Category: Black Artists
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Artist a Day: Mary Lovelace O’Neal
“What I wanted to learn to do as a young person was to make a really good painting, a really tough painting…to make art that had balls; not so much that it would change the world, but to have the balls to be beautiful.” Mary Lovelace O’Neal Mary Lovelace O’Neal grew up in the South…
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Artist a Day: Carmen Neely
“You can spend minutes, hours, days, weeks, or even months over-analyzing a situation; trying to put the pieces together, justifying what could’ve, would’ve happened… or you can just leave the pieces on the floor and move the f— on.” Tupac Shakur Much easier said than done, but there’s power in the ability to let go.…
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Artist a Day: Juan Logan
“It was just an old passenger train from Dixie to the Midwest, with no amenities of any kind. No lights, no reading, nothing to do but make friends with the sounds of the night train. The wheels on the track made endless patterns, and I was caught up in it almost at once….From this I…
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Artist a Day: Maya Angelou
This is a post about the Sunday blues; the dreaded point in the day that woefully signals the weekend is over, and the next week’s anxiety starts to chase you from behind. Someone once described this feeling to me like the 60 Minutes clock, and I’ve never forgotten it. Somehow at 7:00 pm the clock’s…
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Artist a Day: Revisiting Shawn Walker
The New York Times recently reported that photographer Shawn Walker, one of the founding members of New York’s Kamoinge Collective, will have his work added to the collection of the Library of Congress. The acquisition of over 100,000 photos, negatives and other material is being collected and archived in conjunction with the Photography Collections Preservation…
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Artist a Day: Adrienne Raquel
I love highlighting photographers on the blog and noticed that in prior year’s Artist a Day posts I focused on the work of Black male photographers, with the one exception being Ming Smith. I thought it was time to highlight current photographers who are forging new paths in fashion photography that radically define redefine how…
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Artist a Day: Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde was born today in 1934 and I’m thinking about her most notable quotes while reading her essays this evening. They give me pause, because the timelessness of her writing is of great comfort now. Our great writers and thinkers deserved so much more than we what gave them when they were with us.…
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Artist a Day: Radcliffe Bailey
Artist Radcliffe Bailey conducts a unique form of artistic alchemy through the use of his keen sense of curiosity, his penchant for found materials, and his mined memory that he combines to preserve the legacies of people who may otherwise be forgotten to time. Bailey’s practice draws on specific memories, one of which is a…
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Artist a Day: Dox Thrash (cont.)
On Saturday I posted a piece by Dox Thrash called “Saturday Night”, and it’s only fitting that I post this complimentary work called “Sunday Morning”.
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Artist a Day: Dox Thrash
Dox Thrash (1893-1965) grew up in Georgia in the early 1900s with a childhood love for art that would lead him toward self-study of the practice through correspondence courses. His goal was to attend an art school that admitted Black students and the Great Migration led Thrash to Chicago where he studied at the Art…
Colony Little, Culture Shock Art 