Vibrant 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…

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Pamela 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…

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A 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…

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Bird | 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…

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The 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…

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Nick 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…

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