Submitted By John Keasler

Art of Pride is currently seeking fine artists for the 2008 San Diego (CA) Pride Festival. Festival is July 19-20, 2008. We are looking for painters, illustrators, photogs and some scultors for both space rental and juried show.

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

Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture @ The National Portait Gallery

With brightly-colored graffiti murals lining the gallery hallways, and riffs on 17th century Dutch painting, the National Portrait Gallery has brought a breath of fresh air to the often traditional Smithsonian Institution. Last Friday, just weeks after hanging the Stephen Colbert portrait, the NPG opened RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture, a show that’s bound to appeal to a wide-ranging audience. But RECOGNIZE! isn't only about trying to bring a younger audience to a museum — the works on display are powerful evocations of American culture that have a broad appeal both in terms of message and artistic merit. From subtle black and white hip hop performance shots by David Sheinbaum to an ode by poet Nikki Giovanni illustrated with an installation by Shinique Smith, the exhibit captures and gives insight into a cultural movement that is essential to understanding American culture.

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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Outstanding Paintings, Sculpture and Prints by Major Artists Featured in Swann Galleries'

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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A rich exhibition explores blacks' influence on Mexican culture.

By Agustin Gurza

CONSIDERING all the recent speculation about hostility between blacks and Latinos, you have to cringe when you hear what happened to historian Christopher West on a working trip south of the border four years ago. The African American academic was helping research the influence of tourism on children in Isla Mujeres, an idyllic island near Cancun, when a local boy on the street threw a piece of pan dulce at him.

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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By Diane Heilenman

Kevin Cole, a 48-year-old African-American artist based in Atlanta for 22 years, came to Louisville recently to select the 14th Annual African American Art Exhibit, which opens Tuesday at Actors Theatre of Louisville.

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

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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A Young Back Man Painting With A Vision

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.

By Regina Hackett

As many have said before me, Roberta Smith's tribute to Martin Puryear on the occasion of his 30-year retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is a pleasure to read. Tyler Green called it a delight, high praise coming from him, and asked us to imagine the New York Times' arts section without her.

I can't imagine contemporary criticism without her no-nonsense, feet-on-the ground declaratives. Her style is like clear glass. You can see right through it to her subject. She leaves poetics to others and never feels the need to tap dance for attention. Plus, she knows plenty and can clarify complicated ideas without distorting them.

Kara Walker, whose eponymous show is subtitled 'My Complement, My Enemy, My Opressor, My Love.' Her work is on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Feb. 3.

BY ARIELLA BUDICK

In the blistering art of Kara Walker, prim silhouettes wallow in crude sadism, pantomiming the tragic history of race relations in the United States. The 37-year-old African-American art star channels her rage into highly refined installations, films, drawings and paintings that reveal how the shadow of slavery still haunts American culture. Morbid and darkly funny, she delves into the ways blacks and whites alike have been traumatized and twisted by their cruel and mutually destructive history.

An unsettling and intense retrospective of Walker's work is now at the Whitney, inviting us to plunge with her into violence, bestiality and seething passions. She looks back with anger at life in the antebellum South - at the rape, torture, murder and suicide that underlay romantic fantasies of plantation life.

Painter Aaron Douglas has been called 'the father of black American art.' His work exudes hope and optimism.

Aaron Douglas's paintings and illustrations pulsate with the energy and optimism of the Harlem Renaissance, that extraordinary flowering of African-American culture that burst forth in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. While he was not the first black artist to find inspiration in his African heritage, he was the first to consistently blend African imagery with contemporary subject matter and in modernist forms. Douglas, who has been called "the father of black American art," became the premier visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance.

Today, his is not as familiar a name as other luminaries from that era, such as Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, or Zora Neale Hurston. But the organizers of "Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist," a retrospective exhibition at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, hope to bring the artist and his work to a wider audience.

The exhibition is the first major retrospective since the artist's death in 1979 and brings together nearly 100 works that span much of his distinguished career.

Spencer Museum of Art presents Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, on view from September 8, 2007 through December 2, 2007, organized by the Spencer Museum of Art at The University of Kansas, curated by Susan Earle, curator of European and American art and coordinated by Stephanie Knappe, doctoral candidate in art history.

