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The Black Canadian Artists Who Have Shaped the Nation’s Sound

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The Black Canadian Artists Who Have Shaped the Nation’s Sound

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It’s no secret that there are a number of Black Canadians who have had a historic impact on Canada’s music scene over the years.

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The Black Canadian Artists Who Have Shaped the Nation’s Sound

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To celebrate Black History Month, we’ve asked some of our favourite Black Canadian artists to share the Black Canadian musicians who have inspired them.

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Elementary art lessons around picture books by Black authors and illustrators.

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Elementary art lessons around picture books by Black authors and illustrators.

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Introducing artists through picture books has always been my favorite way to transition into the art room. Children can settle down as you read or flip through the book and gather their own interpretations of the artist, subject or art.
Here are a few of my favorites picture books to read to your students during Black History Month and beyond...BEAUTIFUL BLACKBIRD by Ashley Bryan

When Team Sparkle generated lesson ideas for our Black History Month Bundle inside The Sparklers Club, we knew we had to have a lesson based on Ashley Bryan's book, Beautiful Blackbird.

It tells the tale of a blackbird who was voted most beautiful bird in the forest. The colorful birds were so envious they begged blackbird to add a touch of black to their feathers.

For our Sparklers, our lesson offers young students a chance to draw a beautiful blackbird or trace a template onto colored paper. Then we add rainbow paper stripes to fill in the background.
The Blackbird project and book is perfect for ages 5-7.
Purchase this lesson in the DSS SHOP

TAR BEACH by Faith Ringgold

It's hard to have a favorite Black History Month picture book list without including Faith Ringgold's Tar Beach.

This lesson takes the book's heroine, Cassie, on a journey over the Harlem rooftops created with paper and pastels. This lesson is available in the Sparklers' Club in the Black History Month bundle.
The Tar Beach project and book is perfect for ages 7-10. ART FROM HER HEART| Folk Artist Clementine Hunter by Kathy Whitehead and Shane W. Evans

I loved this book from the moment I read the title. This is a powerful story of self-taught artist, Clementine Hunter who painted the scenes of everyday southern farm life during the 1950's and 60's.

The story details how Clementine, who became the first African-American woman to be featured in her own gallery show, wasn't allowed to view her art alongside the public.
The illustrations and story are absolutely perfection.
We created two lessons based on her most popular subject: zinnias. Children in any grade level learn how to draw a pot and fill with colorful round orbs just like how Clementine painted them.
I used Clementine Hunter's still-life flower arrangements as one of my lessons in my book, Draw, Paint, Sparkle.
Art From Her Heart MAGIC TRASH | A Story of Tyree Guyton and His Art, Clementine Hunter

This book is a winner for both Black History Month and Earth Day. Guyton's art is influenced by his desire to make his Detroit neighborhood transform into a place of beauty and art.

In our membership, we used paper scraps, paint, pastels and recycled bits to re-create one of Guyton's most famous pieces.
IT JES' HAPPENED | WHEN BILL TRAYLOR STARTED TO DRAW by Don Tate and R. Gregory Christie
This project is an expressive piece that offers each child the structure to create a base portrait and then make it his own using a variety of media. Perfect for kids who love to stand up, move around and explore what different media can do together.

While we didn't create a lesson for this book, it still deserves a place on your art room library shelf.
It Jes' Happened When Bill Traylor Started to Draw, Don Tate & R. Gregory Christie DRAW WHAT YOU SEE | THE LIFE AND ART OF BENNY ANDREWS by Kathleen Benson with illustrations from Benny Andrews
It tells the story of Bill Traylor who after growing up an Alabama cotton farm, found art when he was 81 years-old. His memories of his enlsaved youth sprung up and blossomed into pictures.
Today, Bill Traylor is considered to be one of the most important self-taught American folk artists.

Another one of my favorite books to read to older students, Benny Andrews dreamt of life beyond the back-breaking labor he was subjected to.

He ultimately became one of the most important African American artists and opened the door to many other artists of color.
Draw What You See: The Life and Art of Benny Andrews, Kathleen Benson RADIANT CHILD | THE STORY OF YOUNG ARTIST JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT by Javaka Stpetoe
This is a book about possibilities and breathtaking art.

This is an absolute MUST READ for elementary school kids. Before Jean-Michel's art became a cultural phenomenon, there was a boy who saw art everywhere. This book illustrates Basquiat's experience that art doesn't have to be neat and clean.
Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Javaka Steptoe LITTLE LEADERS | BOLD WOMEN IN BLACK HISTORY by Vashti Harrison
This book is perfect for kids ages 9-15.

This book is a great book to offer during free choice time. It explores the life of 40 trailblazing black women in American history.
Readers will find women who did extraordinary things in the fields of athletics, science, literature, film and more.

I'm still holding out for a project based not his book, but so far nothing has come to mind. But that doesn't mean the perfect idea isn't floating around somewhere. Have you done a lesson based on this book?
Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History, Vashti Harrison*This post contains affiliate links
The projects based on these books are located in The Black History Month Bundle

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Picture Books for Black History Month | Deep Space Sparkle

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Introducing artists through picture books has always been my favorite way to transition into the art room. Children can settle down as you read or flip through the book and gather their own interpretations of the artist, subject or art. Here are a few of my favorites picture books to read to your students during Black History Month and beyond...

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Emmanuel Nwogbo is a Nigerian-born visual artist who now calls Montreal home.

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2016 MDes. Interdisciplinary Design - NSCAD University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

2015 PBAC. Certificate in Interdisciplinary Design - NSCAD University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

2014 BA. Visual Art and Visual Communication Design - Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, TRNC

EXHIBITION WORK
SOLO (SELECTED)
2022 The Suya Man Series, The Prismatic Art Festival, Halifax, NS, Canada

2020 365 James Bond Characters, Sunroom Art Space at the Halifax Public Library, Halifax, NS, Canada

2019 The Suya Man Series, Kurating Online Gallery, kurating.com

2019 365 James Bond Characters, Corridor Gallery, Halifax, NS, Canada

2019 365 James Bond Characters, Center for Art Tapes (CFAT), Halifax, NS, Canada

2018 365 James Bond Characters, VANS New Grad Program, Open Studio, Halifax, NS, Canada

2018 365 James Bond Characters, Fort Massey Church, Tea and Sale, Halifax, NS, Canada

2018 365 James Bond Characters, Halifax Sunday Assembly, Halifax Public Library, Halifax, NS, Canada

PRESS & MEDIA

Emmanuel Nwogbo. Revision Path Podcast, Podcast Interview, January 24, 2022

Emmanuel Nwogbo. Art Pays Me Podcast, Podcast Interview, June 14, 2020

Best Visual Artist. Emmanuel Nwogbo. The Coast Halifax, November 07, 2019: Page 35. Newspaper Print.

Best Visual Artist. Emmanuel Nwogbo. thecoast.ca. November 07, 2019. Web article.

The Suya Man Series. Suya Goes to Space, Hogwarts and Other Unlikely Places (by Emmanuel Nwogbo). kurating.com. May 18, 2019. Web article.

365 James Bond Characters. Corridor Gallery: 365 James Bond Characters. The Coast Halifax, May 09, 2019: Page 15. Newspaper Print.

365 James Bond Characters. 365 James Bond Characters. thecoast.ca. May 09, 2019. Web article.

Hit List. Emmanuel Nwogbo, Artist - Halifax. akimbo.ca. May 08, 2019. Web article.

365 James Bond Characters. "365 James Bond Characters" by Emmanuel Nwogbo. visualarts.ns.ca. April 30, 2019. Web article.

Emmanuel "Mister 365" Nwogbo. My Blackout Podcast, Podcast Interview, January 15, 2019

365 James Bond Characters. CBC Nova Scotia Radio, Information Morning Interview, January 04, 2019

365 James Bond Characters. Emmanuel Nwogbo Is Creating James Bond-Inspired Art Every Day for a Year. konbini.com. March 19, 2018. Web article.

365 James Bond Characters. CBC Nova Scotia TV, Atlantic Tonight News feature, March 17, 2018

365 James Bond Characters. CBC Nova Scotia Radio, Atlantic Tonight News feature, March 17, 2018

365 James Bond Characters. To beat boredom, Halifax artist creates James Bond-inspired artwork every day. cbc.ca. March 17, 2018. Web article.

365 James Bond Characters. James Bond Related! Emmanuel Nwogbo Is on the Cover of This Week's Issue of the Coast.damiadeniyi.com. February 16, 2018. Web article.

365 James Bond Characters. Emmanuel Nwogbo's Digital Dreamland. The Coast Halifax, February 15, 2018: Cover Page and Page 7. Newspaper Print.

365 James Bond Characters. Emmanuel Nwogbo's Digital Riffs. thecoast.ca. February 15, 2018. Web article.

Octagon Star of the Month. Emmanuel Chukwuebuka Nwogbo JR. The Octagon Nigeria, August 06, 2014: Page 31. News Magazine Article.

AWARDS

2019 The Coast Halifax Reader's Choice Awards: Gold Winner, Best Visual Artist in Halifax

PUBLICATIONS

Nature as Communities at Dalhousie Art Gallery. Akimbo.ca, June 20, 2019: Web Article

Designing for Justice in the Niger Delta. Halifax, Nova Scotia: NSCAD University, 2016. MDes Thesis Book.

PRESENTATIONS & TALKS

2022 "The Suya Man Series." Prismatic Art Festival, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Artist Talk.

2019 "I Made Something Everyday." Center for Art Tapes (CFAT), Halifax, Nova Scotia. Project Presentation and Q&A Session.

2018 "What I Learned From 328 Days of James Bond." Halifax Sunday Assembly. Halifax Public Library, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Project Presentation and Q&A Session.

2015 "Niger Delta: The Land of Vultures and Unchanging Tides." MDes Thesis Defence. NSCAD University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Project Presentation

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2016 MDes. Interdisciplinary Design - NSCAD University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada 2015 PBAC. Certificate in Interdisciplinary Design - NSCAD University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada 2014 BA.

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An odyssey through the prisons, burial sites and slave ships of Black history.

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Several mesmerizing paintings by the late Denyse Thomasos, a Trinidadian-born artist who grew up in Toronto, bear the names of birds. It's an emotive gesture, calling to mind diasporic transience and migration - forced transport across the Atlantic, fuelled by the hateful ideologies of slavery, as well as more recent journeys across the Mediterranean by Africans seeking refuge from desperate conditions at home.

Other avian metaphors can be found in Thomasos's stunning solo show, Odyssey, on view at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria until March 13. Essentially, her paintings reflect aspects of the built environment, evoking shifting permutations of boats, coffins and prisons, as well as any number of dwelling spaces, ranging from apartment buildings to shanty-town huts. Occupying an ambivalent space between abstraction and representation, these elaborate and layered constructions can resemble floating islands approached from above - a bird's-eye view.

Sparrow, for instance, painted two years before the artist's death in 2012 at age 47 from an allergic reaction during a diagnostic medical procedure, feels aqueous. It offers a plethora of lines, both thick and thin, that suggest board walkways and moored boats, amidst a melee of competing rhythms and colours. This complex swirl almost becomes a nest - a human nest. It's a tricky chimera, though. Viewed more closely, individual elements refuse definitive categories. As one studies them, boats morph into coffins or houses, then back again.

Albatross, completed the same year, shares a similar visual language but is less watery. Its towering imagery suggests a ship. But, look again, and it seems to disgorge myriad smaller craft. Or, perhaps, it is coffins spilling from a ghostly death boat. And the titular albatross? The large itinerant seabird comes with rich literary associations, accursedness and psychological burden among them.

Thomasos often spoke of her interest in structures used to confine people of colour, such as slave boats, burial sites and prisons. A professor at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey - she had completed her MFA with a scholarship at the Yale School of Art after studying at the University of Toronto and was researching America's prisons, often run as profitable businesses incarcerating astonishing numbers of Black men. She had visited a superjail in Maryland, and had started to explore that theme in her studio, but said in a 2010 interview with the National Post, that her latest work "kind of turned into bird machines or winged objects. There's freedom to them, but if you look closely, they're still made of small prison forms and containers."

Thomasos, in a 2012 artist statement, described how her interest in slave ships developed. "I was struck by the premeditated, efficient, dispassionate records of human beings as cargo and also by the deplorable conditions of the slave ships - so many Africans stacked and piled into the tiny, airless holds. In my artworks, I used lines in deep space to recreate these claustrophobic conditions, leaving no room to breathe. To capture the feeling of confinement, I created three large-scale black-and-white paintings of the structures that were used to contain slaves - and left such catastrophic effects on the black psyche: the slave ship, the prison, and the burial site. These became archetypal for me. I began to reconstruct and recycle their forms in all of my works."

Thomasos travelled widely to Europe, Asia and Africa, seeking to expand her perspective on human history. Her visits included the ancient hanging coffins on cliffs along China's Yangtze River before the area was flooded for the immense Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric project. Her smaller sketches show an energetic and gestural hand, qualities that remain evident in her largest paintings.

The show, which includes more than 50 works from across her career, is effectively installed on industrial grey walls that resonate with the paintings' matte tones. Digital images fail to capture the work's full appeal - this is a show well worth a visit.

The originating institution, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, near Toronto, has produced a catalogue that includes a conversation between the show's organizers, Sarah Milroy, chief curator at the McMichael, and Gaëtane Verna, director of the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto.

Thomasos was fascinated by all she learned, says Verna, who first saw her work in 2000. "Denyse was joyful, and totally believed in life. At the time of her death, she was living her best life. She took tremendous pleasure in finding Samein, her life partner, in finally having a child - their daughter, Syann - in her exhibiting, in her teaching. What's the expression in English? Everything was coming up roses."

The catalogue includes a remarkable essay by acclaimed Victoria novelist, Esi Edugyan. She observes that Thomasos did not paint people marked by injustice, preferring the more oblique reverberations of the spaces that confined them.

"Instead of the slave, we have the slave ship - but half constructed, as if the possibility of freedom still exists," she writes. "Instead of the glass ceiling, we have the roofless skyscraper, as if the limits on human achievement haven't yet been imposed. Instead of the prisoner, we have the blueprints for the prison, as if the whole enterprise were in its early stages, as if there were time to turn things back, to not build it, to choose differently. The sense of possibility and openness in her work arises from what remains undone, as if a moral awakening might arrive in the eleventh hour. As if we might yet be saved."

American poet Maya Angelou, in her 1969 autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, recounts how a love of literature helped her overcome trauma and racism. Thomasos, in her work, also seems to offer a path forward, a space where the bird can take flight. In her paintings, doors are open, restraining bars are gapped and airy. What she portrays, after all, are empty spaces, devoid of figurative elements. Against a historical narrative of overwhelming wrongs, her work seems a hopeful gesture. ■
Denyse Thomasos, Odyssey, at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from Dec. 11, 2021, to March 13, 2022. PS: Worried you missed something? See previous Galleries West stories here or sign up for our free biweekly newsletter.

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Several mesmerizing paintings by the late Denyse Thomasos, a Trinidadian-born artist who grew up in Toronto, bear the names of birds. It's an emotive gesture, calling to mind diasporic transience and migration - forced transport across the Atlantic, fuelled by the hateful ideologies of slavery, as well as more recent journeys across the Mediterranean by Africans seeking refuge from desperate conditions at home.

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Kit Lang is a Toronto artist whose work falls into three categories: flora and fauna; childhood illustrations; and the Whitewashed and Black and Blue series.

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Find your next play for ELA or drama classrooms or school plays.

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Black Playwrights at Playwrights Canada Press

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Black Playwrights at Playwrights Canada Press

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From Governor General's Literary Award-winning playwright Djanet Sears comes a beautiful and deeply moving story set in present-day Negro Creek, a two-hundred-year-old black community in Western Ontario. ...

Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English sets out to make the best critical and scholarly work in the field readily available. The series publishes the work of scholars and critics who have ...

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From Governor General's Literary Award-winning playwright Djanet Sears comes a beautiful and deeply moving story set in present-day Negro Creek, a two-hundred-year-old black community in Western Ontario. ... Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English sets out to make the best critical and scholarly work in the field readily available.

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The Nicholas Brothers - Mrs.Stouffer's Music Classroom

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The Nicholas Brothers - Mrs.Stouffer's Music Classroom

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Fayard and Howard Nicholas were famous child and adult tap dancers in many American films. Their dancing continues to inspire and amaze.

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An Engaging lesson for Black History Month doesn't have to be about struggles. I recently saw a Facebook post where a Black educator was asking people to NOT focus only on the struggles, but also joyful things.

A lesson I've done often with my 5th graders not only can bring about a discussion about inequality in early Hollywood, but showcases some of the most influential dancers of all time, the Nicholas Brothers.

