KINDR'D shares the Travel, Art & Cultural Experiences of People of Color.
Artist Bisa Butler creates colorful quilts that have a narrative twist. Identifying herself as “essentially a portrait artist who uses fibers and quilting as a medium,” she crafts pictures of people using the same conceptual approaches that a painter would a canvas. The results are striking. While we might picture a quilt as displaying geometric designs, there’s a beautiful…
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A rainy morning in Paris in 1863. On the wet cobblestone street, a handsome black woman in a colorful head wrap, carrying an umbrella, is looking straight out from the canvas. I’m in the studio of Elizabeth Colomba, a French-born, New York–based artist, and this is the painting she’s just finished. Slightly behind the central…
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The Peabody Essex Museum is reuniting a series of paintings that explore the hidden stories of the nation’s formative years Between 1949 and 1954, Jacob Lawrence made countless trips from his home in Brooklyn to the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library, where he scoured history books, letters, military reports and other documents…
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Elizabeth Colomba in her studio via NEW YORKER I’m not sure how many of you are aware of film storyboard artist Elizabeth Colomba; I sure wasn’t, and in case you weren’t either, I wanted to profile and share some of her fascinating work. What’s worth noting is that Colomba has done extensive storyboard and visual…
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The following is one of several extended looks into figures and institutions selected for “The Deciders,” a list of art-world figures pointing the way forward developed by ARTnews and special guest editor Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean. See the full list in the Winter 2020 issue of the magazine and online here. Pamela Joyner has some advice for collectors who…
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From ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song’ in 1971 to Spike Lee’s ‘Malcom X’ in 1992. 1971 ■ MELVIN VAN PEEBLES’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song premieres in Detroit in March, signaling a new direction in African American film and culture. Directed guerrilla-style in Watts, it ridicules SIDNEY POITIER’s ultra-assimilated image, instigates Hollywood’s blaxploitation era, and projects rebellious black heroism in visual…
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The brilliance of Charlie Parker. Arista Records, a relatively new company that helps mind the avant-garde, has recently purchased the invaluable Savoy Records catalogue, and its first reissue is “Charles Christopher Parker, Jr.: Bird / The Savoy Recordings” (Savoy SJL 2201). The album includes the original masters of the thirty sides Parker recorded for Savoy between 1944 and…
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Point ‘Em Out is an editorial series where Ida Harris explores the latest and the greatest in Black art. Thanks to modern-day technology, we get to be virtual consumers of yesterday’s icons and today’s most innovative Black artwork, and — if we’re lucky — the Black geniuses who produce them (BLACKSTEW) — According to astronomy, the…
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Karen Chernick, Open Culture Jazz has inspired a great many things, and a great many things have inspired jazz, and more than a few of the music’s masters have found their aspiration by looking — or listening — to the divine. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they subscribe to traditional religion. As befits this naturally eclectic music that grew from…
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Karen Chernick, Hyperallergic Porter’s struggle, and the ensuing invisibility of his work, are as much a part of his story as his masterful paintings that dignify humble everyday objects. At the end of his life, Charles Ethan Porter’s walls were covered with a career’s worth of paintings portraying apples, cherries, and corn, but he tragically…
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