted on
Nelson Stevens, Uhuru, 1971, screenprint on paper. BROOKLYN MUSEUM, GIFT OF R.M. ATWATER, ANNA WOLFROM DOVE, ALICE FIEBIGER, JOSEPH FIEBIGER, BELLE CAMPBELL HARRISS, AND EMMA L. HYDE, BY EXCHANGE; DESIGNATED PURCHASE FUND, MARY SMITH DORWARD FUND, DICK S. RAMSAY FUND, AND CARLL H. DE SILVER FUND, 2012.80.41.

By Posted 01/22/13

“There have been the singing nun and the flying nun, but the hippest of all is Los Angeles’s painting nun,” noted Newsweek in its 1967 cover story on Sister Corita Kent, the artist, activist, and teacher, whose first career survey, as The Saratogian reports, opened at the Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore college this week.

Corita Kent, E eye love, 1968, serigraph.

COURTESY OF THE TANG MUSEUM AT SKIDMORE COLLEGE AND CORITA ART CENTER, LOS ANGELES.

Despite her edgy Pop sensibility, influential friends like Ben Shahn and Buckminster Fuller, and posthumous shows in various museums, along with a 2009 exhibition at Zach Feuer Gallery, Sister Corita never became a presence in the mainstream art world. No doubt this is partly because of her vocation (she was a Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which she joined in 1936 and left in 1968), and the fact that she was a printmaker, rather than a painter.

Corita Kent, for emergency use soft shoulder, 1966, serigraph.

COURTESY OF THE TANG MUSEUM AT SKIDMORE COLLEGE AND CORITA ART CENTER, LOS ANGELES.

Deploying the earnestness of a believer, an avant-garde sense of typography, and a collagist’s wit, Sister Corita (1918-86) mashed together words and slogans from advertising, the Bible, philosophy, poetry, and lyrics, producing hundreds of confrontational, inspirational prints on themes of individual empowerment and social justice. (Later her 10 rules for Immaculate Heart College’s art department, which cite and are sometimes misattributed to John Cage, became an online classic.)

Sister Mary Corita, king’s dream, 1969, serigraph.

COURTESY OF ZACH FEUER GALLERY, NEW YORK AND THE CORITA ART CENTER

“Almost in some ways she was outsider even though was she trained and was insider in other ways,” says Tang director Ian Berry, who co-curated the exhibition with Michael Duncan. “I’m hoping this show can get her into the trajectory of art conversation.”

Power Authority

More activist art was in the news when the Brooklyn Museum announced its acquisition of 44 rare works from the Black Arts Movement of the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s, landing Elaine “Jae” Jarrell’s stunning patchwork Urban Wall Suit (1969) on the cover of the Times’s Weekend Arts section.

 

Benjamin “Ben” Jones, Untitled (Murray), 1973, watercolor, colored pencil, and mixed media collage on board.

GIFT OF R.M. ATWATER, ANNA WOLFROM DOVE, ALICE FIEBIGER, JOSEPH FIEBIGER, BELLE CAMPBELL HARRISS, AND EMMA L. HYDE, BY EXCHANGE; DESIGNATED PURCHASE FUND, MARY SMITH DORWARD FUND, DICK S. RAMSAY FUND, AND CARLL H. DE SILVER FUND, 2012.80.21.

The Black Arts Movement, conceived as the cultural arm of the Black Power Movement, was started by Amiri Baraka. But its manifesto of sorts was written by Larry Neal, who in a 1968 essay in Drama Review, called for “a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic” with new “symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology.”

To convey its message of self-determination and nationhood, the medium of choice for the Black Arts Movement was usually screenprint with a liberal dose of collage, appropriation, and futurism, as evident in works like Revolutionary, Wadsworth Jarrell’s -Day-Glo 1972 portrait of Angela Davis, and Jeff Donaldson’s 1969 rendering of rifle-toting Wives of Shango.

Nelson Stevens, Uhuru, 1971, screenprint on paper.

BROOKLYN MUSEUM, GIFT OF R.M. ATWATER, ANNA WOLFROM DOVE, ALICE FIEBIGER, JOSEPH FIEBIGER, BELLE CAMPBELL HARRISS, AND EMMA L. HYDE, BY EXCHANGE; DESIGNATED PURCHASE FUND, MARY SMITH DORWARD FUND, DICK S. RAMSAY FUND, AND CARLL H. DE SILVER FUND, 2012.80.41.

That these radically conceived works are entering art-museum galleries–some in the Brooklyn Museum’s American Identities galleries this spring, and others in its upcoming exhibition about the Civil Rights movement next year –shows that the canon of postwar American art has come a long way, kind of.