Fayard (1914-2006) and Howard (1921-2000) were self-trained by watching some of the most amazing performers of Black vaudeville (including their parents, mom a pianist and dad a percussionist), they combined "classical tap", jazz, ballet, and acrobatics to create a style all their own. The brothers could sing and act as well although they were not really given the opportunity because of racial restrictions. Their signature move - jump splits and then rising to standing using only the power of their legs. And also things like dancing up walls, acrobatics, and other amazing things.

More detailed biographies:
Smithsonian Magazine - Lots of great info from Bruce Goldstein, Director of Repertory Programming at New York's Film Forum.
The Nicholas Brothers Website
Library of Congress Website
Britannica

Influence

Their influence on modern dance can't be denied. Fred Astaire called their Stormy Weather performance the greatest musical sequence of all time. Bob Fosse modeled his first act on theirs. Fayard taught Michael and Janet Jackson as well as Tony winning choreography.

The Nicholas brothers didn't get to really show their talents because of the color of their skin. According to the interview above from Smithsonian Magazine, some of their best work and one of the only speaking roles they were given was actually cut from a movie because they could out dance Gene Kelly.

What to Watch

THE dance (Jumpin' Jive from Stormy Weather).
Point of interest: You can talk about "trading fours" with the music and the dancing here too. A great intro to the concept.

Lucky Number: The Nicholas Brothers in 1936 - Ages 15 and 12.

I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo from Orchestra Wives. Wait for the wall.

The Nicholas Brothers Documentary

And there are SO many more great clips of them on YouTube. (I know I've talked about Chattanooga Choo Choo before...)

The Nicholas Brothers are an amazing duo that we need to give some serious attention to. Not only are they some of the most influential dancers of all time, but they are a wonderful act to highlight if you want to talk about the inequities in Hollywood. The first time I did a lesson about them it wasn't planned. You know what I mean. When a kid asks a question and you just have to show them something. (Well..this doesn't really happen anymore, but it did my first few years.)
I showed them a clip and we talked about how they had been dancing since they were little. Their classroom teacher came back to pick them up just as the video was ending, and wonderful woman that she is, she sat down to enjoy the end of it with them instead of rushing them to the door. As they kids were lining up, one of my students commented that they must have made millions.
So our impromptu lesson turned into a conversation about civil rights and what Black performers faced. They got very quiet, and walked out of the room quietly without being asked. After that first time, I always planned the conversation with my students. Highlighting such amazing talent and comparing it with what they faced is always eye opening.

I hope that highlighting the Nicholas Brothers brings joy into your lessons, highlights achievement by Black artists and can be useful for you whether you teach about them in February or August.

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An Engaging Lesson for Black History Month

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An Engaging lesson for Black History Month doesn't have to be about struggles. I recently saw a Facebook post where a Black educator was asking people to NOT focus only on the struggles, but also joyful things.

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Jade's Hip Hop Academy Youth Performance

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Jade's Hip Hop Academy Youth Performance

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INCREDIBLE Black History Month Hip Hop Dance, DJ & Spoken Word Performance - Jade's Hip Hop Academy

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Velázquez painting of the enslaved Juan de Pareja

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Velázquez painting of the enslaved Juan de Pareja

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"How do you paint your own slave?" Painter Julie Mehretu Analyzes Velázquez | The Artist Project

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Baba Olatunji & his Drums of Passion- Akiwowo

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Yara Shahidi explains how James Baldwin inspired her first tattoo | Book Shook

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James Baldwin's Speech on the American Dream

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Music and Black History: Assignment - Listed on TpT

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Music and Black History Month: A grade 6 research project. 

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Music and Black History Month: A grade 6 research project. 

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Grade 6 Music Appreciation Project by C.Corman

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Music and Black History: Assignment - Listed on TpT - Do Not Delete

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Carrie Mae Weems, photographed in New York City on Aug. 7, 2018. Credit... Photograph by Mickalene Thomas. Styled by Shiona Turini

Perhaps our best contemporary photographer, she creates work that insists on the worth of black women - both in art and in life.

Carrie Mae Weems, photographed in New York City on Aug. 7, 2018. Credit... Photograph by Mickalene Thomas. Styled by Shiona Turini

ON CARRIE MAE WEEMS'S deck in Syracuse, N.Y., locusts are buzzing about the space like doomsday portents, emerging from the ground after 17 years only to drown boozily in our cups of rosé. It's a warm day in late June, and a summer languor - or maybe it's a news-cycle-induced torpor - is in the air, but Weems, perhaps our greatest living photographer, is juggling so many projects that when we were emailing to work out the interview logistics, she warned me, "We'll need all your skills on this." She is simultaneously working on a trio of shows: a retrospective at Boston College's McMullen Museum of Art this fall, an installation for Cornell University and a group show she's curating, "Darker Matter," which will include a new series of her own, at the Park Avenue Armory around 2020 - a follow-up to the creative think tank of artists, musicians and writers she organized at the venue last winter titled " The Shape of Things."

But first, she wants to show me her peonies. A few weeks before we meet, she emailed me a JPEG of a flower in full bloom, a still-life hello. Frothy white with a bright yellow center, it wasn't just any peony, but the W.E.B. DuBois peony, which was named for the civil rights activist after Weems called up the American Peony Society with the suggestion. (As she tells it, they happened to have a new variety in need of a name.) The flower was to be the centerpiece of a memorial garden for DuBois at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst - a small but characteristically thoughtful gesture from an artist who has made her career creating spaces for contemplation in the place of absence, rooting a troubled present in a painful past with projects that feel resolutely forward-looking and idealistic.
See all six of the 2018 Greats issue cover stories here.
Weems, 65, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2013, the year before she became the first African-American woman to have a retrospective at the Guggenheim, has for some time existed in the cultural mythosphere. Her many admirers reserve an intense, almost obsessive affection for her that is rarely extended to visual artists: She is name-checked in a lyric on the new album by Black Thought and appears as herself in Spike Lee's new Netflix series of " She's Gotta Have It." Her iconic 1987 picture, "Portrait of a Woman Who Has Fallen From Grace" - a photo that depicts Weems sprawled on a bed in a white dress, cigarette dangling from one hand - is on the cover of Morgan Parker's poetry collection " There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé." (Speaking of Beyoncé, Weems has been cited as an influence on the videos for "Lemonade.") Any day now, surely, someone will name a flower after her.

Image

Weems's photographs and short films have gone a long way toward resetting our expectations of pictures. Bottega Veneta dress and belt, (800) 845-6790. Cartier earrings, (800) 227-8437. Van Cleef & Arpels bracelet, vancleefarpels.com. Manolo Blahnik shoes, (212) 582-3007. All clothing and jewelry price on request. Credit... Photograph by Mickalene Thomas. Styled by Shiona Turini

Canonical, yes - and yet, in many ways, it feels we barely know her apart from the persona we see in her work, in which she often appears, staring down the camera lens, or with her back turned to it, inviting us to see things through her eyes. She's as arresting a presence in real life. In conversation, she has a magnetism that's almost planetary; she is mellifluously voiced and funny, with a habit of repeating "Right? Right?" as she makes her points, which move from critical theory to an anecdote about her Pilates teacher, who tried to break up with Weems because she was too demanding. She's like that friend who sees right through you and who you trust will set you straight, because she's just as undeluded about herself.

Her photographs and short films, as gimlet-eyed and gutsy as they are visually compelling, have gone a long way toward resetting our expectations of pictures and challenging our assumptions about her largely African-American subjects. A gifted storyteller who works accessibly in text and image, she's created new narratives around women, people of color and working-class communities, conjuring lush art from the arid polemics of identity. The desire to create images has never not felt powerful, something Weems understood from the first time she held her own camera. She was 20, and it was a birthday present from her boyfriend, Raymond, a Marxist and labor organizer. "I think that the first time I picked up that camera, I thought, 'Oh, O.K. This is my tool. This is it,' " she tells me.
Read more: 8 Artists on the Influence of Carrie Mae Weems
Originally from Portland, Ore., Weems now divides her time between an art-filled midcentury-modern home in Syracuse, where she moved in 1996 to be with her husband of 23 years, Jeffrey Hoone, the executive director of Light Work - an organization that awards residencies to artists - and a pied-à-terre in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. But much of her family remains on the West Coast, including her mother, also named Carrie, her daughter, Faith, and many aunts, uncles and cousins. They appear in Weems's early work from the late '70s, when she was still mostly in documentary mode - work that became her first show, "Family Pictures and Stories," shown in 1984 at a gallery in San Diego. Inspired by Zora Neale Hurston's writing and Roy DeCarava's depictions of Harlem in his book with Langston Hughes, " The Sweet Flypaper of Life," the black-and-white images revealed a loving, fractious, deeply connected clan and were a glorious rebuttal to the infamous 1965 Moynihan Report's assertion that African-American communities were troubled because of weak family bonds.

Weems was 20 when she first held her own camera; it was a birthday present from her boyfriend. Oscar de la Renta dress, oscardelarenta.com. Pomellato ring, pomellato.com. Christian Louboutin shoes, christianlouboutin.com. Weems's own earrings and ring. Credit... Photograph by Mickalene Thomas. Styled by Shiona Turini

Soon she was turning the lens on herself to address questions of representation. It would be hard to overstate the impact of " The Kitchen Table Series " (1989-90), which combines panels of text and image to tell the story of a self-possessed woman with a "bodacious manner, varied talents, hard laughter, multiple opinions," as it reads. It's the series that made her career and inspired a new generation of artists who had never before seen a woman of color looking confidently out at them from a museum wall, and for whom Weems's work represented the first time an African-American woman could be seen reflecting her own experience and interiority in her art.

Weems is also a nimble satirist - a bride with her mouth taped shut in "Thoughts on Marriage" (1990), a mock fashion show for " Afro Chic" (2009) - but her humor is generally of the more unsettlingly pointed kind, aimed directly at our smug aesthetic foundations. In a 1997 series, " Not Manet's Type," she plays a muse, her negligee-clad reflection in front of a bed, beheld and objectified - or simply invisible. "It was clear I was not Manet's type," the accompanying text reads. "Picasso - who had a way with women - only used me & Duchamp never even considered me." In 2016, she revisited the idea with "Scenes & Take," shot on the sets of television shows like "Empire," "How to Get Away With Murder" and "Scandal," which feature the kind of multifaceted and genuine-feeling black characters that for years weren't widely enough seen outside of Weems's own work. Weems appears in flowing black, a specter of the black ingénue who arrived too early, who was ignored, who never even had the chance to be.

In the art world, too, Weems has always been before her time, and this has made her a singularly eloquent witness to the shifting landscape of race and representation. This is not the enviable position it may seem to some: One wonders if the reason her work hasn't inspired quite the same volume of ink as, say, her contemporary Cindy Sherman is that critics have simply been too afraid, or too unimaginative, to engage with it. Georgia O'Keeffe once said, "Men put me down as the best woman painter. I think I'm one of the best painters." This marginalization, being categorized as "black artist" or "woman artist" rather than simply artist, is something Weems has dealt with her entire career. In fact, much of Weems's most powerful work has examined, with piercing moral clarity, a past that's very much shared, whether she's casting herself as Sally Hemings for " The Jefferson Suite" (2001) or recreating moments from the civil rights movement in " Constructing History" (2008). She is a master at appropriating historical images: For her extraordinary pictorial essay " From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried " (1995-96), she used found sources, including a cache of 1850 daguerreotypes commissioned by the Harvard scientist Louis Agassiz. The sitters are African-Americans, former slaves, many of them depicted naked or half naked, as anthropological specimens. Weems reproduced the images, staining them blood-red and encircling the subjects so that they appear to be held captive by the lens. Providing a context for understanding the historical use of those photographs and then subverting it, she restores tenderness and humanity to the subjects. Even the way the series has been received illustrates the glacial pace of progress: Harvard, which initially threatened to sue Weems over the use of images from its archive, later ended up acquiring a portion of the series for its collection.

Photography can enslave and revictimize, Weems has shown us; it can also, potentially, set us free from our inherited bias and expectations. A 2006 Rome Prize from the American Academy made possible a line of work called " Roaming," challenging the idea that an African-American artist couldn't have international resonance: Looking at Weems's ghostly alter ego dressed in black outside historic sites in the Italian capital, one wonders who could possibly better understand the architectures of power. In " The Museum Series " (2005-6), the spectral figure appears again outside the Louvre, the Pergamon and the Tate Modern, the kinds of institutions that, feeling their authority increasingly in question, now call upon Weems to tell them how they might remain relevant. The figure - a testament to exclusion, longing for admission - challenges the idea of art made by white men as being the only art in Western culture capable of speaking to our common humanity.

If there's a bitter irony in the way in which historically white museums have turned to socially engaged black artists to help solve their problems - asking the victim, in essence, to become their savior - Weems has responded with characteristic optimism. Her "convenings," which she held at the Guggenheim during her retrospective (mordantly named "Past Tense/Future Perfect") and more recently at the Park Avenue Armory, suggest that keeping the old model while simply swapping out the content isn't going to work. Her model, rather, is about curating a flexible, conversation-oriented space that reflects the community, in which real civic engagement might happen. She has so much more work to do, she says: "I feel like I'm racing against the clock."

OVER THE LAST two years, even those of us who might have once been able to delude ourselves into thinking that structures of power don't really affect us have been made to see otherwise. For Weems, who grew up in one of the few black families in Portland, the child of a large (she is the second of seven children), close-knit family of sharecroppers who had migrated from Mississippi, that was never the case. Her paternal grandfather had organized tenant farmers on the Sunshine Plantation, one of Mississippi's first cooperative farms with black and white farmers; Dorothea Lange, she recently discovered, photographed her favorite uncle, Clarence, in the 1930s. Weems's childhood was a very happy one, filled with caravan trips to the beach and Mount Hood. It was defined in large part by two men: her handsome father, Myrlie, who she says resembled Muhammad Ali - "he was just a really charismatic kind of guy, funny and wonderful and warm, polite, open" - and her maternal grandfather, who employed most of the family. "He was Jewish, Native American and black, but looked very Jewish, and he knew that basically he was passing for white and that he could do things that we couldn't so easily. So he used all of that to make sure that his family was taken care of." He ran a janitorial service and later owned a popular barbecue restaurant.

Weems was 8 when her parents divorced, and because the family remained in some ways intact - her father lived around the corner - she told herself for many years that it hadn't affected her. It was only years later, while talking to one of her aunts, that she realized the divorce marked the point at which she'd stopped drawing and painting. Other memories of that time in her youth have come back, too: of arriving home from school to find her mother weeping in front of the television after Kennedy was shot; of reading Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech over and over again with her father, following King's assassination.

Over the years, Weems has revisited in her work the age she was then - 8, 9, 10, a girl still in the process of becoming herself, with a dawning adult awareness of the world and a self-assurance made all the more poignant with the knowledge that it won't survive adolescence wholly intact. A 1978 portrait of her daughter, Faith, at 9, is radiant with Faith's innocence and Weems's love. A nostalgic 2002 image, "May Flowers," hangs prominently on the wall in Weems's home. It depicts three girls at that age dressed in vintage dresses and flower crowns. The girl in the center, whose name, Weems tells me, is Jessica - Weems noticed her on the streets of Syracuse with her mother and approached them to ask if Jessica might model for her - looks directly out at us, warily, fearlessly. It is, like much of Weems's work, a kind of slanted self-portrait.

In one of the indelible images from "The Kitchen Table Series" - possibly the most famous picture Weems has ever taken - a young girl and her mother are looking in matching mirrors while applying lipstick. It's the kind of effortless-seeming image that complexly plays with ideas of feminine subjectivity, recalling the Impressionist painter Berthe Morisot's 1875 painting " Woman at Her Toilette " in the way in which it shows a private act that anticipates public exposure. In Weems's version, a young girl is also learning, perhaps unwittingly, what it means to be a woman, and what it means to be looked at by men. "What do women give to one another? What do they pass on to one another?" says Weems, recalling the girl who modeled for the picture, whom she spotted in her neighborhood in Northampton, Mass., where she was living and teaching at the time. "I just thought she was the perfect echo of me as a young person. The same intensity and the same kind of hair."

After her parents' divorce, Weems moved with her mother and siblings into a large house owned by her grandfather. She would pirouette down the long wood-floored hallway and look out the attic windows, wearing her mother's work smock, imagining she was a dancer or an actress. "I was simply becoming interested in this idea of being an artist in the world in some sort of way, not knowing really what the arts were," she says. "I had these great, grand visions that I would move to New York City and that I would always arrive fabulously dressed, and I would always arrive late, and I would always leave early and everybody would want to know who I was. 'Who is she?' That was my fantasy." After a visit from her drama teacher, her mother agreed to send her to a summer program in Shakespearean theater, freeing her from having to earn money by picking strawberries with the other kids in her neighborhood - giving her permission, essentially, to create. The program led her to other opportunities in theater and street performance, "dancing at the crossroads at night to bring up the gods," she tells me.

