Category: Art
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Artist a Day: Tom Lloyd
Tom Lloyd’s light art holds a unique position in the history of the Studio Museum of Harlem. When the museum held its first exhibition in 1968, it chose Lloyd’s electronic sculptures in a show titled, Electronic Refractions. According to the museum the work defied expectations as a departure from figurative Black art showing even at its…
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Artist a Day: William T. Williams
I’ve been thinking about the traveling exhibition Soul of a Nation and the artists, particularly the abstract painters from this era and how they approached their work during the tumultuous societal and economic shifts that took place between the 1960s and 1970s in New York. One common thread among many of the artists in the Black Arts…
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Artist a Day: Barbara Jones-Hogu
Barbara Jones-Hogu was one of the 5 founding members of South Chicago’s AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists). The collective came together in 1968 to identify and cultivate a cohesive artistic voice around Black art that speaks to aesthetics, and more importantly to the viewer’s experience as Black Americans. Jones-Hogu’s contributions to AfriCOBRA…
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Artist a Day: Hale Woodruff
As a WPA muralist in the 1930s Hale Woodruff was commissioned to create a series of murals for Talladega College in Alabama. His rich, vivid paintings depict historical events from African Americans’ journey from slavery to freedom. It’s easy to see the affinity he shared with artists like Diego Rivera whom Woodruff spent time with…
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Artist a Day: Charles Alston
Charles Alston’s extensive artistic career revolved around painting, sculpture, and murals where he created work that beautifully went in unpredictable directions. That was deliberate, and it’s what makes his work and career so fascinating. In a 1968 interview, Alston critiques, quite presciently, the art world’s tendency to place artists in familiar, predictable boxes: “[O]ne of…
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Artist a Day: Romare Bearden
When learning about the work of Emma Amos, I read an interview where she recounted an interesting story about Romare Bearden and Spiral. They were planning their first group show, which was simply titled “works in black and white”, and during one of their weekly meetings Bearden threw a bunch of black and white clippings…
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With Gratitude, So Long 2018!
One of the last shows I attended in 2018 was the Fowler Museum’s Striking Iron: The Art of African Blacksmiths. Of the 200+ works on display which included tools, totems, weapons, jewelry, and adornments, the most interesting items told stories of people who commissioned blacksmiths to create pieces that told their life story. Other works…
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Karon Davis Explores the Spirit of Home and What it Means When We Must Leave it Behind: Muddy Water at Wilding Cran
Two separate migration patterns brought Americans from the south and mid-west to California in the early 1900s: The Great Migration and the Dust Bowl. One group fled persecution under racist Jim Crow laws, while the other fled droughts exacerbated by over farming. The economic and social impacts of these migrations not only shaped the state…
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The Getty Acquires Betye Saar’s Artistic Archive and Dedicates $5M for Scholarly Research of African American Art
Last month the Getty Research Institute announced that they have pledged an initial $5M dollar investment to fund an ambitious program dedicated to curatorial research and scholarship of African-American art. The African American Art History Initiative will place the GRI at the center of scholarly research in Black art on the west coast and will…
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“Project Blue Boy” Gives Visitors a Glimpse Into an Historic Restoration
The Huntington Library acquired The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough in 1921, and it has graced the walls of the Library as one of it’s crown jewels ever since. The piece has never been loaned or taken out of view for an extended period of time, and the only exception was made in 2017 when…
Colony Little, Culture Shock Art 