Below is a small collection of facts, images, links and videos to help you discover the artwork, artists and influences in the Black community. Before you begin, I ask that you take a moment and try to recall a Black visual artist. Can you name one? how about two? For many, this is a challenge. However, if asked to name a white artist most of us can do so fairly quickly. I challenge you to take some time to learn and appreciate more artists of color. Please explore the collection.
HARLEM RENAISSANCE
This art movement began after World War I (1917) and lead up to World War II (1930's). "Artists associated with the movement asserted pride in black life and identity, a rising consciousness of inequality and discrimination, and interest in the rapidly changing modern world—many experiencing a freedom of expression through the arts for the first time. While the Harlem Renaissance may be best known for its literary and performing arts—pioneering figures such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, and Ma Rainey may be familiar—sculptors, painters, and printmakers were key contributors to the first modern Afrocentric cultural movement and formed a black avant-garde in the visual arts." htmlwww.nga.gov/education/teachers/lessons-activities/uncovering-america/harlem-renaissance.html |
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FREEDOM QUILTS
It is said, that "a safe house along the Underground Railroad was often indicated by a quilt hanging from a clothesline or windowsill. These quilts were embedded with a kind of code, so that by reading the shapes and motifs sewn into the design, an enslaved person on the run could know the area’s immediate dangers or even where to head next. Sharon Tindall is a Virginia-based quilter, educator, and one in a tradition of contemporary quilters who design textile works inspired by this “quilt code.” Tindall hopes her handmade quilts hanging in the Johnson House, a crucial station on the Underground Railroad and now a National Historic Site in Philadelphia, embody the spirit of the house and the presence of those who passed through. Built in 1768 in the heart of Germantown, Johnson House’s woodwork, flooring, and glass are all original to the house." https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/underground-railroad-quilt-codes |
NDEBELE TRIBE & ESTHER MAHLANGU
(N-da-billy) Esther Mahlangu was born in Middelburg South Africa in 1935. She started painting when she was 10 years old. It wasn't until she was 54, that her work was first recognized by the international community. She was the first non-western person, and first women, to commission the BMW Art Car. Her work includes paintings on the tails of plans, and commercial products with celebrities such as John Legend to help in the fight agains HIV/AIDS. "The Ndebele custom of painting the exterior walls of houses was traditionally performed by the women of the community, transmitted from one generation to the next. The elaborately-painted patterns and graphic elements composed of rectangle, triangle, chevron and diamond shapes heralded news of important life events such as a birth, death, wedding or a boy heading off to initiation school. “When you get married, you paint your first house,” Mahlangu relates. “It’s very important to have straight lines and not zigzag lines because your family members will come and look. If your lines are perfectly straight, then you are a very good wife and can look after your family.” A traditional art combining social and decorative functions, it also became a symbol of resistance against the Boer farmers initially, then against the British expansion and finally against the apartheid regime. A means of information and communication, the large wall paintings denoted combat, cultural ties and the affirmation of identity at the same time." www.forbes.com/sites/yjeanmundelsalle/2019/06/07/esther-mahlangu-one-of-south-africas-most-famous-artists-perpetuates-traditional-ndebele-painting/?sh=610c9b4a1501 |
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KEHINDE WILEY
Wiley is best known for painting young black men, often placing them into versions of portraits from art history that were traditionally associated with the poses of colonists. His paintings force us to confront our notions of wealth, importance, race, and gender. "Without shying away from the complicated socio-political histories relevant to the world, Wiley’s figurative paintings and sculptures “quote historical sources and position young black men within the field of power.” His heroic paintings evoke a modern style instilling a unique and contemporary manner, awakening complex issues that many would prefer remain mute." |
KARA WALKER
Walker's art usually takes form as silhouettes. Her intent is to make you feel a lot while providing you simple figures to visually process, she explains that she "says a lot with very little information." "Walker's images are really about racism in the present, and the vast social and economic inequalities that persist in dividing America. More like riddles than one-liners, these are complex, multi-layered works that reveal their meaning slowly and over time." With this said, be warned if you go looking for more images by Walker, they can be graphic. This would be a good time to remind you that your browser history on school computers/wifi is recorded and you are responsible for the images and links you linger or click on. :) |
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JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
Basquiat "was an influential African-American artist who rose to success during the 1980s. Basquiat’s paintings are largely responsible for elevating graffiti artists into the realm of the New York gallery scene., his spray-painted crowns and scribbled words, referenced everything from his Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage, to political issues, pop-culture icons, and Biblical verse. “If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you've got to realize that influence is not influence,” he said of his process. “It's simply someone's idea going through my new mind.” Born on December 22, 1960 in Brooklyn, NY, Basquiat never finished high school but developed an appreciation for art as a youth, from his many visits to the Brooklyn Museum of Art with his mother. His early work consisted of spray painting buildings and trains in downtown New York alongside his friend Al Diaz. The artist’s tag was the now infamous pseudonym SAMO." http://www.artnet.com/artists/jean-michel-basquiat/ |
AMY SHERALD
Amy Sherald is an American painter based in Baltimore, Maryland. She is best known for her painting the official portrait of Michelle Obama. She is well known for using a gray-scale to portray skin tones in her work as a way of "challenging the concept of color-as-race." Her choices of subjects broaden the genre of American art historical realism by telling African-American stories. Through her portraits, Sherald explores the ways people construct and perform their identities in response to political, social, and cultural expectations. |
AARON FOWLER
Fowler’s larger-than-life works are at once paintings, sculptures, and installations. They are made from everyday discarded items and materials sourced from the artist’s local surroundings in Los Angeles and St. Louis, among other places. Items include cotton balls, security gates, afro wigs, hair weaves, broken mirrors, djellabas, sand, broken-down movie sets, found car parts, ropes, lights, and much more. Taking compositional cues from American history painting, religious iconography, and family lore, Fowler inserts both imagined narratives and real stories from his own experiences and those of his friends and family. Each work illustrates a poignant subject, event, or action he wishes to manifest—from portraits of incarcerated loved ones being freed to fantastical scenarios incorporating historical figures alongside friends, role models, contemporary public icons, and often his own likeness. https://www.seattleartmuseum.org/visit/calendar/events?EventId=65036 |
KERRY JAMES MARSHALL
Marshall is an American artist born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1955. He grew up in South Central Los Angeles and now lives in Chicago, Illinois, where he previously taught at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a 1978 graduate of Otis College of Art and Design. An exhibition of his work, Kerry James Marshall: Mastry, was assembled by the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2016. Marshall is known for large-scale paintings, sculptures, and other objects that take African-American life and history as their subject matter. In a 1998 interview with Bomb Magazine, Marshall observed, "Black people occupy a space, even mundane spaces, in the most fascinating ways. Style is such an integral part of what black people do that just walking is not a simple thing. You've got to walk with style. You've got to talk with a certain rhythm; you've got to do things with some flair. And so in the paintings I try to enact that same tendency toward the theatrical that seems to be so integral a part of the black cultural body." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerry_James_Marshall |
AUTHORS (Artists of Words)
bell hooks
An author, professor and activist. bell hooks actually was her great-grandmother's name. She used it as her pen name to honor her. hooks never capitalized her name because she wanted the emphasis and attention to be on her work, not on her. Her writing on gender and race is said to have push feminism beyond its white, middle-class worldview, to include the voices of Black and working-class women. |