Her father gave her another, equally crucial kind of permission. "My earliest memories are of my father picking me up and setting me on his knee. I was about 4 or 5. He looked at me, and he said, 'Carrie Mae, always remember that you have a right. Right? That no matter who messes with you, you pick up the biggest stick that you can, and you fight back with it.' This was a great gift. He would say, 'There's no man greater than you. You are greater than no other man.' This is the bedrock of my understanding, the bedrock of my belief system that really was instilled very, very early in my life, and repeated throughout my life, this idea that we had a right to be there. So, if I arrive at some sort of big, fancy gala, I always feel really comfortable. It just doesn't really matter who is in the room."

IT'S A COMMON fallacy in talking about an artist's formative years to imply that it was all inevitable, that A led simply to B. But nothing was straightforward for Weems, who left home at 17, following her best friend, the film director Catherine Jelski, to San Francisco, where the choreographer Anna Halprin invited her to join her modern dance company. Later, Weems earned degrees from California Institute of the Arts and University of California, San Diego, where she lived with the artist Lorna Simpson, another longtime friend, and she also studied folklore at U.C. Berkeley.

But equally, if not more essential, was a different, more intuitive kind of education gleaned from self-study, reading and youthful misadventures, including a memorable trip to East Berlin where she was mistaken for Angela Davis. Weems first moved to New York in 1971 "with a baby on my back and a cardboard suitcase," as she puts it, only to return quickly to San Francisco. It was too soon; she needed work and child care. Faith, who was born when Weems was 16, was raised mostly by Weems's aunt and uncle. Weems and Faith are very close (they vacation together in Martha's Vineyard), and a handful of Weems's pictures are nearly definitive artistic representations of motherhood - the emotional intensity, the moments of ambivalence - but she doesn't see the subject as central to her work. "I've never really been a real mother," she says. "I think my daughter and I are more friends. Of course, there's an element of mother and daughter, but because I didn't raise her, we have a very different kind of relationship."

Looking through the Black Photographers Annual, she saw her future in artists - mostly men - who looked like her, who were doing the kind of work she wanted to be doing, and in 1976, she tried New York again. "I came to New York to be with them, to see them, to talk to them, to interview them, to study with them, to become their friends, to see their exhibitions," she remembers. While studying photography at the Studio Museum in Harlem, she made money as a Kelly Girl - a kind of temp worker - and later as an assistant to the photographer Anthony Barboza. She found a community in the Kamoinge Workshop, an organization of black photographers, and a friend and mentor in the photographer Dawoud Bey, who taught her at the Studio Museum, and who recalls her "humility and passion" as a student. Both were influenced by Roy DeCarava's images, which merged rigorous craft and "the lives of ordinary black folk," Bey says. "We also both shared a sense that our very presence in the world, as human beings who were also black, demanded that we live lives and make work that somehow made a difference, that left the world transformed in some way, and that visualized a piece of that world that was uniquely ours and that participated in a larger cultural conversation inside of the medium of photography."

Literature, too, helped her imagine her way into the world - I notice books by George Saunders and Mario Vargas Llosa on her reading table. Hurston was an inspiration for " Family Pictures and Stories" (1981-82) - representing a black experience that was vital and real, fractious and deeply loving and humanly imperfect. But by the 1980s, fueled in part by Laura Mulvey's landmark 1975 essay on gaze, " Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," art was in a more reflexive mode, and Weems was exploring her own sense of herself in relation to a visual culture in which black women scarcely appeared at all. Unlike other female artists who have used their own bodies to play characters that challenge representations of women - think of Sherman's cribbing of Hollywood tropes in her early photographs, or Francesca Woodman's near-gothic self-portraits - Weems had to invent largely out of whole cloth, forcing her to confront more private feelings about femininity and relationships. "I think artists are always trying for, struggling for, clamoring for, unearthing, digging for what is most authentically true about their understanding of the world and how they fit in it," she says. "And the one thing that I did know was that the ways in which women had photographed themselves up until that moment for the most part really didn't interest me. I was also deeply concerned about the lack of representation of African-American women generally."

She was teaching at Hampshire College in Massachusetts in the late 1980s when her concern became impossible to ignore. "I always had an exercise in self-portraiture in my classes. Invariably, all of the female students were in some way covered. They were always slightly behind the thing, whether it was their hair or an object or a piece of clothing," she says, raising her hands in a gesture of coy femininity to her face. "They were always sort of hidden. They were never square. They were always doing something to obscure the clarity of themselves. Because women were always sort of interested in being objects, because we've been trained to be objects. We've been trained to be desirous in some sort of way, to present ourselves in that sort of way."

In "The Kitchen Table Series," Weems stares out at us in a way that insists we not simply look at her but really see her - a charged exchange, but also a beautifully leveling one: Here we are, human to human, across the table from one another. She plays a character: friend, parent, breadwinner, lover, a woman who resists classification, a woman of the world, of political conscience. These are roles that transcend race, but behind her, on her wall, we see a photograph of Malcolm X, his fist upraised, reminding us of an inescapable precedent of imagery, of a larger conversation that black women had been missing from.

As Weems tells it, the idea of making a series of tableaux vivants about a woman's life began with an evening with a man and a chance shot at her kitchen table, the expository triangle of light demarcating a kind of domestic stage. In 1989 and 1990, she worked on it obsessively. The narrative, which explores the life cycle of a romance, unfolds over nearly two dozen photographs and accompanying text panels. In one panel, she writes, "In and of itself, being alone again naturally wasn't a problem. But some time had passed. At 38 she was beginning to feel the fullness of her woman self, wanted once again to share it all with a man who could deal with the multitude of her being." In the final image, she's playing solitaire.

"'Kitchen Table' is about really unpacking these relationships, about unpacking monogamy, the difficulty of monogamy, the trumped-upness of monogamy, this sort of ideal that never seems to pan out," Weems explains. "Life is pretty messy stuff. Can we use this space, this common space known around the world, to shine a light on what happens in a family, how it stays together and how it falls apart? What women have to be and what men have to be, because you're always struggling for equilibrium. Somebody always has the upper hand. Every once in a while you get stasis. If you're lucky."

As if on cue, Weems's husband arrives at home and comes out to say hello. They first met in 1986, in the darkroom at the Visual Studies Workshop, where she had a residency. She had seen his name on an announcement for a black caucus in support of the Society for Photographic Education. "I was like, 'Hmm, Jeff Hoone, that's an interesting name for a brother. I don't know any brothers named Hoone.' So I wrote him this note, thinking that he was a black man: 'It's very nice to know that a brother is in charge over there, running this organization at Syracuse University.' " A mutual friend told her he would be stopping by the darkroom that day. "And Jeff walked in, and I was a little taken aback. I think I was probably embarrassed because of the letter that I had written. He walked in, and I looked at him, and I thought, 'Oh my God. This is going to be my husband.'"

Another photograph from "Blue Notes." Here, the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Credit... Carrie Mae Weems, "Blue Notes (Basquiat): Who's Who or a Pair of Aces #1," 2014. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Tthe singer Eartha Kitt. Credit... Carrie Mae Weems, "Slow Fade to Black #1 (Eartha)," 2009-2010. © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

FOR A LONG TIME, her father's womanizing made Weems wary of commitment. "I thought, 'Well, I really don't want to have any serious relationships with men.' I see what my father is doing, and I love him. So I was really pissed off at him for a while. It's like, 'Daddy, you really need to understand the impact you've had on my life. It ain't all been good.' At a certain point, I had so deconstructed my father that he almost became ash. That was pretty scary. So, I came to understand one day that I had to accept that he was a man and not a god." She was in her 40s when she decided to throw a sleepover party for the two of them, flying out to Oregon, taking him to the beach, shopping for matching pajamas, gambling, talking the entire time. "We just worked through some things. You can't do this on the phone for five minutes. It's touch-base time, Dad." She ended up taking him to a recording studio to do an interview, in which he talked about his childhood in the South and his love for her mother. "It was just one of the great conversations of my life," she says. At his funeral in 2003, Weems played excerpts from the interview.

Burying her father also gave way to a new appreciation for her mother, "this dynamic, powerful woman." These days, #MeToo has her thinking once again about gender and power, about color and power and the ways, subtle and not, in which private relationships can reflect larger structural imbalances. She touches on the bravery of her friend, the author Tanya Selvaratnam, who recently went public with claims that her ex-partner, the former New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman, had abused her. She recounts her own experiences on the board of a major arts organization in which her suggestions were sidelined, even after other women in the room supported them, only to be put forward after a man voiced support. No one is immune to this kind of unconscious bias: Recently, a female assistant confronted Weems with the fact that a male assistant was being paid more. "Really, Carrie?" she says, recounting her disgust with herself.

We still live in a world in which the highest price ever paid for a work of art by a woman (in 2014) was Georgia O'Keeffe's " Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1," for $44.4 million, while dozens of male artists sell in the hundreds of millions. Of her own work, Weems tells me, "It is not embraced in the marketplace. And this is a sustained problem across the board, in the ways in which the work of women is valued and the work of men is valued. This is a real problem. And it's worse for women of color, for sure. And I make a fine living." Recently, her work was up for auction around the same time as the artist Kerry James Marshall's. "And it was fascinating. My work sold for $67,000 and his sold for $21 million. Kerry Marshall and I became artists together, we were friends together, we were lovers together, we participated in this field together. On the social value scale, we're equal. But not in the marketplace," she says. The numbers are stark and shocking, but Weems's real value is reflected in the vast scope of her influence, visible in the intimate photographs of Deana Lawson, the transhistorical portraits of Henry Taylor and the subdued longing of Kara Walker's silhouetted paintings.

A person's - and people's - worth has always been a through line in Weems's work. Dior top and skirt, (800) 929-3467. Cartier earrings, bracelet and ring. Credit... Photograph by Mickalene Thomas. Styled by Shiona Turini

A person's - and people's - worth has always been a through line in Weems's work, which has become more explicitly concerned with contemporary violence, from the countless cases of police brutality targeting African-American men to violence within black communities. She is interested in the conditions that give rise to this violence, the corrupt power systems that perpetuate it - both subjects of her recent short films from 2017, " People of a Darker Hue" and " Imagine if This Were You." The camera has long had a fraught relationship with the black body, but the way in which we as a culture are exposed to the atrocities of systemic violence has changed the stakes of this relationship: How, I ask Weems, does an artist operate within a visual culture in which videos of black men being murdered regularly go viral - on the one hand, forcing us to witness injustice for ourselves, on the other, presenting black death with a terrible, numbing casualness? Weems immediately brings up Philando Castile, who was shot and killed by a Minnesota police officer in 2016 during a routine traffic stop. His girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, filmed the encounter from the passenger's seat. "I mean, I will never understand how she was able to do that," Weems says. "I see a deer hit, and I'm completely - I can't do anything but just hold my head. But this is crucial. I'm always thinking, 'How do I show this? What do I show? And how do I contextualize it?'" A camera has become more than just a journalistic or artistic tool, but a kind of weapon itself - one that reveals the truth. Two years ago, she saw a trio of young black boys being stopped in the middle of the road by a white police officer. She pulled out her camera, and another car, driven by a white man, stopped to block her. "And then I move back, and he moves back. And then I move forward, and he moves forward. Just a citizen decided that, whatever this is, you're not going to photograph it, I'm not going to allow it."

ONE EVENING, as the sun begins to drop, Weems gives me a driving tour of Syracuse, a city that has sunk, like so many postindustrial towns, into poverty and violence. In 2002, Weems co-founded Social Studies 101, which mentors local youth in creative professions. In 2011, after a 20-month-old black toddler named Rashaad was shot and killed in crossfire between two gangs, the same group collaborated on Operation Activate, an anti-violence campaign, putting up billboards and signs around the city and distributing matchbooks at bars and bodegas with slogans like "A man does not become a man by killing another man" and "Contrary to popular belief, your life does matter." Recently, a community activist told her about a young man who'd kept the matchbook on his nightstand, totemlike, for two years. "There are days, especially when we're editing, when we just leave the studio in a shambles, or we're just too mentally exhausted to look at another image of someone being shot," she says. "But as much as I'm engaged with it, with violence, I remain ever hopeful that change is possible and necessary, and that we will get there. I believe that strongly, and representing that matters to me: a sense of aspiration, a sense of good will, a sense of hope, a sense of this idea that one has the right, that we have the right to be as we are."

Part of that involves mobilizing others. This year, out of the blue, Weems received a phone call from Jessica, the young girl - now a woman - who once modeled for Weems in "May Flowers." Jessica now has a daughter of her own, and a partner, a woman who also has a child. They're struggling to make a go of it. "I just decided, 'You're going to be the subject of a whole project. It's just going to be you,'" says Weems. "What happens to a black woman who is her age, who drops out of school but has ambition. Who is trying to do the right thing, who is raising children, who's decided that she's also gay." For the project, Jessica will also be self-documenting, telling her own story. Weems gestures as though she's presenting a gift, passing it on matter-of-factly. "I said, 'Here's a camera.'"

At top: Valentino top, (212) 355-5811. Tiffany & Co. earrings, tiffany.com. Van Cleef & Arpels bracelets. Manolo Blahnik shoes.

Hair by Nikki Nelms. Makeup by Yumi Lee at Streeters. Stylist's assistant: Mayer Campbell. Hair assistant: Krysten Oriol

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How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making (Published 2018)

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Perhaps our best contemporary photographer, she creates work that insists on the worth of black women - both in art and in life. Carrie Mae Weems, photographed in New York City on Aug. 7, 2018. Credit... Photograph by Mickalene Thomas.

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Statement

"... When I create work... it is in my view a metaphor reflecting an alternative response to examine ... possibilities and extend the boundaries in art. ... My work can represent links in the evolving narrative of memory and identity."

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El Anatsui is a Ghanaian sculptor active for much of his career in Nigeria. He has drawn particular international attention for his iconic 'bottle-top' installations.

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Using faceless blue figures which evade assigned identity, Alex Gardner paints the universal human experience of 2020 in “Blues,” his newest exhibition.

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Welcome to the Oscar Ukonu Gallery. Experience unique art made with ballpoint pen on paper. The prints are also available for purchase.

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Artist Calida Garcia Rawles continues her explorations into the myriad possibilities of water with paintings distorted by bubbles, pockets of air, and ripples reflecting the light above. She suspends Black figures in otherwise imperceptible moments, like the pause that immediately follows a fully-clothed plunge into a pool, conveying a vulnerable and fleeting interaction between her subjects and their surroundings. With submerged profiles or mirrored features, many are unidentifiable. "You really can't see a face. They become almost forms and a part of their environment," she tells Colossal. "I think there's a spiritual element to water... They're formless, and we're a part of something bigger than ourselves."

Many of the poetic renderings depict figures in billowing gowns or collared shirts in white for the color's association with virtue and purity, a symbolic choice that's connected to the artist's interest in broader questions of race and its implications. "A lot of times innocence is not associated with the Black body. I thought it was a place to start," she says. In an exploration of Rawles's work, writer Roxane Gay further connects these questions to the water itself, sharing that the ripples in the artist's paintings reference "the topographical maps of cities where Black lives have been tragically lost."

Each painting is based on photographs the artist takes herself-read more about her lengthy research process previously on Colossal -and captures water's incredible power and meditative qualities. For Rawles, the fluid spaces are metaphorical and tied broadly to Water-Memory Theory, or the idea that the vital liquid can preserve all of its interactions. "(I'm) remembering what water does, that it holds history in a way," she says. "Water has everything that's been through it, and that's fascinating to me."

Her practice is circular, and she's likely to return to a thought or broader theme after setting it aside. The ethereal, abstract paintings that comprise the new series On the Other Side of Everything, for example, are extensions of those in A Dream For My Lillith, six paintings featuring clothed figures who are obscured by lustrous ripples of water rendered in acrylic. "It's not a departure," Rawles says of her new work. "It's just showing more range of what I can do."

On the Other Side of Everything is on view at Lehmann Maupin in New York through October 23, and the artist is currently working on her first mural at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. You can follow her progress on that large-scale work and see more of her process on Instagram.

This article was updated for context on October 13, 2021.

