Traveling without a Map: Navigating Invitations and Provocations

Another year in the books.  January 1, 2022 started just like 2021. I made gumbo and black eyed peas, watched the Twilight Zone Marathon…then I got to business clipping and pasting images, creating my vision board to chart my course for the year. However, there was one notable omission from my annual plan; I didn’t … Continue reading Traveling without a Map: Navigating Invitations and Provocations

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 … Continue reading Artist a Day: Alexandra Bell

Artist a Day: Hilton Als, Nothing Personal

“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

Poems and Portraits: Revealing and Reclaiming Blackness in Western Art

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

Octavia E. Butler: Telling My Stories

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