Fight of the Butterfly

As the activist art of a half-century ago, like the agitprop art before it, enters museum collections, a new generation is developing its own esthetic. Writing in Creative Time Reports, Robert Lovato describes some of the cultural interventions that artist/activists are staging to campaign for migrants’ rights—particularly those adapting the monarch butterfly, that great migrator, as the movement’s symbol.

Alfredo Burgos and Pablo Alvarado, Migration is a Human Right

COURTESY OF NO PAPERS NO FEAR

That butterfly floats through Migration is Beautiful, a video recently posted on rapper Pharrell Williams’ i am OTHER YouTube channel that’s been making the rounds of blogs. The three-part series follows artists, designers, and performers who have been using the arts to campaign for migrant justice in Arizona, at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, and in actions across the country. A prominent generator of new iconography has been No Papers No Fear, an advocacy group that put out a call for images to express the migrants’ struggle. Many of the artists who responded drew clearly on the precedent of ’60s activist art.

Cesar Maxit, Migrant.

COURTESY NO PAPERS NO FEAR

Doing the Rights Thing

One artist who has managed to bring the art of activism into the academy is Cuba-born Tania Bruguera, recently announced as the winner a Meadows Prize residency awarded by the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University.

Since she launched Immigrant Movement International as a project cosponsored by Creative Time and the Queens Museum in 2011, Bruguera has offered free classes, workshops, pro-bono legal advice, and other services, operating out of a storefront in Corona, Queens. This year, Bruguera plans to spend more time teaching immigrants art history—“not as an end, but as a means to something else,” she explains, using the imagery as a bridge to approach difficult subjects. Bruguera and her team have also been working to develop a visual arsenal for immigrants’ rights, including a ribbon whose blue and brown tones reflects their passage by land and sea.

Tania Bruguera worked with a group at Immigrant Movement International to create a Ribbon for Immigrant Respect.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND IMMIGRANT MOVEMENT INTERNATIONAL.

More recently Immigrant Movement produced a rubber stamp to stamp currency with the notice that immigrants pay taxes, too. The image, and the idea behind it, are partly behind a performative event that the group will stage at “How Much Do I Owe You?”, an exhibition organized by No Longer Empty at the Clock Tower in Long Island City on Saturday, February 16, at 2 p.m.

A rubber stamp made by Immigrant Movement International.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND IMMIGRANT MOVEMENT INTERNATIONAL

Copyright 2013, ARTnews LLC, 48 West 38th St 9th FL NY NY 10018. All rights reserved.

George Lucas’ next act? Opening an art museum

Posted on

 

by

George Lucas may not be directing the new Star Wars movies, but he’s still found ways to occupy his time. In an interview with CBS This Morning today, Lucas took a reporter around Skywalker Ranch and discussed how he intends to open an art museum in the next chapter of his life. “There is a world of young people who need to be inspired,” the prolific art collector explained.

Highlighting his love of Maxfield Parish and Norman Rockwell, Lucas discussed how he learned a lot about storytelling through art, because artists need to tell a whole story in just one frame. He hopes the new museum, which he plans to open in San Francisco, will inspire young people the way paintings inspired him. “[It’s] the idea of being able to paint your fantasies which is what Star Wars was. Star Wars was there to inspire young people to imagine things, to imagine going anywhere in the universe and doing anything you want to do and using your imagination to entertain yourself.”

 

Four-Year-Old Drummer Tyler Clemons, Potential Child Prodigy, Adorably Bangs On His Instrument (VIDEO)

Posted on

KPLC 7 News, Lake Charles, Louisiana

 

Like most 4-year-olds, little Tyler Clemons enjoys banging on objects around the home. So what separates him from the rest of his destruction-prone peers? The answer: a pair of drum sticks and the label “child prodigy.”

In a video posted by Louisiana news outlet KPLC, Clemons is shown in quite possibly the cutest ensemble a toddler has ever worn, grinning as his mother describes him as a prodigious drummer. “He just wouldn’t stop banging on things. All day, everyday,” she says.

Clemons waves his arms in the general vicinity of his instrument and attempts to strike a high hat without falling off his stool. But did we mention his amazing outfit? The 4-year-old is rocking a bow tie and an argyle sweater vest like a professional. When he mistakenly tells the camera he wants to be a “magician” instead of a musician when he grows up, and then slaps about three measures of drumming together, we can’t help but want to pinch his cheeks.