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Metaphorical Paintings by Calida Garcia Rawles Obscure Black Subjects with Gleaming Ripples of Water

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Artist Calida Garcia Rawles continues her explorations into the myriad possibilities of water with paintings distorted by bubbles, pockets of air, and ripples reflecting the light above. She suspends Black figures in otherwise imperceptible moments, like the pause that immediately follows a fully-cl

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"Art must be an integral part of the struggle," Charles White insisted. "It can't simply mirror what's taking place. ... It must ally itself with the forces of liberation." Over the course of his four-decade career, White's commitment to creating powerful images of African Americans-what his gallerist and, later, White himself described as "images of dignity"-was unwavering. Using his virtuoso skills as a draftsman, printmaker, and painter, White developed his style and approach over time to address shifting concerns and new audiences. In each of the cities in which he lived over the course of his career-Chicago, New York, and, finally, Los Angeles-White became a key figure within a vibrant community of creative artists, writers, and activists.

White's far-reaching vision of a socially committed practice attracted promising young artists, including many artists of color, and he became one of the 20th century's most important and dedicated teachers. Acclaimed contemporary artists David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall were among his many students: as Marshall reflected, "Under Charles White's influence I always knew that I wanted to make work that was about something: history, culture, politics, social issues. ... It was just a matter of mastering the skills to actually do it."

Charles White: A Retrospective is the first major museum survey devoted to the artist in over 30 years. The exhibition charts White's full career-from the 1930s through his premature death in 1979-with over 100 works, including drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, illustrated books, record covers and archival materials.

In the audio below, hear WQXR radio host Terrance McKnight's conversation with Harry Belafonte about his relationship with Charles White and their commitment to celebrating and advancing black culture. McKnight also paired music and other audio with selected works from the exhibition, and you can scroll down to listen to his full playlist.

Charles White: A Retrospective is organized by Esther Adler, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints; and Sarah Kelly Oehler, Field-McCormick Chair and Curator of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Prior to its MoMA presentation, the exhibition will be on view at The Art Institute of Chicago from June 8 through September 3, 2018. Following its MoMA presentation, the exhibition will travel to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it will be on view from February 17 through June 9, 2019.

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Exhibition. Oct 7, 2018-Jan 13, 2019. "Art must be an integral part of the struggle," Charles White insisted. "It can't simply mirror what's taking place. ... It must ally itself with the forces of liberation." Over the course of his four-decade career, White's commitment to creating powerful images of African Americans-what his gallerist and, later, White himself described as "images of dignity"-was unwavering.

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Join us as we speak to artists about their practice and works that speak to the times. This week, the AGO's conservator Sherry Phillips and curator Georgiana Uhlyarik will speak to image-maker Tim Whiten about his artistic practice with a special focus on his work Metamorphosis, his use of materials and how this impacts the way in which the work is cared for by the museum.

In over forty years of creating cultural objects, Tim Whiten has sought to navigate the territory of the human condition with the intent of inviting experiences and encouraging "sensing" over "reading". Whiten's work extends from two- to three-dimensional forms and includes ritual performances, real-time systems, site-specific and mixed media installations. His work is held in numerous private, corporate, and notable public collections, such as the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Hamilton, the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (both the de Young and the Legion of Honor/ Achenbach Foundation for the Graphic Arts). He is represented by Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto.

Sherry Phillips has been employed at the Art Gallery of Ontario since 1989, working as the Conservator of Contemporary and Inuit Art Collections since 1996. Following an Honours BSc in microbiology and zoology at the University of Toronto, Sherry studied Art History and Art Studio before receiving her Masters of Art Conservation degree from Queen's University. Although her original focus was the conservation of paintings, working with contemporary objects and installations over the years has cultivated a working knowledge of the unusual. Anything from modern materials to electronics, traditional art materials or living systems may require her intervention for conservation treatment or preservation.

Georgiana Uhlyarik is Fredrik S. Eaton Curator, Canadian Art, and co-lead of the Indigenous + Canadian Art Department at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. She co-curated: Tunirrusiangit: Kenojuak Ashevak and Tim Pitsiulak, the J.S. McLean Centre for Indigenous + Canadian Art, Introducing Suzy Lake, and collaborations with Tate Modern, Jewish Museum, NY, Terra Foundation for American Art and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. She is currently an adjunct faculty member at York University and University of Toronto, and research associate, Modern Literature & Culture, Ryerson University. Originally from Romania, she lives in Toronto with her twin sons.

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Join us as we speak to artists about their practice and works that speak to the times. This week, the AGO's conservator Sherry Phillips and curator Georgiana Uhlyarik will speak to image-maker Tim Whiten about his artistic practice with a special focus on his work Metamorphosis, his use of materials and how this impacts the way in which the work is cared for by the museum.

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It is not every day that a 19th-century landscape painter is the subject of national news, but that was the case last week, when a work by Robert S. Duncanson on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum was presented to the Biden administration by Congress as an inaugural gift. Duncanson is not a household name-or, at least, not an artist as well-known as some of his contemporaries, including William Louis Sonntag and Worthington Whitteredge. (When the New York Times covered the gift, for example, it did not name Duncanson, only referring to him as a "Black artist.") But during his day, Duncanson achieved fame, both in the U.S. and Europe, and blazed a trail for future generations of Black artists. To survey Duncanson's achievements, below is a guide to his life and art.
In 19th-century Ohio, Duncanson's landscapes brought him unparalleled success.
These days, Duncanson's idyllic landscapes, filled with peaceful rivers and verdant mountains, reside in the collections of the U.S.'s top museums, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. But, as Duncanson got his start in mid-19th century Ohio, it was largely private collectors who helped secure his place in art history. Many of them were white abolitionists whose support for Black artists became a part of their political mission-and, some have argued, a way of accruing social capital.

Prior to that, Duncanson had struggled to make ends meet. His still lifes, featuring pile-ups of produce set atop unadorned tables, were the result of hard work-Duncanson had taught himself by copying prints and drawing from life. Critics took notice. When one work in the genre by Duncanson was shown at the Michigan State Fair, the Detroit Free Press sang his praises, writing, "The paintings of fruit, etc. by Duncanson are beautiful, and as they deserve, have elicited universal admiration."

Robert S. Duncanson. William Notman/McCord Museum

Yet Duncanson had received few major commissions until one came from Charles Avery, a Pennsylvania-based reverend who, having profited from the cotton industry, helped slaves escape the South using the Underground Railroad and became involved in abolitionist causes. In 1848, Avery commissioned Duncanson to paint a landscape, marking a turn for an artist who had generally specialized in still lifes. Titled Cliff Mine, Lake Superior and depicting what was then the top copper mine in the country, the work went on to spur Duncanson to fame.

Other commissions later followed. The abolitionist and horticulturalist Nicholas Longworth brought on Duncanson to paint a series of landscapes for his home in Cincinnati. Completed between 1850 and 1852, the work that Duncanson went on to rank among his defining works. These Hudson River School-inspired images feature sunsets rendered with subtle tonal shifts, intricately painted foliage, and trompe l'oeil frames. At nine feet tall, these works engulf the viewer in transcendent landscapes-though they only saw the light of day for so long. After Longworth died in 1863 and the house was sold, Ducanson's murals were covered with wallpaper, and they remained that way until 1931, when they were trotted out to be shown at what is now the Taft Museum of Art, which counts them as the finest works in its collection.

Robert S. Duncanson, Landscape with Rainbow, 1859.Smithsonian American Art Museum

Whether Duncanson's landscapes bear out abolitionist messages is the subject of debate.
In Duncanson's most famous landscapes, waterfalls tumble over rocky expanses, tiny figures admire giant mountains, and fluffy pastel-colored clouds float over sunlit lakes. For some, these images have been considered more than just pretty pictures. Various art historians have suggested that, in addition to touting the beauty of the American landscape, these works are poignant statements about the horrors of slavery and the importance of maintaining the Union, with natural formations and the people who populate them acting as veiled metaphors.

According to Joseph Ketner, an art historian who wrote a 1993 biography of Duncanson called The Emergence of the African-American Artist, Black audiences at the time would have been able to decode such hidden messages. In the 1862 painting Minneopa Falls, Minnesota, for example, two waterfalls rush through a wooden landscape. Duncanson composed the work such that the viewer's eye is led along a diagonal line, watching the river's water as it tumbles over two outcroppings; a figure who has been identified by scholars as a Native American stands in awe of them. Some, including the Cincinnati Art Museum, which owns the work, have suggested that that person is a reference to William Henry Longfellow's epic poem The Song of Hiawatha, which was viewed at the time as being about the violence wrought by white settlers upon Indigenous peoples. Abolitionists embraced that text because they saw parallels in the treatment of Black slaves.

Whether Duncanson's visually striking canvases are, indeed, meant to communicate political messages remains the subject of debate among historians. In 1993, historian Judith Wilson, whose specialty is 19th-century African-American art, told the New York Times, "I'm excited that scholars are taking different analytic approaches to 19th-century African-American art, which stylistically looks so conventional. But in the case of Duncanson, I think that both historians are working from a false set of assumptions."

Robert S. Duncanson, Landscape with Shepherd, 1852.Metropolitan Museum of Art

Duncanson charted new paths for Black artists.
Even during his day, Duncanson was celebrated by critics. In 1861, the Daily Cincinatti Gazette wrote effusively of the artist, calling him "the greatest landscape painter in the West"-a superlative that would go on to be echoed when he later traveled abroad and obtained fame in Europe. But success had by no means been assured for Duncanson.

Born sometime around 1821 in Fayette, New York, Duncanson was raised by two freed Black people. (Previously, scholars had thought one of them was white, but Ketner's research dispelled that notion.) His grandfather had been a slave; his father was a carpenter and a house painter. After an itinerant upbringing spent partly in Detroit and Monroe, Michigan, Duncanson wound up in Cincinnati, which was considered an art capital at the time. It was there that he became a part of a budding network of Black artists that included James Presley Ball, who ran a daguerreotype studio for which Duncanson worked as the principal artist. "This was the first real aggregate cluster of an African-American community of artists in America," Ketner told Smithsonian Magazine in 2011.

In 1853, with funding from Longworth, the commissioner of his most famous series of landscapes, Duncanson took a grand tour, a survey of European destinations that would allow him to see classic artworks deemed essential to one's education. (He is believed to have been the first African-American artist to have made such a voyage.) He stopped in London, Paris, and Florence, and continued painting spectacular vistas upon his return. Then the Civil War broke out in 1861, and something within Duncanson shifted. He traveled north, to Canada, and some scholars debate to what extent tensions in the U.S. impacted him. (Some scholars have suggested that Duncanson dealt with psychological strain because he tried to pass as white.)

Whatever the case may be, Duncanson largely remained abroad. He traveled to England once more in 1866, and he found new admirers, including the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He returned to the U.S. later that year, though his mental health began to decline-he began to imagine that he was possessed by a dead artist and exhibited other forms of unusual behavior. Some have ascribed his breakdown to the virulent racism that continued in post-Civil War America, though others have proposed that he had a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia. In 1872, he died at 51, having suffered a seizure that landed him in a sanatorium.

Robert S. Duncanson, Pompeii, 1871.Smithsonian American Art Museum

In recent decades, Duncanson has been celebrated anew.
Even though Duncanson's work had a loyal following among patrons, artists, and critics alike, he was nearly forgotten until the 1970s. Much of his current reputation is thanks to the Cincinnati Art Museum, which held a survey of Duncanson's art on the occasion of the centennial of his death, in 1972, though curator David C. Driskell also helped elevate his paintings. In a landmark traveling exhibition called "Two Centuries of Black American Art," which opened in 1976 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Duncanson's work was placed in a continuum of key Black artists that included Edmonia Lewis, Henry Ossawa Turner, Horace Pippin, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, and many more. "I was looking for a body of work which showed first of all that blacks had been stable participants in American visual culture for more than 200 years; and by stable participants I simply mean that in many cases they had been the backbone," Driskell told the New York Times of his exhibition in 1977, when it traveled to the Brooklyn Museum.

Further signs of Duncanson's renewed fame came in 2018, when Detroit-based artist Dora Kelley began leading a campaign to finally get the artist a gravestone. Despite the fact that it was a piece of local lore that Duncanson was buried the city, his grave went unmarked, a practice typical of the era for African-Americans. In 2019, the Detroit Institute of Arts presented the new headstone for Duncanson, which features his image, along with a quote from him: "I have no color on the brain. All I have on the brain is paint."

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Robert S. Duncanson Charted New Paths for Black Artists in 19th-Century America

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It is not every day that a 19th-century landscape painter is the subject of national news, but that was the case last week, when a work by Robert S. Duncanson on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum was presented to the Biden administration by Congress as an inaugural gift.

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Up and Coming: Meet Kapwani Kiwanga, the Emerging Artist Challenging What You Learned in History Class

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The library is not the first place that comes to mind for the creation of contemporary art—but for Kapwani Kiwanga that’s where the process begins. “...

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Gordon Parks, photographer, composer, author, and filmmaker.

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Gordon Parks, one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, was a humanitarian with a deep commitment to social justice. He left behind an exceptional body of work that documents American life and culture from the early 1940s into the 2000s, with a focus on race relations, poverty, civil rights, and urban life. Parks was also a distinguished composer, author, and filmmaker who interacted with many of the leading people of his era-from politicians and artists to athletes and other celebrities.

Born into poverty and segregation in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912, Parks was drawn to photography as a young man when he saw images of migrant workers in a magazine. After buying a camera at a pawnshop, he taught himself how to use it. Despite his lack of professional training, he won the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1942; this led to a position with the photography section of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C., and, later, the Office of War Information (OWI). Working for these agencies, which were then chronicling the nation's social conditions, Parks quickly developed a personal style that would make him among the most celebrated photographers of his era. His extraordinary pictures allowed him to break the color line in professional photography while he created remarkably expressive images that consistently explored the social and economic impact of poverty, racism, and other forms of discrimination.

In 1944, Parks left the OWI to work for the Standard Oil Company's photo documentary project. Around this time, he was also a freelance photographer for Glamour and Ebony, which expanded his photographic practice and further developed his distinct style. His 1948 photo essay on the life of a Harlem gang leader won him widespread acclaim and a position as the first African American staff photographer and writer for Life. Parks would remain at the magazine for two decades, covering subjects related to racism and poverty but also fashion and entertainment, and taking memorable pictures of such figures as Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael. His most famous images, for instance American Gothic (1942) and Emerging Man (1952), capture the essence of his activism and humanitarianism and have become iconic, defining their generation. They also helped rally support for the burgeoning civil rights movement, for which Parks himself was a tireless advocate as well as a documentarian.

Parks was a modern-day Renaissance man, whose creative practice extended beyond photography to encompass fiction and nonfiction writing, musical composition, filmmaking, and painting. In 1969 he became the first African American to write and direct a major Hollywood studio feature film, The Learning Tree, based on his bestselling semiautobiographical novel. His next film, Shaft (1971), was a critical and box-office success, inspiring a number of sequels. Parks published many books, including memoirs, novels, poetry, and volumes on photographic technique. In 1989 he produced, directed, and composed the music for a ballet, Martin, dedicated to the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.

Parks spent much of the last three decades of his life evolving his style, and he continued working until his death in 2006. He was recognized with more than fifty honorary doctorates, and among his numerous awards was the National Medal of Arts, which he received in 1988. Today, archives of his work reside at a number of institutions, including the Gordon Parks Foundation, Pleasantville, New York; the Gordon Parks Museum in Fort Scott, Kansas, and Wichita State University in Wichita; and the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution, all in Washington, D.C.

Parks' work is in the permanent collections of major museums, among them the Art Institute of Chicago; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Cincinnati Art Museum; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the International Center of Photography, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, all in New York; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Saint Louis Art Museum; the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond.

In recent years, Parks has been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions, all accompanied by illustrated publications, organized by the Gordon Parks Foundation with other institutions. These include: Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, Museum of Modern Art (2020); Gordon Parks X Muhammad Ali, Nelson Atkins Museum of Art (2020); Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story, Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo (traveled; 2017-2019); Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940-1950, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (traveled; 2018-2019); I Am You: Selected Works 1942-1978, C/O Berlin (traveled; 2017-2018); Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem, Art Institute of Chicago (2016); Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015); Gordon Parks: Segregation Story, High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2014-2015); Gordon Parks: The Making of an Argument, New Orleans Museum of Art (2013-2014); and Gordon Parks: A Harlem Family 1967, The Studio Museum in Harlem (2012-2013).

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The Gordon Parks Foundation permanently preserves the work of Gordon Parks, makes it available to the public through exhibitions, books, and electronic media and supports artistic and educational activities that advance what Gordon described as "the common search for a better life and a better world."

