"We took a direct hit," Moore said. "The permanent exhibit was devastated."

Moore and his team rescued most of the temporary exhibit about George Washington Carver, including artifacts on loan from Iowa State University, the Tuskegee Institute and the inventor's birthplace in Missouri. The staff saved Carver's original plant specimens, his drawings, some baskets he wove, and a few small items he embroidered and knitted.

Curators and conservation experts from around the country have offered to help, and potential donors are still waiting to see what the museum needs.

Fundraising is a perennial challenge for all nonprofits, but Moore suspects the flooding disaster is so extreme that supporters will readily reach for their checkbooks.

"Capital money is usually easier to raise," he said. Since the building opened five years ago, the museum has established more credibility and attracted more donors from throughout the state.

Fundraising "used to be really, really tough. And now it's just tough," he said. Please contact the website for further information or to make a contribution.

Art of Pride

Art of Pride strives to encourage understanding among all people by providing a format for LGBT artists and their allies.

On July 21-22, 2007, many of us participated in the San Diego LGBT Pride weekend. Twenty-six diverse artists presented their works to the majority of the 40,000 people who walked into the Festival gates.

We hope our site provides a venue for a diversity of crafts, media and styles.

Find more information at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/artofpride/ or write artofpride@sbcglobal.net

RECOGNIZE! is part of the Portraiture Now series, which focuses on contemporary artists and new ways of making portraits. This exhibit helps illustrate these parameters — Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp are graffiti artists, who write under a pseudonym, or a “tag.” As the wall text explains, a tag is like a self-portrait, and artists perform “without a public audience.” Their portraits may not be traditional, but they're a vibrant statement about contemporary life.

The portraits by Kehinde Wiley all but steal the show — Wiley depicts Ice T as Napoleon in the famous Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres painting of the emperor. Ice T wields a scepter and sits on a robe, but wears a baseball cap in lieu of a crown. There’s also a portrait of LL Cool J in which he’s sitting in a chair against a patterned backdrop that is characteristic of Wiley’s paintings. The portrait is based on the John Singer Sargent portrait of John D. Rockefeller, because LL thinks of himself as a modern-day Rockefeller.

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New York, NY (BlackNews.com) - On Tuesday, February 19 Swann

Elizabeth Catlett, Head, painted terra cotta sculpture, 1947. This is the artist's first terra cotta work to come to auction. Estimate: $180,000 to $200,000.

Galleries will conduct the third auction organized by their new African-American Fine Art department. The sale offers 250 paintings, drawings, collages, prints and sculpture from notable collections and estates, and illustrates the full panorama of achievement by African-American artists--from Henry Ossawa Tanner to Faith Ringgold. Many of the works are recognizable because they have been included in important museum exhibitions and illustrated in catalogues and monographs.

There is a wonderful assembly of early and important artwork by Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas, including Emperor Jones, gouache on illustration board,1926, one of few known studies for the well-known woodcut series (estimate: $30,000 to $50,000); Young Man in Repose, oil on canvas, circa 1934-5, a poignant work from the artist's New York period ($30,000 to $50,000); a beautiful Haitian Landscape, oil on canvas, one of a few paintings from the artist's 1938 travels on a Rosenwald Foundation fellowship ($50,000 to $75,000); and Building More Stately Mansions, oil on canvas board, 1944, a smaller variant of one of his most famous paintings at Fisk University ($100,000 to $150,000). The first-ever retrospective of Douglas's work is currently on tour throughout the United States.

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By Agustin Gurza

WORKING TOGETHER: John Outterbridge and Jane Castillo’s fabric piece “Outcast” is in the complementary exhibition “Common Ground.”

The insult (not the first he had encountered) might be seen as more evidence of that racial animosity, currently fueling the notion that some Latinos are cool to Sen. Barack Obama because he's black. But West considered the gesture an anomaly and went on to shoot some hoops with his Mexican friends and colleagues.

In fact, the historian says he's been accepted as family in some parts of Mexico, thanks to his wife, Ilda Jimenez, a Mexican American anthropologist he met when they were students at USC. The union of the two communities is reflected in their surname, which they changed to Jimenez y West. Today, as history curator at the California African American Museum, Christopher Jimenez y West continues to explore the often overlooked cultural connections between the country's two largest minorities. This week, he was busy preparing for the opening of a groundbreaking exhibition, "The African Presence in México: From Yanga to the Present," which celebrates what is called the Third Root of Mexican culture, adding African to the mix of European and native Indian.

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Cole said in a telephone interview from his studio that he was familiar with the Louisville event: One of his works was selected to be in it in 1998.

"One of the most important things about the exhibit is it gives African Americans a way to show their work," he said.

That said, Cole added that this aspect of the exhibit is not all that is important.

There has been "a big surge" in "market respect" of African-American art in the past 10 years. Cole pointed to the example of African-American artist Kara Walker, who is lauded as, simply, a contemporary American artist exploring race and gender, identity, violence and propriety with takeoffs on the Victorian black silhouette.

"All of a sudden, the content of work by African-American artists is OK," he said

"Kentucky Arcana," a print by artist UPFROMSUMDIRT from Midway, Ky., will be part of the 14th Annual African American Art Exhibit at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

Cole counts "a lot of ballplayers," such as Michael Jordan and Darrell Walker, among his 750 collectors, also including the Yale University Art Gallery; Tampa Museum; Corcoran Gallery Museum in Washington, D.C.; the Dayton (Ohio) Institute of Art; and the College Board of New York City.

It used to be, Cole said, that black artists "were not able to show (in the mainstream art world) if it was specific 'black content.' " That no longer necessarily is true. And the opposite side of the coin, that a black artist could be "too white" and yet "too black," is shifting, as well.

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I had the privilege of meeting Reduell Crowder. He's an 18 year old black male in the state of Tennessee. A senior in high school fulfilling a dream as a Singer and Artist. Reduell is a true Leo to his heart. His love and passion to paint free lance for the last five years and his music as a singer for two years in R & B.

Reduell had a ruff life as a child coming up. He was raised by his mother who was at the time on drugs heavily;  then later he move in with his father which he really dreaded.

He and his father were not close at all. Unfortunately they never bonded like most people. Those three years were hell for Reduell. The only good thing that happen in his life is his mother did finally get drug free and as of today she is still drug free.