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 … Continue reading Artist a Day: Maya Angelou
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. … Continue reading Artist a Day: Audre Lorde
Today’s post and featured artist is about process. Recently I’ve been hyper-focused on routines and how sometimes those routines fail us, leaving us caught in a terrible rut. When I find myself stuck, I try to make one small change in my daily routine. It may be a change of direction in my daily walks … Continue reading Artist a Day: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
“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 … Continue reading Artist a Day: Alexandra Bell
In 1957, a 27-year-old Lorraine Hansberry was busy writing a play when out of sheer exhaustion and frustration she threw the manuscript into the trash. Two years later that discarded text became a theatrical hit when a Raisin in the Sun premiered on Broadway in 1959 and paved the way for Hansberry’s highly decorated career as … Continue reading Artist a Day: Lorraine Hansberry
“We have, it seems to me, a very curious sense of reality-or rather perhaps, I should say, a striking addiction to irreality.” James Baldwin, Nothing Personal, 1964. The book “Nothing Personal”, a collaboration between writer James Baldwin and photographer Richard Avedon, had an instrumental impact on a young Hilton Als growing up in Brooklyn. … Continue reading Artist a Day: Hilton Als, Nothing Personal
Look, I know it’s dramatic, but 2017 was tough and I’m not even going to try to sugar coat it. Despite this, I saw some incredible work that helped me make some sense of the world we find ourselves in today. Here are 9 highlights: 1. Kenyatta Hinkle, The Evanesced @ CAAM The Evanesced at CAAM … Continue reading The Art that Helped Me Survive 2017
The cover of Robin Coste Lewis’ book, Voyage of the Sable Venus features a Harlem Renaissance era photo of a slim black woman standing on a sidewalk deep in thought. With one hand resting on her hip and the other cradling her chin, the woman is pondering what lies behind the glass window in front … Continue reading Poems and Portraits: Revealing and Reclaiming Blackness in Western Art
When artists leave us too soon we are reminded of their greatness in the items they left behind. Musicians have libraries of unreleased tracks or compositions, photographers leave behind negatives, contact sheets and undeveloped film, painters have hidden canvases or incomplete work and writers leave behind their words—ideas that weren’t fully developed, concepts that never came to … Continue reading Octavia E. Butler: Telling My Stories
James Baldwin, 1945. Portrait by Richard Avedon. Photo Credit, National Portrait Gallery Yesterday’s post about Dawoud Bey took a close look at his 2013 Birmingham Project, a photographic examination of church bombings and deaths that took place in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963. Bey’s work was an attempt to reconcile the present through an examination … Continue reading Artist a Day Challenge (15): James Baldwin
Culture Shock Art 