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Watch Little Simz' cinematic debut I Love You, I Hate You

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I Love You, I Hate You is a short film by Little Simz, created with WePresent and inspired by a personal track from her album, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert

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Jake had a radical mind in a sense that he was so far ahead of his time. He could see beyond the contours of time and history.

David C. Driskell

And so we see ourselves in all of the things he did. But he was so reserved-he was such a gentleman that I could never see him embracing what some called the Black Power movement, in the sense ... of a symbol that was Black-inspired only. It would have to be something that reached for the depths of meaning, embracing humanity-a full humanity, a colorless humanity. These pictures are, yes, black and brown. They are colored in a sense of an artistic definition. But they are universal in their longing, in their desires, in their wishes.

Have we become, as a result of this moving North, an integrated society? Some raise the question, Have we become a post-racial society? I think in most cases the answers would be no. We're never defined as a conglomerate in a sense of our national attitudes, except in times of war and such. That is part and parcel of the American experience. We have individualism and humanism ... but it's not racially bound all of the time. It's just one looking at one's self.

I think Lawrence understood all of that. And so the Black figures could have been the Irish immigrants, could have been the Italian immigrants. They could have been any Americans who came and went through this experience of accommodating themselves to new ideas, new structures, new plans."
Image credits

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Jake had a radical mind in a sense that he was so far ahead of his time. He could see beyond the contours of time and history. David C. Driskell And so we see ourselves in all of the things he did.

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Quil Lemons shifts the lens to his own Philly community to capture the breadth of Black love

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Quil Lemons’ WePresent commissioned project 6 7 encourages people to think of their own families, while also considering what it means to be a Black American

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Painter Cinga Samson captures the randomness of violence

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Painter Cinga Samson's series Iyabanda Intsimbi explores the threats we face on a daily basis, be they from nature, chance, or the passage of time

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The references run deep: Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Kandi Burruss, Summer Walker, Mary J. Blige, Tamar Braxton, Daenerys Targaryen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Be sure to take notes because, E. Jane's knowledge, from sci-fi to R&B, is masterful. Researching and celebrating the Black diva is at the core of their work. It's embodied. It's about joy. It's decolonial. It's invested in the care and keeping of Black women's culture.

It is E. Jane's parents who are responsible for their early education in the work of 1990s Black R&B divas. This is the source of the twenty-eight music videos at the core of Lavendra (2015-), a work composed of the eponymous planet and shrine to Black divadom presided over by E. Jane's (who uses they/them pronouns) alter ego, recording artist and Black diva in her own right, MHYSA (who uses she/her pronouns).
My mom and my dad were the people that at a young age, introduced me to the genre of R&B that is heavily reliant on women's vocals. So that meant listening to Whitney Houston and Chaka Khan and Mariah Carey-my mom played me a lot of Mariah Carey, a lot of Whitney Houston. My parents really loved Whitney Houston. They also really loved Janet Jackson, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill. My mom had all these tapes. My mom bought me the Monica CD when I was a kid, the Brandy CD too. She bought me all these R&B diva CDs, and that was what I did in my spare time. I had a boom box when I was like nine, and I would make mixtapes. I would record songs from the radio because I had the two- tape cassette thing, and it had the CD player at the top, too. So you could really go in. I never really went in. I just recorded songs off the radio that I wanted and made my radio mixes. That music for me was very escapist; for my mom too.
Hearing the names, E. Jane rattles off; you cannot help but think. Anthems. Legends. Divas. All of them powerhouses, their music so readily at the surface of your mind. Each comes with a sharp sonic remembrance. Every song is a bop. This is not a canned '90s R&B top ten list. The Black '90s R&B diva is foundational to both Black culture and E. Jane's work.

In grad school, I was taking video classes and trying to make video art and being like, "I'm going to be like Steve McQueen. I'm going to be a video artist," and not knowing what to make a video about. I just didn't know what I cared about, but then the summer before the second year, I got really obsessed with watching old R&B music videos. I just couldn't stop, that's just what I wanted to do with my time. I was just like doing all this stuff, and I was, like, wait like this isn't a distraction, this is what I care about, and I should make from this. Then I started making Lavendra videos, and then I started thinking more about the Black diva in general as a performance archetype. A Black American archetype. An archetypal figure like how the hero is an archetypal figure. The diva, too, was an archetypal figure, and she already is in culture.

E. Jane's research looks to unpack the archetype of the diva. Divas are spectacular and display immense talent, but lost in narratives of innate gifts is the equally spectacular and immense work that has gone into their performances. For the diva, singing can be a means of mental escape, and also financial escape. Divas are a sight to behold, but are often not held or supported; they can be subject to intense critique. One of E. Jane's more recent case studies is the career of singer and songwriter Summer Walker. Walker, a direct descendent of the '90s R&B diva, has social anxiety that has caused her to cancel most of her recent tour. Fans lashed out, harshly critiquing what performances she did give. E. Jane looks to understand with empathy what the diva is going through.
There was a point when I realized that I don't want to just critique these women. I want to understand them. I want to study them. I want to study them deeply, and that's why I think MHYSA is very much deep performance, where I'm getting to study the experience through my body, but then also still reading, researching, and trying to understand the history of these people in detail. Not just an outline or a headline, since that isn't really considering them. You know?

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The references run deep: Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Kandi Burruss, Summer Walker, Mary J. Blige, Tamar Braxton, Daenerys Targaryen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Be sure to take notes because, E. Jane's knowledge, from sci-fi to R&B, is masterful. Researching and celebrating the Black diva is at the core of their work.

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Lubaina Himid: ‘The beginning of my life was a terrible tragedy’

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As the first Black woman – and the oldest person – ever to win the Turner, the artist reflects on being a trailblazer, and how her early life moulded her

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During the 1960s Alma Thomas emerged as an exuberant colorist, abstracting shapes and patterns from the trees and flowers around her. Her new palette and technique-considerably lighter and looser than in her earlier representational works and dark abstractions-reflected her long study of color theory and the watercolor medium.

Red Sunset, Old Pond Concerto [SAAM, 1977.48.5] emphasizes the intensity of a sunset as it overtakes a landscape, penetrating layers of greenery to strike darkening water. Broken rows of color pats, a hallmark of her mature style, alternate with emphatic vertical bands. Their irregular intervals create a visual rhythm akin to music, while dappled reds, greens, and blue-blacks orchestrate subtle nuances and dramatic contrasts. Thomas frequently talked about ​"watching the leaves and flowers tossing in the wind as though they were singing and dancing." She also liked to imagine seeing natural forms from a plane. Her lyrical interpretation of a pond at sunset suggests a blending of these two perspectives.

As a black woman artist, Thomas encountered many barriers; she did not, however, turn to racial or feminist issues in her art, believing rather that the creative spirit is independent of race or gender. In Washington, D.C., where she lived and worked after 1921, Thomas became identified with Morris Louis, Gene Davis, and other Color Field painters active in the area since the 1950s. Like them, she explored the power of color and form in luminous, contemplative paintings.

Lynda Roscoe Hartigan African-American Art: 19 th and 20 th-Century Selections (brochure. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art)

"Man's highest aspirations come from nature. A world without color would seem dead. Color is life. Light is the mother of color. Light reveals to us the spirit and living soul of the world through colors."-Press Release, Columbus Museum of Arts and Sciences, 1982, for an exhibition entitled A Life in Art: Alma Thomas 1891-1978, Vertical File, Library, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Alma Thomas began to paint seriously in 1960, when she retired from her thirty-eight year career as an art teacher in the public schools of Washington, D.C. In the years that followed she would come to be regarded as a major painter of the Washington Color Field School.

Born on September 22, 1891, in Columbus, Georgia, Thomas was the eldest of four daughters. Her father worked in a church and her mother was a seamstress and homemaker. Thomas's family was well respected in Columbus, and she and her sisters grew up in comfortable surroundings. The family lived in a large Victorian house high on a hill overlooking the town where Thomas spent her childhood observing the beauty and color of nature. In 1907, when Thomas was fifteen years old, her father moved the family to Washington, D.C. She enrolled in Howard University, and in 1924 became the first graduate of its newly formed art department. Thomas's teacher and mentor, James V. Herring, granted her use of his private art library, from which she gained a thorough background in art history. A decade later, she earned a Master of Arts degree in education from Columbia University.

During the 1950s Thomas attended art classes at American University in Washington. She studied painting under Joe Summerford, Robert Gates, and Jacob Kainen, and developed an interest in color and abstract art. Throughout her teaching career she painted and exhibited academic still lifes and realistic paintings in group shows of African-American artists. Although her paintings were competent, they were never singled out for individual recognition.

Suffering from the pain of arthritis at the time of her retirement, she considered giving up painting. When Howard University offered to mount a retrospective of her work in 1966, however, she wanted to produce something new. From the window of her house she enjoyed watching the ever-changing patterns that light created on her trees and flower garden. So inspired, her new paintings passed through an expressionist period, followed by an abstract one, to finally a nonobjective phase. Many of Thomas's late-career paintings were watercolors in which bold splashes of color and large areas of white paper combine to create remarkably fresh effects, often accented with brush strokes of India ink.

Although Thomas progressed to painting in acrylics on large canvases, she continued to produce many watercolors that were studies for her paintings. Thomas's personalized mature style consisted of broad, mosaic-like patches of vibrant color applied in concentric circles or vertical stripes. Color was the basis of her painting, undeniably reflecting her life-long study of color theory as well as the influence of luminous, elegant abstract works by Washington-based Color Field painters such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Gene Davis.

Thomas was in her eighth decade of life when she produced her most important works. Earliest to win acclaim was her series of Earth paintings-pure color abstractions of concentric circles that often suggest target paintings and stripes. Done in the late 1960s, these works bear references to rows and borders of flowers inspired by Washington's famed azaleas and cherry blossoms. The titles of her paintings often reflect this influence. In these canvases, brilliant shades of green, pale and deep blue, violet, deep red, light red, orange, and yellow are offset by white areas of untouched raw canvas, suggesting jewel-like Byzantine mosaics.

Man's landing on the moon in 1969 exerted a profound influence on Thomas, and provided the theme for her second major group of paintings. In 1969 she began the Space or Snoopy series so named because "Snoopy" was a term astronauts used to describe a space vehicle used on the moon's surface. Like the Earth series these paintings also evoke mood through color, yet several allude to more than a color reference. In Snoopy Sees a Sunrise of 1970, she placed a circular form within the mosaic patch of colors and accented it with curved bands of light colors. Blast Off depicts an elongated triangular arrangement of dark blue patches rising dramatically and evocatively against a background of pale pinks and oranges. The majority of Thomas's Space paintings are large sparkling works with implied movement achieved through floating patterns of broken colors against a white background.

In her last paintings, Thomas employed her characteristic short bars of color and impasto technique. The tones, however, became more subdued, and the formerly vertical and horizontal accents of Thomas's brush strokes became more diverse in movement, and included diagonals, diamond shapes, and asymmetrical surface patterns. During the artist's final years, the crippling effects of arthritis prevented her from painting as often as she wanted.

Alma Thomas never married, and lived in the same house her father bought in downtown Washington in 1907. The final years of her life brought awards and recognition. In 1972 she was honored with one-woman exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art and at the Corcoran Gallery of Art; that same year one of her paintings was selected for the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Before her death in 1978, Thomas had achieved national recognition as a major woman artist devoted to abstract painting.

Regenia A. Perry Free within Ourselves: African-American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art in Association with Pomegranate Art Books, 1992)

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During the 1960s Alma Thomas emerged as an exuberant colorist, abstracting shapes and patterns from the trees and flowers around her. Her new palette and technique-considerably lighter and looser than in her earlier representational works and dark abstractions-reflected her long study of color theory and the watercolor medium.

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Melissa Falconer, also known as M. Falconer, is a Toronto based self-taught visual artist. Her work is strongly influenced by Black culture and Black pop culture in North America as they represent the forms of culture she identifies with the most. Her paintings foster a sense of self-love, empowerment and self-expression. She describes her style as "Black Pop Art" due to her use of a bold and unconventional color palette. Her mission is to use art to empower people of color and to represent the culture.

Melissa has had the opportunity to exhibit in various locations in Canada, including at the Art Gallery of Ontario and Nuit Blanche, and has been commissioned for various projects with media households such as FLARE, the HuffPost and CBC/Radio-Canada among others.

Melissa Falconer graduated from Wilfrid Laurier University with a Bachelor degree in Business and Economics. She currently works as a full time artist from her studio in Toronto.

https://www.mfalconer.com/
IG:@melissafalconer

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Melissa Falconer, also known as M. Falconer, is a Toronto based self-taught visual artist. Her work is strongly influenced by Black culture and Black pop culture in North America as they represent the forms of culture she identifies with the most. Her paintings foster a sense of self-love, empowerment and self-expression.

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Ellen Gallagher was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1965, and lives and works in New York and Rotterdam, Holland. She attended Oberlin College and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Repetition and revision are central to Gallagher's treatment of advertisements that she appropriates from popular magazines like Ebony, Our World, and Sepia and uses in works like eXelento (2004) and DeLuxe (2004-05). Initially, Gallagher was drawn to the wig advertisements because of their grid-like structure. Later, she realized that it was the accompanying language that attracted her, and she began to bring these "narratives" into her paintings-making them function through the characters of the advertisements, as a kind of chart of lost worlds.

Although the work has often been interpreted strictly as an examination of race, Gallagher also suggests a more formal reading with respect to materials, processes, and insistences. From afar, the work appears abstract and minimal; upon closer inspection, googly eyes, reconfigured wigs, tongues, and lips of minstrel caricatures multiply in detail. Gallagher has been influenced by the sublime aesthetics of Agnes Martin's paintings, as well the subtle shifts and repetitions of Gertrude Stein's writing. In her earlier works, Gallagher glued pages of penmanship paper onto stretched canvas and then drew and painted on it. In Watery Ecstatic (2002-04), she literally carved images into thick watercolor paper, in her own version of scrimshaw, from which emerge images of the sea creatures from Drexciya, a mythical underwater Black Atlantis.

Gallagher received the American Academy Award in Art and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. Solo exhibitions include Whitney Museum of American Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; St. Louis Art Museum; Des Moines Art Center; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston.

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54:09

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Educator-in-Residence Todd Elkin reflects on the ways in which his classroom embodies the concept of "scenius," in which creative inventions emerge from social contexts, as the students working near each other riff off one another's strategies and ideas.

Interview

Artist Ellen Gallagher discusses the characters she employs in her work, such as Pegleg and Eunice Rivers. She also talks about how she moved from painting and collage to film.

Interview

Artist Ellen Gallagher discusses her process and how she came to use collaged paper in her paintings.

"DeLuxe" (2004-2005)

7 Images

Artist at Work

24 Images

Artwork Survey: 2000s

15 Images

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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“I have created nothing really beautiful, really lasting, but if I can inspire one of these youngsters to develop the talent I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work.”—T. R.

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Wangechi Mutu observes: “Females carry the marks, language and nuances of their culture more than the male. Anything that is desired or despised is always placed on the female body.” Piecing together magazine imagery with painted surfaces and found materials, Mutu’s collages explore the split nature of cultural identity, referencing colonial history, fashion and contemporary African politics. In Adult Female Sexual Organs, Mutu uses a Victorian medical diagram as a base: an archetype of biased anthropology and sexual repression. The head is a caricatured mask – made of packing tape, its material makes reference to bandages, migration, and cheap ‘quick-fix’ solutions. Mutu portrays the inner and outer ideals of self with physical attributes clipped from lifestyle magazines: the woman’s face being a racial distortion, her mind occupied by a prototypical white model. Drawing from the aesthetics of traditional African crafts, Mutu engages in her own form of story telling; her works document the contemporary myth-making of endangered cultural heritage.

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Fibreglass mannequin, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, globe, brass, steel baseplate, umbrella

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For the first thirty years of his career, Kerry James Marshall was a successful but little known artist. His figurative paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, and videos appeared in gallery and museum shows here and abroad, and selling them was never a problem. He won awards, residencies, and grants, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997, but in the contemporary-art world, which started to look more closely at Black artists in the nineties, Marshall was an outlier, and happy to be one. He had an unshakable confidence in himself as an artist, and the undistracted solitude of his practice allowed him to spend most of his time in the studio. The curator Helen Molesworth told me that during the three years it took to put together "Mastry," Marshall's first major retrospective in the United States, which opened in 2016 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and travelled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, "there were still people in the art world who didn't know who he was."

This is no longer the case. The exhibition outed Marshall as a great artist, a virtuoso of landscape, portraiture, still-life, history painting, and other genres of the Western canon since the Renaissance. The return to figurative art in the past two decades has been embraced by a new wave of younger Black artists, and for many of them, it is now clear, Kerry James Marshall has been a primary inspiration. "Kerry's influence expands so far beyond his own project," Rashid Johnson, who at forty-three is one of the strongest voices in contemporary art, told me. "He's an electric and dynamic thinker who's also had an enormous influence on those of us who use abstraction and more conceptual approaches. There are two artists without whom I probably would not have become one-David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall."

