Willoughby Avenue, an advertising agency & publisher, will launch KINDR’D Magazine, a new print publication in 2018, featuring the Travel, Art & Cultural experiences of People of Color. KINDR’D Magazine, published twice a year, will be a photo-rich publication with a clean design throughout each of its 250+ pages. The Summer/Fall and Winter/Spring issues will share the stories of and by People of Color, who are committed to their respective passions.
Read MoreThe Impressive Profile of French Film Storyboard Artist and Painter Elizabeth Colomba | Shadow and Act
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…
Read MoreNick Cave: Using materials that range from twigs to crystals to rainbow-colored hair, the artist makes sculptures that, for all their beauty, are visceral and necessary critiques of racial injustice. | The New York Times
Megan O’Grady, The New York Times THE INAUGURATION OF Nick Cave’s Facility, a new multidisciplinary art space on Chicago’s Northwest Side, has the feeling of a family affair. In April, inside the yellow-brick industrial building, the classical vocalist Brenda Wimberly and the keyboardist Justin Dillard give a special performance for a group that includes local friends, curators and…
Read MoreMeryAnne Loum-Martin Is The Only Black Woman to Own and Operate A Hotel In Morocco, and She’s A Bonafide Boss | Essence
Enuma Okoro, Essence MeryAnne Loum-Martin Is The Only Black Woman to Own and Operate A Hotel In Morocco, and She’s A Bonafide Boss It can be an interesting and beautiful thing in life that we rarely end up where we imagined. And often it is the challenges along the way that propel us to discover…
Read MoreStriking Portraits Featuring Powerful Women of Color Painted by Artist Tim Okamura | Colossal
Grace Ebert, Colossal In his portraits of women, Brooklyn-based painter Tim Okamura explores the human relationship to identity. His powerful works largely feature a single black woman in an exceptionally strong pose, with some pieces including natural elements like butterflies and rodents and others using graffiti reminiscent of city landscapes. Originally from Canada, Okamura “investigates identity, the…
Read MoreVibrant Quilts Honor Black Men and Women Whose Stories Were Forgotten or Overlooked | My Modern Met
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…
Read MorePainter Elizabeth Colomba Is Giving Art’s Hidden Figures Their Close-Up | Vogue
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…
Read MoreHow Jacob Lawrence Painted a Radical History of the American Struggle | Smithsonian Magazine
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…
Read MorePamela J. Joyner’s ‘Mission-Driven Collection’ of African-American Art Looks to Reframe History | ARTnews
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…
Read MoreA Time Line to Post-Soul Black Culture | The Village Voice
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…
Read MoreBird | The New Yorker
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…
Read MoreWhy Alfred Conteh Is The Dopest Artist You Never Heard Of | BLACKSTEW News (Medium)
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…
Read MoreThe History of Spiritual Jazz: Hear a Transcendent 12-Hour Mix Featuring John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Herbie Hancock & More | Open Culture
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…
Read MoreThe Story of Charles Ethan Porter, an African American Still-Life Painter | Hyperallergic
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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