“I found myself with 15 years of Western painting and art history studies under my belt, but suddenly realized that my own autobiography was more important to me than the 400 years of Western painting history that I had learned. I urgently wanted to figure out a way to abandon that conceptual sphere and to find something concrete that mattered to me.”
Alexandra Giniger interviews Jacolby Satterwhite.
“In my early teens, my mother didn’t allow me to wear makeup. Her way of negotiating that was to allow me to wear nail polish. The nail polish was more than an accessory, it was a creative outlet and it became an expression of my identity. In 2002 when I realized that I was still in possession of a bottle of nail polish that I had since I was 15 years old, I started to think about the ways in which women use cosmetics as a means of personal codification. I originally made paintings in which I used and arranged the nail polish colors into a map legend of sorts and called it ‘The Sensation Code’. The code would imply further possible narrative directions in the work. I was plaing with language, with the viewer’s expectation for familiar canons – Awai spreads her fingers wide open looking at her transparent flesh/pinky colored polished nails – and sometimes a nail polish name would start off an idea for a work or, when seeing a name on a bottle, one of the ideas that I am working on would come to mind and it would become part of it.”
Sasha Dees in conversation with Trini-American Nicole Awai.
American artist Nick Cave shows his ‘Sound Suits’ in the ICA in Boston. Is his exhibition proving that fashion is entering the art world more and more or is it showing the work of an artist who wants to surprise his audience by crossing the borders between art, fashion and kitsch?
“On objectively reflecting the East African art scene, we can generally assume the Addis and Khartoum art movements were, among other events, two important artistic platforms, which helped shape the Ethiopian and Sudanese modern art. Both countries lived through hard times in which social and political calamities were not uncommon; in fact, there were several anomalies that dragged on for long affecting every citizen. And this is how, in addition to the standoff there, this setting has created the current Africa’s chronicles – including its visual culture.” Mulugeta Tafesse on the art scene in East Africa.
The Caribbean itself can be seen as a series of dubbed spaces or dub mixes of the European countries they once were colonies or outposts of. Moving from island to island is like visiting a series of ghost towns where the distinctive English, Dutch, French and Spanish architecture is now repopulated, recomposed and remixed into Creole versions of European cultures. Language isolates and separates Caribbean countries from each other but the common grammar of the Creoles and Patwas of the region unite them. Jamaican writer and critic Annie Paul writes about the Caribbean art dub.