Now we’re just waiting for some actual footage of Clemons playing the drums so we can substantiate his mother’s claims of his greatness. Because if this kid’s musical abilities are anywhere near as fantastic as his colorful get-up, we’re rooting for him. (Who cares if he can only name two components of a drum set?)

Blonde Beyonce: Bey Debuts A New Look For ‘Mrs. Carter Show World Tour’ Promo

Posted on

Beyonce surprised fans on Tuesday evening when she posted a new promo for her upcoming Mrs. Carter Show World Tour.

In the Pepsi-branded poster, four leggy Beyonces are shown with long platinum blonde locks — a color the Grammy-winning performer has never rocked before —

Beyonce kicks off The Mrs. Carter Show world tour on April 15 in Belgrade. She is set to hit major European cities such as Amsterdam, Paris, Milan, and London. Bey will then be off for one month, before returning to the U.S. for a June 28 show in Los Angeles. The Mrs. Carter Show world tour wraps at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center on Aug. 5.

Willie Cole (artist)

Posted on

Willie Cole (artist)
American, born 1955
Domestic ID, V, 1992
steam-iron scorches with graphite on paper mounted in window frame
framed: 46.4 x 116.8 cm (18 1/4 x 46 in.) sheet (sight): 37.5 x 103.5 cm (14 3/4 x 40 3/4 in.)
Gift of Werner H. and Sarah-Ann Kramarsky
1997.92.4
Not on View
From the Tour: African American Artists: Collection Highlights

The imprints of six steam irons mark this work on paper. Beneath each silhouette, in large capital letters, is the name of an iron manufacturer—Casco, General Mills, Monarch, Silex, Presto, with one “unknown.” What do we make of this image, framed in an old window?

For the past twenty years Willie Cole has selected and transformed particular items discarded from our vast consumer culture, such as irons, shoes, and lawn jockeys, into objects that resonate with metaphorical meaning—particularly cross-referencing African cultural history and the African Diaspora. The iron silhouettes in Domestic ID call up the slave era in America, when African women served as forced domestics, and the period after emancipation, when they took in laundry as one of the few lines of work open to them. The irons’ singed imprints also evoke the rituals of scarification, practiced within certain African and other cultures, and branding, which expunged identity to mark humans as slave property—perhaps reinforced by the iron marked “unknown.” Other references inhabit this powerful image—such as the similarity of the iron’s shape to boats that plied the slave trade across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and the near-whiff of heat and steam that seems to evoke the hot, backbreaking work of plantation life.

Mounting his image in a window, Cole literally reframes history in a way that summons the ready-made art of surrealist and Dada artists such as May Ray and Marcel Duchamp. Such wry yet serious correspondences of history, art, and racial politics anchor Cole’s reputation in the art world. Educated at Boston University School of Fine Arts, and the School of Visual Arts (where he received a BFA) and the Art Students League, both in New York, Cole lives in northern New Jersey and has exhibited his work throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Kara Walker – Visual Artist

Posted on
Kara Walker Freedom, a Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times, 1997 Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection

 

Kara Walker (artist)
American, born 1969

From the Tour: African American Artists: Collection Highlights

Freedom, a Fable is an illustrated artist’s book with text and pop-up silhouettes. At first glance it appears to be a nineteenth-century children’s book, but it is decidedly not. It tells the story of a female slave whose life after emancipation veers far from her dreams of meritocracy, revealing that Freedom, a Fable is not just the title of the work but is also the lesson to be learned.

Much of Kara Walker’s work engages the historical art form of the black paper silhouette to re-present African-American history. Her beautiful, laser-cut figures initially attract. But quickly one notices their demeaning postures and exaggerated features, which recall negative stereotypes of African-Americans portrayed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century minstrel shows, novels, and art. Walker’s figures depict a physically and sexually violent antebellum South, often the source of these virulent typologies. Walker’s inversion of the portrait silhouette—a supposedly representative art form—reveals the corrosive power of stereotypes and prejudice. To heighten the irony and poignancy of her message, her cutouts are normally wall-size installations. In contrast, the miniaturized images in Freedom address the viewer on an intimate, personal scale.

Born in Stockton, California, in 1969, Walker moved to Atlanta, Georgia, at age thirteen. Her transition from an integrated town to the racially divided atmosphere of the South had a profound impact on her. She received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, having begun her exploration of the silhouette while in school. At age twenty-seven, Walker received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation award. Her first retrospective exhibition was at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2007.

Mathew Knowles: I’m Proud of Beyoncé

Posted on

By Derrick Bryson Taylor

On Saturday, Beyoncé opened up about splitting ways with her former manager and father Mathew Knowles in her documentary, Life Is But a Dream.