Marshall, whose calm manner and impeccable courtesy put people at ease, talks about his work with clarity and precision. "Everything I do is based on my understanding of art history," he told me recently. "The foundation of art as an activity among human beings has always been some form of representation, and there isn't a mode of art-making that I haven't explored, and put into use when it was necessary." His painting is figurative but not realistic. In 1993, he made two paintings that set him on a course that was entirely his own. He was thirty-eight years old, living in Chicago with his wife, the actress Cheryl Lynn Bruce, and he had recently moved into his first real studio, a three-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot office space with an eleven-foot-high ceiling. The new paintings were much bigger than anything he had done for quite a while-nine feet high by ten feet wide. "The Lost Boys" shows two young Black boys, one of whom sits in a dollar-a-ride toy car; the other stands nearby, holding a pink water pistol, beside a tree that has a yellow "Do Not Cross" police tape around its trunk. The boys look directly at the viewer, and there is something unnerving about them, a sense of sadness and vulnerability.

The painting, Marshall said, came partly out of experiences he'd had during his own boyhood, in South Central Los Angeles, where his family lived in the nineteen-sixties. "This was the period when the Crips and the Bloods came into existence and everything changed," Marshall recalled. "The level of violence grew exponentially. Before, gangs were groups of guys who hung out together and now and then they would have a fight, but it was a fight. When the Crips came, it was just shooting, and a lot of young people died. My older brother, Wayne, narrowly escaped a drive-by shooting on our block. 'The Lost Boys' was built around a child who was killed by a police officer because he had a toy pistol that they mistook for a gun. When I finished 'The Lost Boys,' I stood back and said, 'This is the kind of painting I always imagined myself making.' It seemed to me to have the scale of the great history paintings, mixed with the rich surface effects you get from modernist painting. I felt it was a synthesis of everything I'd seen, everything I'd read, everything that I thought was important about the whole practice of painting and making pictures."

The other painting, which he began working on at the same time as "The Lost Boys," is called "De Style." The title is a play on the Dutch movement De Stijl, founded in 1917, which opened the way to pure, hard-edge abstraction in art and architecture, and the setting is a barbershop-the window sign reads "Percy's House of Style." A customer is in the chair, and three others wait, two seated and one standing. Behind them, red cabinets with white drawers form a structure of precise rectangles, echoing Mondrian. Our attention is drawn to the men's elaborate hair styles-sculptured masses on the standing figure, a tower of stacked braids on one of the sitters, who I could have sworn was a woman. (Marshall said they're all men.) He went on to explain how young men of his generation in South Central had been captivated by the blaxploitation movies of the seventies, which "gave us models of high style and sophistication that a lot of guys I was in high school with emulated. My brother and I did each other's hair. I had mine in rollers when I went to bed. Guys were spending as much on their hair as girls did. And not only hair. We designed our own suits and had them made. You worked all summer so you could start school in the fall with a new wardrobe." For a Black teen-ager in Los Angeles, life was in the details. "Just walking is not a simple thing," Marshall told the curator Terrie Sultan. "You've got to walk with style."

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art bought "De Style" the year Marshall painted it-his first sale to a major museum. The price was "around twelve thousand dollars," he recalls, and he saw this as a down payment on what had become his overriding ambition: to bring large-scale Black faces and Black bodies into places, such as museums, where their almost complete absence had troubled him since he was a child. "Once I made those two pictures, I understood clearly how to move forward," he told me.

Knowing what to do and how to do it is the cornerstone of Kerry James Marshall's existence. When he was in the seventh grade, at the predominantly Black George Washington Carver Junior High School in Los Angeles, he took every shop class that was available-the school offered a wide range of options. During summer vacations, when the shop facilities were open to the public, Marshall spent one summer learning about plastics-how to laminate, cut, sand, and polish earrings, ashtrays, and other objects. "I sometimes use plastic now, because I know what I can do with it," he told me. "The new D.I.Y. culture is so behind what we had. Parents spoiled it by suing schools if anybody got hurt in shop class, and so you have a whole generation of kids who don't know how to make anything." Today, the workshop in his studio is three times as big as the area where he paints. When the overhead lighting there needed rewiring a few years ago, he rented a hydraulic lift and fixed the problem himself. "There isn't anything I can't do," he said. "I am not going to be found not knowing how something works." He is bone-certain that knowing how things work gives him a freedom and an independence he would not otherwise have. Marshall once told a group of doctors, only half joking, that with a couple of weeks' study he could do brain surgery.

How someone with Marshall's depth of knowledge, confidence, and self-reliance escaped being somewhat insufferable is a good question. His alert and amused approach to the world has brought him many close friendships, and no discernible detractors. I sometimes wonder how much of this is related to the remarkable woman he married. They met in 1985, when Marshall came to New York for a one-year artist residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem. He had driven from L.A. in a Volkswagen van packed with all his belongings, and he arrived two weeks early, planning to store his things at the museum while he explored the city and found a place to stay. Cheryl Bruce, the museum's public-relations director, had to tell him that he couldn't do so, because the three outgoing residents hadn't left yet. Bruce had grown up in Chicago. She was seven years older than Marshall, she had a thirteen-year-old daughter, Sydney, who lived with Cheryl and spent summers with her father, in Los Angeles, and she was already launched on an acting career. That fall, when she was offered a role in a series for children, starring a very young Ben Affleck, which would be filmed on location in Yucatán, she quit her job at the museum. At her going-away party, Bruce struck Marshall as "the strangest girl I'd ever seen, because she was just crying her eyes out. I had never seen anybody do that. She was also extremely beautiful and vivacious, with personality in excess."

Four months later, after Bruce finished working on the series, she returned to visit her friends at the museum. Mary Schmidt Campbell, the director, asked if she wanted her job back, and she said yes. Marshall called her the next day. Would she be interested in going with him to see Orson Welles's "The Magnificent Ambersons," which was playing at the Thalia on upper Broadway? Bruce said she did not date artist residents or people who worked at the museum. "But I felt badly about turning him down, and I asked him to my place in Brooklyn for dinner with me and my daughter, Sydney," she recalled. "I was making a salad when all of a sudden he kissed me. I thought, Oh, man, he is really misconstruing this. But then we talked for a long time. Sydney went to bed. As Kerry was getting ready to leave, he said, 'You're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.' And I remember-maybe this was another night-I looked out the window and saw him walking under a tree, playing his harmonica."

The no-dating rule lasted for six months. Marshall had stayed in New York after his Studio Museum residency ended, living in Harlem and working for a Manhattan print publisher. He was in the early stages of his career, making small abstract paintings and collages, some of which he had shown in 1985 at the Koplin Gallery in Los Angeles. He and Bruce started dating, but they didn't live together. They were best friends. She kidded him a lot, and they made each other laugh. Sydney thought he was cool, because he talked to her the same way he talked to her mother, and was "incredibly comfortable about going his own way." One night, when Marshall and Bruce were in the Union Square subway station-she was headed for Brooklyn, he was going uptown-he asked if she'd like to get married. "I had already put my token in-that was when you still used tokens-and I said . . . 'Kerry, you can't ask me something like that going through a turnstile. I can't answer you. Give me some time to think about it.' He asked me again a couple months later-we were in a playground somewhere in Manhattan-and I hadn't thought about it. I'd promised to give him an answer, though, and I said O.K. We didn't set a date. And then my sister Vicki got very sick with multiple sclerosis, and my mom said she needed me home in Chicago."

Marshall drove her there in a U-Haul. They dropped her belongings off at her mother's garage, explained that they would be back as soon as possible, then turned around and went to South Carolina. Both of them had agreed to work on an independent film, written and directed by Julie Dash, called "Daughters of the Dust," about three generations of Gullah-speaking people living on an island off the coast. Marshall had been recruited as the film's production designer by Arthur Jafa, its cinematographer and Dash's husband, whom he had met a few years earlier in Los Angeles. Bruce would play one of the key roles. They had come to South Carolina to make a "proof of concept," a few scenes to help raise money for the film. Shooting the footage took several weeks. Marshall provided all the props-if he couldn't find them in stores on the mainland, he made them himself. Although Dash and Jafa broke up a few years later, the four of them have remained close, and "Daughters of the Dust," released in 1991, is considered one of the classics of independent cinema.

After driving back to Chicago with Bruce, Marshall returned to New York and his job at the print publisher. "When I left L.A., I had planned to stay in New York," he told me. "But I felt confident that I could go anywhere on the planet and do what I had to do." As soon as he had some money in the bank, he moved to Chicago permanently. Bruce's acting career was thriving-she was in two plays, one at the Northlight Theatre, in Evanston, and the other at Steppenwolf, in Chicago. She also landed a film role that allowed them to sublet an apartment in Hyde Park. They got married in April, 1989, at the South Side Community Art Center, in Chicago. By 1992, Marshall had made enough money to buy, for fifteen thousand dollars, the house they live in today.

James Marshall, Kerry's father, didn't graduate from high school. He served in the Army during the Korean War, then went to work as a dishwasher at the veterans hospital in Birmingham, Alabama, his home town. His wife, Ora Dee, had hoped to be a singer-songwriter; she made a record with a doo-wop group in Birmingham, and co-wrote a song called "Lovin' Feeling," which paid her royalties for years, but that was the extent of her musical career. Kerry, their second child, was born in 1955. Birmingham then was so rigidly segregated that the only white people he and his brother Wayne, who was a year older, came into contact with were the Italian family that ran the corner store and the Catholic nuns who taught at the Holy Family school he attended, where the students were all Black. Marshall's most vivid early memory was of looking through a scrapbook of pictures-Christmas cards and Valentine cards, photographs from National Geographic and other magazines-that belonged to Miss Hill, his kindergarten teacher and the only Black teacher in the school. She rewarded well-behaved children by letting one of them have the book during nap time. "I was captivated by those images," Marshall told me. "I remember saying to myself, This is what I want to do, I want to make pictures."

The family moved to Los Angeles in 1963, first to a public-housing project in the Watts area and later to a rented house elsewhere in South Central, the heart of the Black diaspora. They were part of the Great Migration of more than six million Black people who left the South during the Jim Crow era, to find better jobs and more humane treatment. James worked for the U.S. Postal Service, and Ora Dee ran a secondhand shop, selling objects she bought at auction. Racial tensions were building in L.A. The Watts riots erupted in 1965. By then, Kerry and his family were a few miles north, but the rioting spread throughout the area; Kerry and Wayne saw a supermarket on fire and bricks being thrown through store windows. "It looked like a carnival," Kerry recalled. Gang warfare was on the rise. Neither Wayne nor Kerry joined a gang. Wayne had gained respect at their public school as someone you didn't mess with, and, because he looked out for his younger brother, Kerry didn't have to fight. They both did well in school, and became avid readers-their mother had read Aesop's Fables and other classics to them, and she signed up for a subscription to receive the Dr. Seuss books-as a bonus they were given a "Children's Guide to Knowledge." "I also became obsessed with comic books," Kerry said. "When I was in the fifth grade, my brother and a friend and I rode our bikes to a used-magazine store in Huntington Park, just south of L.A., which had back issues of Marvel Comics. I wanted to go again by myself, so one day, after lunch, I climbed the fence at school and walked there." It took him four hours. He arrived just in time to buy three comic books before the store closed, and he didn't get home until nine-thirty. "I told my mother I'd been helping a teacher at school."

Kerry and Wayne both liked to draw images of comic-book superheroes and other characters. "Kerry was just sketching all the time," his younger sister Jennifer, who was born in Birmingham the year before they left, told me. She remembers lying on the floor in front of the TV, with Wayne and their youngest brother, Travis, "and Kerry would be drawing us." In 1965, the same year Kerry played hooky from school, his class made a field trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which had just opened at its current location. "I didn't know there was such a thing as a museum," Kerry told me. "Once I learned how to get there, you couldn't keep me away." What he remembers vividly from that first visit are two huge allegorical paintings by Veronese and a wooden tribal figure from Mali, a Senufo executioner with feathers on the head and two sticks for arms. ("That thing scared me to death.") He didn't know art schools existed until several years later. A teacher at his junior high school had noticed that Kerry was more interested in drawing than any of the other students were, and he recommended him for a summer drawing class at the Otis College of Art and Design. This was where Marshall discovered the work of Charles White. Born in Chicago in 1918, White was a great but largely unrecognized Black artist. Marshall had read a biography of him when he was in the sixth grade, and he had written a paper on it, but he had no real conception of what White's work looked like until the Otis instructor George De Groat projected reproductions from "Images of Dignity," a book of White's drawings. The pictures were all of Black people, and they had a depth and a power that astonished Marshall. White was teaching at Otis then. De Groat took the class upstairs to see his studio, and later that afternoon White himself walked into their classroom. "He was shorter than I was, but he had a big voice," Marshall told me. "That's when I decided Otis is where I want to go after high school."

Otis required that applicants to its B.F.A. program have two years of college credits. Marshall graduated from high school in 1973, and spent the next year washing dishes, parking cars, and finding other odd jobs. He lived with Wayne for a while, after Wayne's girlfriend moved out of his house, and he learned to subsist on five dollars a week. In 1975, he entered Los Angeles City College. By the time he became a full-time student at Otis two years later, Marshall had taken evening and weekend classes with Charles White and Sam Clayberger, both of whom knew how to analyze a painting and build visual structures. "Charlie White just adored him," the veteran Otis teacher Arnold Mesches told Ian Alteveer, the curator who installed Marshall's retrospective at the Met. "Charlie would say, 'He's a bit obnoxious, isn't he? . . . He's good, but he's opinionated.' " To Marshall, though, the Otis program was a bitter disappointment: "By the time I got there, conceptual art was the dominant force in a lot of art schools, including Otis. Anything that looked like conventional painting and drawing and sculpture was dismissed. Charles White was still there, but the Old Guard had been pushed aside. There was no rigor." Except for White and a few others, Marshall said, "it just seemed like a colossal waste of time."

Soon after he graduated from Otis, his abstract collages were in a group show called "Newcomers" at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. A Los Angeles couple had bought four of them, but Marshall was losing interest in abstraction and collage-like Otis, they both now seemed too forgiving, lacking in rigor. His life was opening up in other ways. He went to New York for the first time, to see the monumental 1980 Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art-more specifically, to see "Guernica," which he called "one of the greatest history paintings in modern art," and which would be repatriated to the Prado Museum in Madrid after the show ended. Around that time he read Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, "Invisible Man," which changed his approach to representation in art. "It allowed me to set a path away from those abstract collages and mixed-media work," he told me. Ellison's piercing insight, that Black people were invisible because white people refused to see them, was a revelation. It also made Marshall realize that he could use the human figure to explore the phenomenon of being present and absent at the same time.

This idea is embodied in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self" (1980), the first figurative painting Marshall had done in several years. Only eight inches tall by six and a half inches wide, on paper, it shows the head and torso of a Black man in a wide-brimmed black hat, against a dark-gray background. His skin is so dark that all we see at first are the dazzling whites of his eyes, a triangle of white shirt, and eighteen teeth in a comically wide, gap-toothed grin. "There's a joke about people being so black that you can't see them at night unless they're smiling," Marshall told me. "Being Black was a negative, and for me this was the starting point from which I could build an image of Blackness without those negative associations."

Instead of oil paint, he used egg tempera, which he mixed according to the formula in a fifteenth-century treatise by the Renaissance artist Cennino Cennini. This gave his Black figure an uncanny depth and richness of tone. "With egg tempera, as with fresco painting, you have to know what you're doing because the medium dries so quickly," Marshall said to me. "It allows you to be deliberate in your approach." Marshall had no interest in chance or the sort of random order that many contemporary artists used to give an effect of spontaneity. He wanted total control of everything that happened in his work. He also wanted to be a painter of social and political history, and the question he asked himself was: "How do you address history with a painting that doesn't look like Giotto or Géricault or Ingres, but without abandoning the knowledge that painters had accumulated over the centuries?"

The key to "A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self," Marshall told me, "is that every single shape you see in it was calculated in a way that exercises a certain force against the edges. The angle and the crease of the hat, the location of the shirt, the gap in the teeth, all those things are lined up on vectors that either stabilize or add tension to the direction those shapes are going in-it's plotted like a mathematical equation." The result is shockingly vivid. He had turned a racist caricature into a powerful, disturbing, and complex work of art. Martha Koplin, who opened her L.A. gallery in 1982, heard about Marshall and asked him to bring in some of his work. He brought "A Portrait," and she sold it the next day, for eight hundred and fifty dollars, to a Los Angeles collector who donated it, three years ago, to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Several more "Invisible Man" paintings followed. In each one, the Black figure's outlines are barely visible against the black background, but the longer you look the more you see. The figure is simultaneously there and not there.

