Category: Black Artists
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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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Artist a Day: Emma Amos
In the summer of 1963 a group of Black artists in New York came together to form a collective to address the precarious state of creating art amidst societal upheaval caused by politics, racism, and social unrest. Led by Romare Bearden, Spiral was formed to tackle these philosophical issues, and its initial members included Hale Woodruff, Norman…
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Unsynthesized Intuitions: Confronting Discomfort with Adrian Piper
As I left Adrian Piper’s “Concepts and Intuitions” at the Hammer museum, I noticed a series of wooden structures resembling voting booths positioned outside of the exhibit’s entrance. I walked into one of the private booths steadying myself as I prepared to write in the binder that was resting on a shelf in front of…
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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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Family Ties: Fashion and Art Collide in the Work of Jack and Bill Whitten
I recently wrote a story about the work and writings of the late artist Jack Whitten for artnet, and in his book called “Notes From the Woodshed”, he shares an interesting recount of a fabric shopping experience with his brother Bill that had a profound impact on the artist. Jack Whitten dedicated one of his…
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Decoding Sunshine-Glenn Ligon at the Broad
Glenn Ligon baffles me—the more I look at his work, the less I understand, and because it’s so layered, I learn something new with every attempt I make to decode a piece. It’s a challenge I gladly accept. In the Broad’s latest group show called “A Journey That Wasn’t” Ligon explores the fluidity of time, race,…
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Anonymous Was a Woman
During the last two months, I’ve been batting around the idea of starting a newsletter to share articles, exhibition announcements, some of my recent publications, etc. , but before I think too deeply about actually doing it, invariably another news crisis, deadline or other distraction ultimately shift my focus elsewhere. This week, two stories captured…
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What’s in a Name? Reflections from the Looking Glass
It happened without fail on the first day of school, always with such a predictable regularity that it became comical. In the first few minutes of a new class, a teacher would fastidiously take roll call, easily cruising through all the last names until they got to the “Ls”. That’s when the knot in my…
Colony Little, Culture Shock Art 