The exhibition and catalogue are made possible through the generous support of the Henry Luce Foundation, with additional funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Office of the Chancellor, The Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist presents the first nationally touring retrospective of the work of Aaron Douglas (1899-1979), the foremost visual artist of the Harlem Renaissance. A native of Topeka, Kansas, and a socially conscious artist, Douglas vividly captured the spirit of his time and established a new black aesthetic and utopian vision.

 

OPENS FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2007, 6-9pm
"AMERICAN CUISINE"
New work by RAMEKON O'ARWISTERS (SuperART Hero)
Through OCTOBER 14, 2007

Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco
509 Ellis Street (btw. Leavenworth and Hyde) SF, CA 94109 http://www.luggagestoregallery.org/content/view/223/51/
Gallery hours: Wednesday - Saturday, Noon - 5 PM

Contact: Darryl Smith or Laurie Lazer Directors 415.255.5971

 

By Lindsay Pollock

Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- A collection of black art owned by Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Co. in Los Angeles has been carted off to be auctioned in New York, infuriating local art historians who want it to remain in California.

Golden State plans to sell 94 artworks on Oct. 4 at Swann Galleries. The paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings are expected to sell for as much as $1.5 million.

Communist Cuba hasn't exactly been tolerant of homosexuality and transvestitism.

In the late 1960s, Cubans were sent to labour camps simply for being gay, with the state deriding homosexuality as an illness of the capitalist past. Even today, some Cuban transvestites are detained by police and threatened with prison for the crime of "peligrosidad," or "dangerousness."

But a new tolerance creeping into the system over the last decade helped contribute to what many believed they would never see on the island: a photo exhibit by Robert Mapplethorpe, an American photographer known for his homoerotic images.

Hansen’s Entertainment Corner

Love Rained Down On Me:  For The Love Of My Nubian Brother

An interview with J. D. Dragan, a fine arts photographer of male nudes depicting men of color.

Kenyan artists have for the first time staged a street art festival to showcase urban youth creativity.

The festival, called Sanaa Noma -Kiswahili slang for Good Art - was staged in Nairobi's Godown Art Centre located on the edge of the main industrial area.

The two week-long festival featured a variety of street art, from graffiti to sign-writing, poetry and dance stage shows and hip-hop performances.

See More Images in GBMNews Art Gallery

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/07/africa_nairobi_street_art/html/6.stm

Effie Mae Howard was selling household goods at a Marin County flea market, back in 1985, when a customer asked her if she knew any African-American quilt makers.

Howard, who was black, mentioned that she did a little quilting herself. She gave the man, an Oakland, Calif., resident named Eli Leon, her phone number. He called and arranged to come to see her work.

May 21, 2007 -- A selection of 100 African sculpture works from the New Orleans Museum of Art collection will be on display at the University of Wyoming Art Museum from May 26 through Aug. 12.

"Resonance from the Past," was most recently hosted by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C.

"New Orleans is considered the most African of American cities," says Susan Moldenhauer, director and chief curator of the UW Art Museum. "The city has maintained continuous ties to African culture that go back hundreds of years."

The New Orleans Museum of Art was among the earliest of American municipal museums to devote significant resources to the arts of Africa, Moldenhauer says.

Kevin B. Hansen interviews the artist known as Binga.

BY SARA PEARCE | SPEARCE@ENQUIRER.COM

From the title, In the Hands of African-American Collectors, to the family portraits of Bernard and Shirley Kinsey and their son, Khalil, by Artis Lane at the entrance, there's no mistaking how personal the exhibit now at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center is.

There are photographs, historic documents and objects, sculptures, paintings, prints and books.

The pieces span hundreds of years but are just a fraction of those collected by the Kinseys over the 35 years he was an executive for companies including Humble Oil and Xerox Corporation. He now owns KBK Enterprises, a management consulting firm.

John Wesley Hardrick's riveting maritime image is one of the unexpected gems of Black Masters, a modestly scaled but hugely illuminating exhibition of works by 19th- and 20th-century African-American artists on view at the American University in Washington.

Organized by the Harlem-based Essie Green Galleries in New York, the show traces the development of African-American painting from the late 19th century to the present.