After they married in 1989, Marshall and Cheryl Bruce went back to South Carolina to shoot "Daughters of the Dust." Marshall was the production designer for two more independent films after that, one of which was Haile Gerima's "Sankofa." Filmmaking usually required working with other people, though, and Marshall preferred to be alone in his studio. In the early nineties, he painted tender visions of Black lovers in domestic interiors, and strange, surrealistic works that borrowed images from African folklore and Haitian voodoo. The breakthrough came in 1993, with "The Lost Boys" and "De Style." The next year, he began work on the "Garden Project," a series of large paintings that confirmed his new direction as a history painter.

His subject was the public-housing projects that had been introduced in the nineteen-twenties to get low-income families out of urban slums-a well-intentioned experiment that poor planning, spreading poverty, and the drug wars turned into a nationwide disaster. Marshall and his family had lived in one of these developments, called Nickerson Gardens, when they moved to Los Angeles in 1963. "This was before the projects were overloaded with people who were out of work," he said. "I would mark the transformation to sometime after the 1974 recession, when the cycles of poverty set in. After that, nobody wanted to live in the projects, but when we were there everybody did." Marshall's tapestry-like paintings, which are on unstretched canvas, with grommets to hang them by, show well-maintained buildings, neatly dressed Black people gardening and enjoying one another's company, children running or biking to school, and lots of songbirds, blue sky, and green lawns. "The Garden Project paintings are overabundant, particularly lush, particularly rich in surface and mark-making," Marshall wrote in a 2000 essay. "[The] sky is always just a little too bright a blue; the sun is always beaming just a little too gaily; there are bluebirds of happiness and flowers bursting out all over the place." Why all the too muchness? "I wanted to evoke some of the hope that the projects started with, but also to demonstrate a little bit of the despair," he told me. "And the way I did that was to go over the top, with the Disneyland fantasy and the bluebirds." The gangs and the drugs and the poverty that overwhelmed the projects are what we remember, not the utopian dreams that inspired them. As his work would demonstrate again and again in the years to come, Marshall was not interested in depicting Black trauma. He wanted to show that there has always been more to the Black experience in America than oppression and humiliation-that somehow, in spite of everything, Black lives have been and can be rewarding, diverse, and full of joy.

The dense, matte, ultra-black skin that he gave to everyone in these paintings is a rhetorical statement about Blackness itself-not realistic but didactic. "When you say Black people, Black culture, Black history, you have to show that," he remarked, in one of our conversations. "You have to demonstrate that black is richer than it appears to be, that it is not just darkness but a color." Marshall worked with the three black pigments that can be bought in a paint store-ivory black, carbon black, and Mars black-and he mixed them with cobalt blue, or chrome-oxide green, or dioxazine violet. The result, which is fully visible only in the original painting, not in reproductions, is something entirely his own. "That's what got me to the place I am now, where the black is fully chromatic," he said.

The "Garden Project" paintings were shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, in a 1995 group exhibition called "About Place," curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn, and soon afterward they appeared at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. Shainman had become Marshall's New York dealer, working in collaboration with Martha Koplin in Santa Monica. All five paintings sold quickly, four of them to museums and one to a private collector. "Kerry had a waiting list from then on," Shainman recalls. It was a limited one, and buyers had to be patient, because Marshall worked slowly. As Shainman explained, "Kerry told me right at the beginning that every painting he did had to have a reason for existing, and he never, never produced for the market."

In 1997, recognition "was just raining on me," Marshall said. He was invited to show at the Whitney Biennial and at Documenta X, the big international art exhibition in Kassel, Germany, and the MacArthur Foundation awarded him one of its "genius" grants: sixty thousand dollars a year, for five years. He used the money to buy the building his studio was in-to buy it outright, with no mortgage. Being debt-free has always been important to him. Until quite recently, he did all the maintenance work and improvements on the two-story brick house that he and Bruce had bought in 1992, on Chicago's South Side. Their neighborhood, called Bronzeville, had once attracted successful Black professionals-doctors, lawyers, musicians-but by the nineteen-sixties most of them had left, and the area had been in decline for many years. The house, which he saw in a local listing, had been abandoned and occupied by squatters, and it was in bad shape. Marshall bought it because the price was low and he could make the necessary repairs himself-putting in new bathrooms and a new roof and shoring up the floors, with help from Bruce. "He referred to me as unskilled labor," she said, and added, "Our kitchen window was shot out one New Year's Eve. The next year, we heard a similar noise. No windows were broken, but a week later I was sweeping the second floor and I found a bullet."

Marshall stopped a police car one day, described the shootings, and asked what could be done about them. "Stay away from the windows," he was told. "About eight years ago, when our neighbors threatened to harm us, I did go shopping for a firearm, but I didn't buy it," Marshall said. "Guns are really expensive. I knew that if I got one I was probably going to use it, so we had to find a better way." Moving to a safer neighborhood was not an option. Aya-Nikole Cook, a former student of Marshall's who became his first (and last) studio assistant, from 1995 to 2013, told me that she often felt nervous because he and Bruce would confront their neighbors for playing too-loud music at night. The house was their home, and they refused to be pushed out. Bruce was attached to her substantial garden in the back yard. The greeting on her answering machine, updated regularly, always began with a horticultural note: "Peonies are blooming. Please leave a message." As Cook explained, "They both felt very strongly that once you achieve a level of success you have a responsibility to the neighborhood. . . . They expanded my view in so many ways." The Bronzeville neighborhood has improved considerably in recent years, and in 2017, to Bruce's utter amazement, Marshall agreed to a complete renovation of their house, which involved an architect and a contractor. The job took two years, during which they lived on the twenty-first floor of an apartment building overlooking Lake Michigan.

Marshall never had creative blocks or fallow periods. He explored a wide range of media, including photography, video, and sculptural works such as the 1998 "Mementos"-vastly oversized stamps and ink pads scattered around a room, with their printed messages ("Black Is Beautiful," "Black Power," "We Shall Overcome," "By Any Means Necessary," "Burn Baby Burn") on the wall. The "Garden Project" was followed by "Souvenir," a series that memorializes the civil-rights struggles in the sixties. Violence and trauma are present in them, but not on view. In a painting of a middle-class living room, a woman with mysterious golden wings bends to move a vase of flowers, wall hangings mourn the martyred Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the faces of the four girls who were killed in the 1963 Birmingham church bombing and other victims of white supremacy float near the ceiling. (The Marshall family had left Birmingham a month before the bombing.) "Heirlooms and Accessories," a later work, shows three open lockets on chains, each one bearing a photograph of a different white woman. The women were part of a large and festive audience that gathered on August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana, to watch the lynching of two young Black men. Marshall had singled them out from a photograph of the event, which is reproduced in the background, but so faintly that the other celebrants and the victims are hard to see. The three white women are "accessories" to the crime, ready to hang from someone's unsuspecting neck.

"Kerry has such a whimsical, quizzical mind," Arthur Jafa told me. "His paintings take on the whole weight of Western civilization, but I don't know another person with whom I laugh as much when we talk." In the years since Jafa and Marshall worked together on "Daughters of the Dust," Jafa had become an artist as well as a cinematographer, but his career in art had developed more slowly than Marshall's. "He is amazingly generous," Jafa said. "He tried fiercely to get me into Documenta in 1997. He's not just a friend but a comrade."

"Rythm Mastr," Marshall's visual Black superhero narrative, started in 1999 as a comic strip. Images from it were shown at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh that year, on newsprint, and it had a limited run in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette while the show was on. Since then, the evolving concept has appeared, in different forms, at the David Zwirner gallery, and, this summer, in a large group exhibition of comic-strip art at MCA Chicago. Marshall is now working on a new version in the form of a graphic novel, which will become the basis for an animated film, and then a live-action feature film.

We talked about this hugely ambitious project one morning. Marshall was in his studio on Michigan Avenue, an eighty-by-twenty-foot building that an architect was commissioned to build, to Marshall's exact specifications, in 2011. (Architecture, like brain surgery, is one of the rare disciplines that he hasn't had time to master.) He was sitting at his desk on the mezzanine, where the walls are covered with drawings, prints, and images of all kinds. One section is devoted to his meticulously organized art library, and another to dozens of small action figures, dolls, furniture, and other objects that he often makes himself and uses as models for things that will appear, enlarged and altered, in his paintings. Genial and self-contained, as always, Marshall took pictures on his iPhone to show me the rest of the studio-the twenty-by-twenty-foot area on the ground floor where he does his painting, and the adjoining, much larger workshop space, filled with machinery and tools to make whatever he needs. "I'm in the midst right now of developing the graphic novel," he said, "but I also paint every day. I'm always doing several things simultaneously-they overlap, and become completely integrated. I hate to have people drop in on me here because it breaks my concentration. Cheryl gives me a courtesy call before she comes, and"-laughing-"she has to call before she gets to the corner of my block."

Through the decades, Marshall said, a lot of people have tried to introduce Black superheroes. One of the first was the Black Panther, who appeared in Marvel Comics' "The Fantastic Four" in 1966. "But none of them got the kind of traction that Superman or Batman or Spider-Man had, and that gave me a challenge." Marshall saw no point in a Black superhero who was created by a white artist, and for that reason he has little interest in the new Black Panther series that was developed by Marvel, and written by Ta-Nehisi Coates. "If all you can do is take characters that already exist, it's a failure to me," he said. Marshall wanted to invent his own characters, and a narrative and a world in which they could function. He found his narrative in two things that were happening simultaneously in Chicago in the late nineties: the "explosion of violence" that the gang wars were inflicting on young people, and the demolition of public housing, "which moved kids into neighborhoods where the gangs didn't want them." His superhero is dual-Rythm Mastr, an old man who teaches his young protégé, Farell, the ancient secrets of drumming that can activate the powers of African tribal objects on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. There are echoes of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker here, but the characters are different, and, anyway, why not? " 'Star Wars' is more than a trilogy," Marshall said. "Those characters are iconic-there isn't a person on the planet who doesn't know who Darth Vader is." What Marshall has in mind is a film on the scale of the Steven Spielberg and George Lucas epic. "My goal is to match the iconic level of 'Star Wars,' " he said.

Marshall clearly sees this magnum opus as both an art work and a cinematic blockbuster. "I think it can be as complex as anything I've done as a painter," he said recently to Arthur Jafa, who shares Marshall's love of comics, and, in particular, of Jack Kirby, the comic-book artist who collaborated with the writer Stan Lee to co-create the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, and other Marvel Comics superheroes. "Jack Kirby was the man, the king," Jafa told me. "A Jewish guy from the Lower East Side invented all this stuff. You think of the ten biggest-selling movies of all time, and several of them are Marvel Comics adaptations, right? And they all come out of this one guy Jack Kirby. He had a bigger visual impact on me than anyone. I think he's up there with Charlie Parker and Picasso and Miles Davis."

Kirby's drawings, Marshall said, have an artistry that goes beyond technical skill. "He was a great storyteller with pictures-looking at one of his comic books is like watching a movie. The page layout and the way the action is drawn is really dynamic. There's a kind of electric plasma that he did with dots-they're called Kirby dots-to show something that's been charged with radiation. I always saw the absence of Black superheroes in comic books as a failure of Black imagination that needed to be resolved, and I wanted to be an inventor, like Kirby, rather than a follower."

In our mezzanine conversation, Marshall told me that the "Rythm Mastr" story line has become increasingly complex. There are now two different groups of people trying to stop the gang violence-Farell and his crew of Afrocentric drummers, and a posse of wheelchair-bound tech wizards, victims of drive-by shootings, who use weaponized robots against gangs. He also said that Chicago is no longer where it happens. "I've substituted a city and a world that I created myself," he said. "It's invention the whole way. And I don't think it will take another ten years. It's possible within the next five."

In the early two-thousands, a few perceptive curators started to think about giving Marshall a mid-career survey show. Elizabeth Smith, the chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago at the time, approached him about doing one. Marshall didn't want a survey. What he wanted was a show of existing and new works of his that dealt with Black identity and Black culture in white society. This led to "Kerry James Marshall: One True Thing, Meditations on Black Aesthetics," which opened in Chicago in 2003 and travelled to museums in Miami, Baltimore, New York (the Studio Museum), and Birmingham. Five years later, though, Madeleine Grynsztejn, who had recently become the director of MCA Chicago, proposed doing a full-scale retrospective of Marshall's work there and he said yes. At Grynsztejn's suggestion, they decided to wait until he turned sixty. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles signed on to take the show when Helen Molesworth became its chief curator in 2014. The Metropolitan Museum of Art had already agreed to do the same, a decision that helped make the exhibition a major art-world event.

Marshall gave Grynsztejn and Molesworth complete freedom to do the kind of show they wanted, a chronological survey that concentrated on his paintings. They wanted to call it "Kerry James Marshall: Old Master," but he balked at that. "Kerry didn't like the word 'old,' " Molesworth confided, smiling. "He came back with 'Mastry.' I think he liked playing with the word-what it meant to have mastery, and to misspell it and make it colloquial, and put it in the tradition of African American wordplay." "Mastry" opened at MCA Chicago in April, 2016. I saw it a few months later in New York, where its seventy-two paintings filled two floors in the Met Breuer, at that time the Met's modern and contemporary branch. (The building had formerly housed the Whitney Museum of American Art.) For me and for many others, the exhibition placed Kerry James Marshall in the pantheon of great living artists. "One might have thought it impossible for contemporary art to simultaneously occupy a position of beauty, difficulty, didacticism, and formalism with such power," the artist Carroll Dunham wrote, in Artforum. "There really are no other American painters who have taken on such a project."

Painting after painting bore witness to the fusion of image and idea, and to the subtle, not so subtle, and sometimes hilarious references to art history. The "Vignette" series (2003-12) shows mostly young Black people in antique clothes enjoying the rococo charms of Fragonard's "The Progress of Love." "Do Black people seek out pleasure?" Marshall asked me. "Of course. So let's have some of it."

In "Black Painting," whose blackness is so deep that it takes a minute or more to make out the image, two people are in bed, one of them a woman who has just heard something that prompts her to raise herself up on one arm. Marshall's junior high school was a few blocks from the Black Panther headquarters in Los Angeles, and he remembers the police raid on it in 1969. His painting shows "the instant when nothing has happened yet, but it's about to happen," he said. "It's not Fred Hampton and his wife; it's meant to evoke the whole range of police raids on the Black Panthers." The painting is dated 2003-06, because Marshall was not satisfied with its first incarnation; he took it back from his New York gallery and continued to work on it, off and on, for three years.

Marshall's paintings often have inexplicable elements. "7am Sunday Morning"-the title refers to Edward Hopper's "Early Sunday Morning"-is divided down the middle. The left half is a precise, almost photo-realist rendering of a street crossing near Marshall's studio, with red brick storefronts, a pedestrian in a yellow jacket, and a flight of birds overhead. The only unclear object is a blurred gray car, speeding across the space and linking the left side of the painting to the right side, where nothing is clear. I asked Marshall what was going on there. "It's like a lens flare," he replied. "It's the sun reflected in the glass of that building on the corner, an optical phenomenon that lets you introduce into the space something that's not there, a mirage." His aim was to catch "a moment that's miraculous in the context of a mundane, ordinary day." There are several such moments in his huge, 2012 "School of Beauty, School of Culture," which channels his earlier "De Style" and also Velázquez's "Las Meninas." Here we are in a hairdressing salon, where eight or nine women talk or preen or stand and watch. The critic Peter Plagens described it as "one of the most complex orchestrations of color in contemporary painting." A large poster of a woman with a flower in her hair, on the wall at the far right, is from Chris Ofili's 2010 show at Tate Britain in London. ("I was absolutely floored when I saw that image," Ofili told me. "I'm still honored when I think of it.") Two toddlers are in the foreground, one of them a boy, who is peering at a distorted yellow-and-white shape on the floor, which no one else seems to have noticed; it is an image that can be seen only from an extreme angle, an anamorphosis, like the skull in Hans Holbein's "The Ambassadors"-in Marshall's painting, it is Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty. The idea of white female beauty as the impregnable standard in Western art is only one of the questions raised by this endlessly evocative painting.

