Tag: writing
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2024 Year in Review
Editorial Note: In the absence of a Substack, which I am going to continue to spare you from in the short term, (you’re welcome) my blog posts are purely refections on my freelance work. I need to hold space for broader ideas that are always percolating (I’m manifesting a book proposal here), so continue to…
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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…
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Guideposts to Grace
This week I sat down numerous times to recall the highlights of 2021 and how they shaped my writing this year. So many of these positive memories were nearly eclipsed by personal loss and the neverending distractions from the news cycle. Throughout this year I found solace in the visual image. Art continues to be…
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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…
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Octavia Butler’s Radio Imagination
One of the best books I read in 2016 was Kindred by Octavia Butler and one of the most powerful essays I read in 2016 was “Broken Defaced and Unseen: the Hidden Black Female Figures of Western Art”, by Robin Coste Lewis. One work explored time travel, slavery and the black female body while the other takes the…
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On Sabbatical: Notes from the Rabbit Hole
The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice. `Who are YOU?’ said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, `I–I hardly know, sir,…
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Superscript Speculation
In preparation for tomorrow’s 2015 Superscript conference on media and art criticism, the Walker Center has published a virtual interview series probing industry influencers to speculate on the future of arts journalism in an environment where access to and consumption of art has gone through a dynamic shift in the last 10 years. The key…
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Artist a Day Challenge: Hank Willis Thomas x James Baldwin
For the past week I’ve been thinking about James Baldwin; so much so that I was searching for an original copy of “The Price of the Ticket”. In the meantime, it’s Armory Week in NY and all I am hearing about is Hank Willis Thomas and his art.sy collaboration. While looking at Thomas’ work on-line…
Colony Little, Culture Shock Art 