Saturday, June 29, 2013
Whitfield Lovell
Whitfield Lovell, a 2007 MacArthur Fellowship winner, is internationally renowned for his thought-provoking images of anonymous African Americans from the 19th and 20th centuries. Using old black and white photographs taken in the early and mid-twentieth century, and more recently, imagery from contemporary sources, the Bronx born and raised artist pays tribute to his ancestors by spiriting them into the present. HunterMuseum
Monday, June 24, 2013
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden was originally from Charlotte, North Carolina. Grew up during the heart of the Harlem Renesance and graduated from NYU. He was surrounded by the New York city jazz scene and was lucky enough to call Duke Ellington one of his first patrons. He began his collage works in the 1960s after working mostly in the realm of abstract painting.
"Born into a middle-class, educated family, he chose subjects for many of
his paintings and collages that represent a life of agrarian toil. An
early trauma came in 1914, when the artist was 3. Walking one day a few
blocks from his family’s grocery store, Bearden, who was light-skinned,
with curly blond hair, was nearly snatched by a white mob from his
darker-skinned father. Shortly after that, the family migrated north to
Harlem, and Bearden’s South became, as he put it, “a homeland of my
imagination.” One essay in the catalog argues that over the next 45
years, Bearden in his art “returned to family scenes that he could not
possibly remember.”NYT
NPR's Neda Ulaby reporteded on The National Gallery of Art's retrospective of Bearden's work in 2003. It was The Gallery's first major
retrospective of an African-American artist.
Sunday, June 23, 2013
The Last Ice Merchant (El Último Hielero)
My good friend, ChrisP, just put me on to this----such a beautiful story.
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Shade Compositions 2012 SFMOMA
Video documenting Rashaad Newsome's performance of Shade Compositions 2012 SFMOMA. The performers enact Newsome's choreographed sound score comprised of repeated sequences of culturally specific or stereotypical gestures, movements, and vocalizations.
Monday, June 17, 2013
Friday, June 7, 2013
Monday, June 3, 2013
Julio César Barrita Sierra
"Fotografías realizadas en la mixteca de Oaxaca, una de las zonas más golpeadas por la migración a nivel nacional. Esta dinámica social ha fracturado a las familias de la zona, dejándolos en el abandono de algún ser querido, las imágenes están realizadas en las casas que construyen los migrantes, sus familiares, y la proyección del migrante.
Proyectar el retrato del migrante en el espacio en el que habitó es regresarle por un momento una añeja relación con los que han quedado y con el hogar que ha permanecido atrás, pero al mismo tiempo la imagen proyectada no puede separarse de su inmaterialidad construida a base de luz, esa inmaterialidad que viven también las personas que han partido. El juntar en una imagen el hogar abandonado, la familia que se ha quedado atrás y la proyección de un migrante que ha partido es un ejercicio de melancolía, un deseo por reconstruir las viejas relaciones, habitar nuevamente lo que se ha deshabitado, cancelar la espera del regreso por unos instantes
Projecting the the migrant’s portrait on the space they once inhabited is to go back momentarily to the previous relationship they held with those who stayed behind and the household that remained behind, but at the same time the projected image cannot overcome its immateriality based in light, this immateriality that’s part of life for the people who are gone. Joining the image with the forsaken household, the family who remained behind and the projection of a departed migrant is an exercise in melancholy, a desire to reconstruct previous relationships, to re-inhabit that which has been forsaken, and to erase for an instant that expectation of homecoming."Migrare
"
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