Category: new york
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Artist a Day: Ming Smith
As a young model in New York, Ming Smith was drawn to photography and portraiture. Her friendship with photographer Anthony Barboza cultivated her artistic interests and she eventually became the first woman to join New York’s Kamoinge’s photography collective. In 1975 MoMA acquired one of her works making Smith the first Black woman photographer represented…
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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: 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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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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Artist a Day: Lorna Simpson
Lorna Simpson’s work body of multi-media work is so diverse it’s too hard to single out just one work for discussion, but I’m picking a piece she created in 2016 that I recently saw at the Tate Modern. Then and Now is an appropriated photo from the Detroit riots of 1967—a screen-printed tableau that’s split…
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Artist a Day: Jamel Shabazz
Before Rap Squats became a meme, any musical artist coming out of the 1980’s had to have a perfect album cover pose, and Jamel Shabazz’s photography captured the look. His portraits not only gave us a contemplative look at Brooklyn in the 1980’s and 1990’s, his ability to connect to his…
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Artist a Day: Alexandra Bell
“Words work as release–well-oiled doors opening and closing between intention, gesture. A pulse in a neck, the shiftiness of the hands, an unconscious blink, the conversations you have with your eyes translate everything and nothing. What will be needed, what goes unfelt, unsaid-what has been duplicated, redacted here, redacted there, altered to hide or disguise—words…
Colony Little, Culture Shock Art 