Marshall's craftsmanship and free-ranging imagination make his later work as unpredictable as "A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self." The "Painter" series shows confident, sumptuously dressed women and men, several of whom pose in front of their unfinished, paint-by-number canvases. Anyone can paint, they seem to say; their absurdly oversized palettes are abstract paintings in themselves. There is a series of imaginary portraits, most of them of historical figures such as Nat Turner, the rebel slave, who holds the hatchet he has used to kill his master, and Harriet Tubman, portrayed as a young woman, with the man she just married, who has vanished from the historical record. The exhibition at the Met also included an example of Marshall's photographs of people-himself, his wife, and several close friends-in black light, which is ultraviolet light. "What this does is to give this beautiful dark tone to the skin, and a kind of blue wash over everything," Naomi Beckwith, the Guggenheim Museum's chief curator, and one of the sitters, said. "Kerry has always been interested in the question 'What would art history look like if we had saturated it with Black American cultural history?' "

The most indelible painting in the show, to me, was his 2014 "Untitled: (Studio)." It shows four people and a yellow dog in a room where radiant color and magically calibrated design make it feel like the most desirable place on earth. It's hard to imagine a painting more mysteriously seductive than this, but Chris Ofili is convinced that Marshall's best work is yet to come. Comparing him recently to a Formula One racing driver, Ofili said, "For quite some years, we've been watching Kerry doing warmup laps to get his tires sticky. Now he's ready to assert his authority on the contemporary history of painting. His tires are sticky, and he knows he can take the corners a little bit tighter than before."

A big retrospective can derail an artist's career, but Marshall took his in stride. When "Mastry" was about to close at the Met, the museum gave him an informal party in the Temple of Dendur which was one of the most joyous gatherings I have ever attended. Something magnificent had happened, and was being celebrated. Soon afterward, Marshall went to the opening in Los Angeles, and then returned, with a sigh of relief, to his studio and his unrelenting work schedule. Only a few people were aware that he had undergone successful surgery for prostate cancer early in 2016. In the past two years, Cheryl Bruce has had a pulmonary embolism and a second knee replacement. They are both in good health now, and they have decided to move to Los Angeles. It won't happen for a few years-they are too busy with ongoing projects and obligations-but the bitterly cold Chicago winters and a yearning to spend more time with their families are too strong to resist. Marshall's brothers and sisters and their children live in or near L.A., and so does Bruce's married daughter, Sydney Kamlager, who went into politics and was recently elected to the California State Senate. (Marshall, her godfather as well as her stepfather, now calls her Senator Godchild.)

In the meantime, their Chicago life continues as before. Marshall gets up at five-thirty or six every morning and is in his studio by eight-thirty. Before her knee operation, Bruce was performing several times a week in "Theater for One," a production, in Chicago, for a solo actor and a sole audience member. In the evening, Bruce cooks dinner, and they argue and spar amiably. She makes fun of his erudition, calls him El Jefe, and threatens to beat him up. Years ago, they had talked about having a child. "The timing was always wrong, and somehow it didn't work out," Bruce said. After dinner, they watch classic films from Marshall's extensive collection, and at eleven-thirty they tune in to "NHK World-Japan," a Japanese channel (in English) that Marshall, who discovered it, describes as being devoted to explaining what it means to be Japanese. "You see craft traditions that are hundreds and sometimes thousands of years old," he said. Lately, they've been glued to the sumo-wrestling tournaments that are shown for fifteen days every other month. "Cheryl has become obsessed with sumo wrestling," Marshall said.

Since his retrospective, the prices paid for Marshall's work embarrass him. "Past Times" sold at Sotheby's in 2018 for twenty-one million dollars, the highest auction price yet registered for a living African American artist. (The buyer was Sean Combs.) David Zwirner, the mega-dealer who represents Marshall in Europe, told me that his new paintings can sell for seven or eight million dollars. Marshall is a semi-celebrity: his name turns up in rap songs, including "Vendetta," by Vic Mensa, and "One Way Flight," by Benny the Butcher. He is working on a new series of paintings, called "Black and part Black Birds," which will eventually include all the species in John James Audubon's "The Birds of America" that are black or have black markings. Using Audubon's images as a starting point, he depicts each species in a fanciful environment, perched on trees and posts adorned with brilliant flowers. Marshall is a longtime bird-watcher. A few years ago, he captured a juvenile crow in his bare hands-the bird was sitting on a low limb of a tree near his property, and he managed to sneak up on it from behind. He tied one of the bird's legs to a milk crate on the second-floor deck of his house, took photos and videos, set out water and mulberries for it to eat, and released it the next morning. "I'd always had a fantasy about a crow that was my friend, and would come to my call," he told me.

"London Bridge," which he painted in 2017, is his most recent history picture in the grand manner. The famous landmark was judged unsafe for traffic in the early sixties, and an American entrepreneur named Robert P. McCulloch bought it from the city, dismantled it, and used the parts to create a replica, as a tourist attraction, on the shore of Arizona's Lake Havasu. "The picture is about dislocation," according to Marshall, who obviously had a fine time painting it. Among the tourists strolling near the bridge is a Black man, dressed in the Beefeater costume of the guards of the Tower of London. He's wearing a sandwich board that advertises "Olaudah's Fish and Chips," which refers to another dislocation. "One of the earliest slave narratives was by Olaudah Equiano," Marshall explained, smiling broadly. "He and his sister were sold into slavery as children, and Olaudah ended up as a servant to a British sea captain. He eventually became free, settled in England, married an Englishwoman, and got rich from his book." In the painting, Marshall said, "the staff he carries has a picture of Queen Victoria, and the song he's singing"-it's notated on a scroll-"is the Rolling Stones' 'Sympathy for the Devil.' " The painting was bought by the Tate, where it quickly became a crowd favorite.

Marshall's determination to know more than anyone else about whatever he does is unabated. "Kerry is like Goya, you know," Madeleine Grynsztejn told me. "He's a political, social, emotional, intellectual powerhouse.There's a drawing that Goya made in his last years of an old man, bent over, leaning on two sticks, who says ' Aun aprendo '-I'm still learning. That's Kerry." ♦

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los angeles county museum of art (lacma)

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For the first thirty years of his career, Kerry James Marshall was a successful but little known artist. His figurative paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, and videos appeared in gallery and museum shows here and abroad, and selling them was never a problem.

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Zanele Muholi – ‘In My World, Every Human is Beautiful’ | Tate

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Elementary Cycle 3 Visual Arts

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A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin is a beautifully illustrated and written book about American self-taught painter, Horace Pippin. It's what I call a perfect "art class" book as the story is riveting enough for older readers (in my case, 5th graders) and the illustrations are simply inspiring.

My goal with this lesson was to teach my 5th graders about a relatively unknown American painter and how every artist's journey is different. There is a spread in the book that shows Horace painting in his studio. He paints what he knows, sees and recalls. He uses his imagination and likes to add a touch of red.

This is the page that gave me the inspiration for this art lesson....

My questions to my students were:

What would you paint on your easel?

What does your room look like?

What colors would you use?

What would appear outside your window?

I gave each student a piece of 12″ x 18″ 90-lb watercolor paper, a pencil, a tray of watercolor paints, colored pencils, a brush and some water. The students shared a 4″ x 6″ cardboard template to draw the easel: the main subject in the composition. We did a guided drawing for the easel, chair and artist.

On the whiteboard I drew a large rectangle to mimic the watercolor paper then drew a small rectangle inside to mimic the easel. I demonstrated a few options for chair which could be drawn first. Then showed the kids how to draw a back-facing person sitting in the chair.

Here are some tips:

Encourage the kids to draw as large as possible. When drawing with pencils, 95% of children will draw very small even if given a large piece of paper. This is why I rarely use pencils but in this project, I wanted to give them a try.

I used 12″ x 18″ paper but a better choice would be a 9″ x 12″ paper. The large paper took a very long time for most children to fill. This was exacerbated by the use of pencils. Pencils=Perfectionism.

Use a larger easel template so that more of the paper can be filled, thus encouraging larger shapes to paint.

Drawing the room:

Talk about the various items that are commonly seen in bedrooms like beds, dressers, curtains, light fixtures, etc. Then ask the students to fill up the paper with these items. Many children will forget rules of perspective and if you try and teach perspective here, it is time-consuming. Trust me! I felt as though the students were successful if they were able to draw large enough.

After all the details were drawn with pencils, I encouraged both colored pencils and watercolor paints to be used to add color.

This project can take a very long time to do and in the end, it wasn't a great project for my art program because it consumed a little less than a third of the classes I have with my 5th graders. You will find that many children will obsess over the tiny objects in the room and ignore the bigger pieces like walls, floors and beds. That's just a developmental thing.

If I were to do this lesson again, I would use 9″ x 12″ paper and focus only on the easel and the artist. That way, the images would be larger, more focused and still would allow a great deal of imagination.

Have you done an imagination painting before using pencils? What are your tips for getting students to draw large? Share your experiences in the comments below....

In the end, there were some very proud fifth grade artists!

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Horace Pippin Imagination Drawings | Deep Space Sparkle

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A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin is a beautifully illustrated and written book about American self-taught painter, Horace Pippin. It's what I call a perfect "art class" book as the story is riveting enough for older readers (in my case, 5th graders) and the illustrations are simply inspiring.

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Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jazz-Inspired Painting, Mind Maps, and Getting Your Work Out There

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Jazz inspired painting - Jean-Michel Basquiat

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Jazz inspired painting - Jean-Michel Basquiat

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Elementary Cycle 2 & 3

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This month, 3rd grade has been learning about the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat (1960-1988) was a famous painter during the 80's who had a loose, improvisational method. His career began as a homeless graffiti artist selling postcard-sized work on the street for $10 a piece, and ended as a famous, internationally-selling artist in the top tiers of the art world.

After looking at Basquiat's work and learning about how he was heavily influenced by jazz and hip hop music, the students watched a brief clip from a movie about Basquiat where you can see him painting a huge canvas in his studio to the sound of jazz music. We talked about rhythm, and how artists are often inspired by music. We talked about drumming your paintbrush with the beat or moving paint around like the notes on the saxophone. I emphasized that the students should listen very carefully and FEEL the music while they paint. I had no specific outcome in mind - just loose, improvisational painting inspired by jazz music. We used primary colors to keep it simple. After a demonstration of my own jazz-influenced painting process, I put on a Louis Armstrong video, and the students began to paint.

I was so pleased with how engaged the students were while they painted. When I asked how the process felt, many of them commented how they loved being able to paint whatever came to their minds.

The next week, we talked about how Basquiat included words and images in his work that were based on the things he read in books, heard on the TV or radio, or remembered from history. We made a mind map of the things that the students were learning in math, social studies, language arts, science, and art. Each student had the opportunity to add one word to the mind map.

After we created this collaborative mind map on the board, students used oil pastel over their paintings to draw words and pictures based on what was going on in their brains (they could pulls words from the mind map or add something new). In between this lesson and the next, I cut each artwork into postcard sized quarters. Cropping each image into fourths made for really beautiful, abstract compositions - especially when they're pieced together out of order.

The next lesson was an ART MARKET in the cafeteria! I had told the students in the beginning of this unit that we would be giving away our artworks to people in the school, just like real artists! We watched a short clip from a movie about Basquiat where he sees Andy Warhol walking into a restaurant, follows him in, and sells him some postcard-sized artworks for $10 a piece. We discussed how artists need to get their artwork out into the world, and how many famous artists start out by selling their art on the street. I included information about the art market in morning announcements, and asked specific teachers to bring their classes down to the market during a 20 minute time slot. We spent the first 10 minutes of class signing the artworks and reviewing possible answers to the questions: "How did you make this?" "What materials did you use?" "What was your inspiration?" and "Can you tell me about it?" I included a bowl at the entrance of the market with little slips of paper with these questions on them.

When student "customers" came down to the market, they took a slip of paper, asked an artist the question on it, and when the artist answered, the "customer" was able to take an artwork. The whole thing was a bit chaotic but really exciting and engaging. Teachers who brought their students down to the market commented later about how much the children loved it. It was also great to hear the 3rd graders responding to questions about their artwork and reinforcing their knowledge of their process, materials, and inspirations for this project.

Overall, the art market experience was great. Each class had a different grade level "customer" group come to the market. The difference between 4th grade customers and Kindergarten customers was really interesting variety. Afterwards, the students reflected on the experience. Some said they felt nervous, some were really excited, but everyone seemed excited about the fact that they sent their work out into the world in the hands of someone else. Some students held on to one or two pieces to give to another teacher, friend, or family member who wasn't able to come to the market.​

I highly suggest watching the films about Basquiat (not with children - he had some very destructive habits that eventually lead to his death). One of my favorites is a documentary called Basquiat: Radiant Child .

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3rd Grade - Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jazz-Inspired Painting, Mind Maps, and Getting Your Work Out There

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This month, 3rd grade has been learning about the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat (1960-1988) was a famous painter during the 80's who had a loose, improvisational method.

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Historical Narrative using Silhouettes - Kara Walker

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Historical Narrative using Silhouettes - Kara Walker

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Students research a historical event and approach their project as a visual narrative - examining the work of Kara Walker as a resource. Grades 8-10. USA.

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Submitted by: Elise Weiler
Title: Historical Narrative using Silhouettes
Grade level: 8th-10th Grade
Objectives:
Students will research a historical event that has some significance to them and explain why they chose to represent that particular event. Students will approach their project as a visual narrative and will examine the work of Kara Walker as a resource. Students will understand the importance of history and the relationship that it shares with art. Students will understand why some artists choose to use history as a subject matter. Students will make a personal connection to their historical event and artwork by incorporating their own likeness within their art. Students will demonstrate growth in using art tools and improve craftsmanship. Students will use their sketchbooks and brainstorming to develop their ideas. [Click on all the images on this page for full size]
Materials: Procedure: Day 1
The lesson will begin by using Visual Thinking Strategies to discuss a piece of art by contemporary artist Kara Walker. After, the discussion is complete, the students will take 5-10 minutes to answer the following questions in their sketchbooks about another example of Walker's work, (the teacher will be connecting the video equipment as the students answer the questions. Remind the students to date the sketchbook page and to label it VTS questions.

What do you think this particular piece of art is about? Explain why you think that.
Does the image provoke any specific feelings within you? Please explain what those feelings are and why?

Next, show the video and then ask the students what their general thoughts are about Walker's work. Spend only a couple minutes listening to opinions. Use the handout for reviewing the video.

Now, have the students return to their sketchbooks and answer the following questions:

Have your feelings changed towards Walker's work? Explain your answer.
How did her explanations of her artwork help you to gain a deeper understanding of her work?
If you had to describe her artwork in three words, what would you say and why?

Use examples from what we've looked at and watched. Please don't worry about titles, try your best to explain the image or idea you are thinking of.
Day 2
Start the class with a recap of what we did the previous day. Next, show the students a PowerPoint that includes more of Walker's work. If the students have not made the connection form the previous day, point out to them or help them come to the realization that Walker's work is about history and historical events. Explain how Walker is not the first artist to draw attention to history and its impact on society. Show student's other examples of artwork that is connected to a historical event.

After all of the images are done, ask them why this artist might choose history as their subject matter?

Next, continue on to their actual assignment. Show a slide from the presentation that has the details of the assignment listed on it, also put up a handout on the board so that they can use it for future questions.

For the assignment, they must research a historical event that has some importance to them (and be able to explain why) and depict that event as a narrative while also including their own silhouette in the piece. Explain to the students that their own silhouettes will be taken with a camera, printed out on plain paper and then cut-out to use as a reference tool (but this will be done after they have decided on a composition#.

End the class with the students using their sketchbooks to write a list of historical events. They should date the page and write "Historical Events" on the top.
Day 3
The class will begin by the teacher demonstrating how to brainstorm ideas for a historical event. The teacher will give an example of a historical event and then show how she brainstormed in her sketchbook of possible ways to represent that event. She will also write down ideas on how she could incorporate herself in the composition. The next step is to work on at least 2-3 different sketches.

Once, the teacher has finished demonstrating, the students will open their sketchbooks to look at what they brainstormed for a possible historical event. Next, they will either get library time to look up more historical events and facts, or there will be reference books provided in class #laptops are also a possibility#.
Day 4
The students will have more time to complete their sketches and to look up their historical event.

Once all of the students have their sketches done and have an idea of a composition, they will have their picture taken in the pose that they will use as their silhouette.

The students will begin working on their artwork. They will use colored paper to create their silhouetted images and small scissors to cut them out.
Days 5-9
The students will have this time to complete their projects.
Day 10
The students will have a few minutes at the beginning of class to add any finishing touches on their pieces. They will then write a reflection in their sketchbooks stating #teacher will write this on board)

Why they choose to represent this particular historical event. Why is it important to them?
Explain where they placed their own silhouette and why.

Next, the students will meet up in small groups of 3-4 to critique their work. