Center for Black Visual Culture. by Rhea Nayyar, Hyperallergic. The Smithsonian Institution announced that a solo exhibition of Amy Sherald is set to arrive at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, DC, exactly one year from now. Curated by Sarah Roberts, head of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Amy Sherald: American Sublime will be the largest survey of the artist’s practice in her career, including over 40 works spanning 2007 to today.
Center for Black Visual Culture. by Coley Gray, BmoreArt. The paths of Gordon Parks and James Baldwin regularly crisscrossed over the course of their lives. Despite differing artistic sensibilities and spheres of influence, Parks and Baldwin shared the same, staunch commitments to the civil rights struggle, using art in service of social justice, and deploying their gifts to reflect the Black American experience in all its diversity.
Center for Black Visual Culture. by Giancarlo Valentine, The New Yorker. For the past four decades, Cox, who was born in Jamaica and raised in the U.S., has been making photographs of Black women which cast them as complex protagonists. In a body of work that spans fine art and fashion photography, she has repurposed familiar imagery to broaden the scope of how we envision our deities and our histories.
Center for Black Visual Culture. Taft Museum of Art. Curated by Dr. Deborah Willis, Posing Beauty in African American Culture traces the relationship between African American beauty and visual culture from the 1890s to the present through documentary, commercial, and fine art photography. Documentary photographs and portraits of portraits of Black Americans—some famous, some just ordinary citizens—present the public face of African American beauty, while commercial photographs demonstrate how fashion and advertising have
Center for Black Visual Culture. Co-curated by Glenn Kaino and Mika Yoshitake. Part of Getty’s region-wide initiative PST ART: Art and Science Collide, Breath(e): Toward Climate and Social Justice considers environmental art practices that address the climate crisis and anthropogenic disasters and their inescapable intersection with issues of equity and social justice.
Center for Black Visual Culture. co-curated by Cameron Shaw, Executive Director, and Yael Lipschutz, independent curator. George Washington Carver was a pioneer of plant-based engineering and one of the nation’s earliest proponents of sustainable agriculture. A trained and practicing artist, Carver used sustainable materials such as peanut- and clay-derived dyes and paints in his many weavings and still-life paintings.
Center for Black Visual Culture. Candice Madey is pleased to announce an exhibition that pairs work from the 1980s by Darrel Ellis and Miguel Ferrando, examining the artists’ lifelong friendship and shared artistic influences. Merging art historical themes with deeply personal and cultural narratives,
Center for Black Visual Culture. by Beverly Guy-Sheftall with Kristian Conteras, Darnell L. Moore, Claudia Rankine, Ed Schad, Christine Y. Kim, Renée Mussai, Rachel Thomas. A major monograph chronicling Thomas’ vibrant, rhinestone-adorned paintings. Mickalene Thomas’ extensive body of work spans painting, collage, print, photography, video and immersive installations. Thomas’ art articulates a complex and empowering vision of womanhood while expanding on and upending common definitions of beauty, sexuality, celebrity and politics.
Center for Black Visual Culture. by Salamisha Tillet, The New York Times. Walking around downtown Philadelphia, James Ijames reflected on his new play, “Good Bones,” gentrification and the absence that “haunts the cities.” Gentrification, ghosts and intergenerational trauma are subjects explored in “Good Bones,” his much-anticipated follow-up to his Tony-nominated “Fat Ham,” a Pulitzer winner about a Hamlet-inspired character’s struggles to overcome his family’s cycles of trauma and violence.
by Brian Boucher, artnet. Hundreds of artists and art-world denizens gathered in person and online on September 19 for the conference “In Session: Perspectives on Art School in the 21st Century,” where experts debated the merits of graduate degrees and pulled back the curtain on some of the country’s most prestigious residency programs.