The pop icon explained that the decision to become her own manager wasn’t about selling records, but about having her support system and family back. “I felt like I had to move on and not work with my dad,” said Beyoncé. “I don’t care if I don’t sell one record. This is bigger than the record. It’s bigger than my career. I think one of the biggest reasons I decided it was time for me to manage myself is because at some point you need your support system and you need your family.”

Since their split, both sides have kept quiet. However, Knowles appeared on HLN’s The Showbiz Countdown recently and shared that he’s very proud of his daughter. “I’m proud to see her as a mother,” said Knowles. “I know this was something very important to her and to see her hold Blue Ivy—that’s something very special. I have a picture that no one else will ever get to see of her holding Blue Ivy. You can see the joy in her face.”

The Music World executive dodged personal questions related to grandfathering Blue Ivy but shared he was very proud of his daughter’s performance at President Obama’s inauguration. “When I see her perform, I am so proud,” said Knowles. “It reminds me of when she was a kid. I know all of her dreams have come true. It makes me so proud to see her—an incredible talent. I can tell that special thing when Beyoncé’s really happy. It’s a certain way she dances, it’s a certain smile that she has. And I saw that. It brought tears to my eyes.”

read more…..

African Fashion And Culture Celebrated With Diesel+EDUN Collaboration (VIDEO)

Posted on

The Huffington Post  |  By

Africa is slowly but surely making its presence in the world fashion. The continent has provided endless inspiration for designers, celebrities and virtually anyone who has come in contact with its beauty, which includes us. After visiting Johannesburg this past October for Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Africa, we were hooked.

So, it was a pleasant surprise to learn that EDUN, Bono’s “fashion brand bringing about positive change through its trading relationship with Africa,” was teaming up with Diesel for a 25-piece capsule collection called Diesel+EDUN. Each piece from the line is crafted from Ugandan cotton and manufactured entirely in Africa — a feat that Diesel founder Renzo Rosso says has never been done before.

“With this project we want to show to consumers, and to industry alike, that it is indeed possible to source, produce and generate sustainable trade in Africa,” Rosso told ElleUK.com.

And while the raw, untreated denim and dresses embellished with Kenyan metalwork will no doubt become must-haves, we’re particularly excited about the Diesel+EDUN’s Studio Africa concept.

Studio Africa is described as “a virtual loudspeaker for a new generation of creative talents from across the continent.” Diesel+EDUN rounded up a team of tastemakers from fashion, photography, music, film, music and literature to provide dynamic first-hand accounts via a Tumblr page filled with photo galleries and videos that demonstrate the power of African art and culture.

The collaboration’s official launch was feted on Sunday during Paris Fashion Week with a party attended by Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Nicole Richie and Jessica Alba, to name a few. A special performance was given by Solange Knowles, who serves as an ambassador for the collection.

“My love for African fashion, music and art runs deep to my core and has been a significant source of inspiration to me as an artist,” Solange told ElleUK.com. “I’m constantly being exposed to such innovative African talent so I’m excited that Diesel + Edun is celebrating that extraordinary creativity through Studio Africa and taking me along for the journey!”

Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz Sell Their SoHo Penthouse

Posted on

Better than backstage passes to the Grammys, this triplex penthouse once belonged to Lenny Kravitz and is now being sold by Alicia Keys and her husband, Swizz Beatz.
With over 6,000 square feet of space — including five bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a private spa — it is a home worthy of music industry legends, but for a mere $15 million, it is available to lesser mortals.

NEWARK: Fatimah Tuggar

Posted on
Fatimah Tuggar, Voguish Vista, 2012. Computer montage; inkjet on vinyl, 50 x 72 inches. © Fatimah Tuggar, BintaZarah Studios

 

In/Visible Seams
February 6 – May 12, 2013
MECHANICAL HALL GALLERY
30 North College Avenue
Newark, DE
In/Visible Seams brings together a selection of works by artist Fatimah Tuggar, best known for her large-scale ink-jet on vinyl prints, assemblages and video collages. Developed through processes that include photography, image capture, cut and paste, superimposition, and digital manipulation, Tuggar’s work offers distinct combinations of wit and irony, compassion and critique. Showcasing the artist’s beguiling, often unsettled temporal, spatial, and geographic conjunctions, Fatimah Tuggar: In/Visible Seams includes nineteen computer montages from 1995 to 2012, her renowned video collage, Fusion Cuisine (2000), and the assemblage Tum Tum & Tabarma (1998).
Sourcing a global range of imagery, including her own photographs, and mining archival as well as contemporary media, Tuggar’s fusion images and videos are not fictions per se but rather surreal combines of diverse realities made starker by their juxtaposition. “Borrowing from the realms of advertising, popular entertainment, folklore, and the experiential, I use technology as medium, subject and metaphor,” notes the artist, aiming “to produce artworks that engage how we adapt, modify and are modified by, the implements and systems that define our environments.”
In Fusion Cuisine, post-WWII American commercials promoting new, automated kitchen appliances and in-home designs are intermixed with contemporary footage from northern Nigeria of women carrying out various domestic tasks. This video collage of moving images, sound and animation invites viewers to question whether Western prosperity, industrial design and invention have in fact advanced women’s emancipation. Perceptual and visual disjunctures likewise trouble the surface of Cake People, a computer montage from 2001. While viewing ostensibly a life-size “snap” of a teenager celebrating her sixteenth birthday, we are drawn into and trapped by the associative values assigned to “tradition,” “modern,” “Western,” and “African” embedded in Tuggar’s cakes and cake pan.
Collage and montage strike beyond surface representation; what appears to be visual incongruity is more acutely the byproduct of social, historical, racial and gendered constructions. Economies of seeing and visual tropes of place, nation, gender, and ethnicity all play a role as Tuggar strives to “challenge the segregated borders of aesthetic and cultural perceptions and to facilitate diverse ways of knowing and making.”
Tuggar has long been interested in the potential of modification, the reuse of one thing for another: in much of her early work, she endeavored to reposition the image of the black female through a process of re- and de-familiarization, challenging dogmas and preconceived notions of Africa and black women in both the private and public spheres. This strategy of deconstructing aspects of the image to challenge conventional perceptions and attachments to static ways of looking remains seminal to her work. Her evocation of seemingly irreconcilable “realities” has been compared with work by early twentieth-century Dada and Surrealist artists as well as postwar British pop artists—Richard Hamilton of the Independent Group, in particular; Tuggar herself acknowledges an early attraction to the often loaded and politically contentious photomontages by the German artist John Heartfield (1891-1968). In/Visible Seams draws attention to her use of overlapping visual codes and their manufactured and fractured meanings as the artist deconstructs their authoritative place in representational significance.
Created for the Harlem Postcards project of the Studio Museum in Harlem, Voguish Vista (2012) is a composite image, incorporating photographs taken by Tuggar in Harlem and other found imagery. The merging of American Apparel, a global retailer, and Daisy Fashion Design, a local merchant that “brings African design to NYC,” challenges interpretations of location and fashion as reliable signifiers. Overlaying the storefront window, visible as though a reflection, is an image capturing the Occupy Wall Street movement. Harbingers of the reflected slogan, “the 99% will not be silenced,” the five female figures in Voguish Vista serve as standard-bearers of fashion and global interdependency—one wears an “African” print dress patterned with a portrait of Barack Obama and the American flag.
Visually alluring and content-rich, Tuggar’s images encourage multiple readings, offering, in the artist’s words, the “chance to retell history and restructure hegemonic conditions” as well as to invite conversations about the make-up and process of image construction. Ultimately, the reorientation of perception, visual and otherwise, is what Tuggar’s art asks each viewer to undertake.
Born in 1967 in Kaduna, Nigeria, Fatimah Tuggar attended the Blackheath School of Art in London, received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and her MFA from Yale University. She is a graduate of the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, and currently on the faculty of the University of Memphis. Among Tuggar’s honors are the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, 2002; the Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship, awarded by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, 2008; and grants from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, New York, 1999. Her work has been exhibited widely in over twenty-five countries, most recently in the USA in The Fertile Crescent: Gender, Art and Society, Rutgers University, 2012; The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, 2010 and On-Screen: Global Intimacy, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2009.
— Julie L. McGee, Curator of African American Art
Posted Yesterday by

Bobby Womack

Posted on
Soul music legend hits a High “C” wearing eye sculptures by Cyrus Kabiru

Appointed fellow of TEDGlobal 2012, Cyrus Kabiru is a self-taught painter and sculptor living and working in Nairobi, Kenya. His paintings show life in Nairobi with wit and charm, depicting figures with bulging eyes satirizing the everyday experiences of an important African capital city. Working with found objects, his sculpture is built on the notion of (in Kabiru’s own words) “giving trash a second chance.” Weaving together materials such as bottle tops, shoe polish tins, wire and cutlery, he is most renowned for his series of wearable eye sculpture called C-STUNNERS.

 — Emma Cavendish for Under the Influence magazine (Fall/Winter 2012)

 




Posted 12 hours ago by