Every week I feature one photograph and the photographer who took it. You’ll read a short introductory note from me, and more importantly, a statement from the photographer.
Archive: articles
Reading Black Art
A Resource on Black Artists, Art History and Visual Culture by Nasher, Museum of Art at Duke University
Reading Black Art is a non-exhaustive collection of resources on art, art history and visual culture of the African Diaspora. This curated selection presents a wide array of instructive texts that will aid in better understanding of and engagement with work by Black artists in the Nasher Museum collection. Reading Black Art also features exhibition catalogues published by the Nasher Museum on the occasion of original, traveling exhibitions of work by Black artists. Intended to be a living and circumscribed bibliography that is updated regularly,
Reading Black Art is a helpful tool for educators, students and those interested in Black visual culture.
Poetry from South-Africa
FROM THE ARCHIVE 2: December 10, 2017
Following in the footsteps of their predecessors, this new generation has taken up the social and revolutionary potential of poetry; they have grasped it between two hands, stretched it, pulled it apart, and moulded it back together in their own way, with an array of multi-disciplinary influences from hip-hop, jazz, visual art, film, and performance.
Candice Allison on poetry in South-Africa
Robin Rhode, The Moon is Asleep, 2015. Super 8mm film transferred to digital HD, duration 1 min 50 sec, images courtesy of the artist and Stevenson Gallery.
The art world in South Africa observed
FROM THE ARCHIVE 1: February 2016:
Thuli Gamedze – a middle class Black person, as she calls herself – observes the art world in South Africa, specifically in Cape Town, in an attempt to reconcile personal encounters in various art spaces that seem to present multiple tensions between viewer, artist, art object, and gallery structure- due to the latter’s implied neutrality.
Memory drawing of Sophia Lehulere (2015, chalk on blackboard, 70 x 100cm) of ‘Untitled’ painting by Gladys Mgudlandlu (undated, gouache on paper, 51 x 70cm), part of ‘History Will Break Your Heart’, of Kemang Wa Lehulere, 2015.
Frida Orupabo
To gaze at the artist’s work is to encounter the vagaries of history, to be fixed in a time mitigated by the whims of the clock, an arbitrary sequence that fails to account for how Black femininity exists both within and without modernist time.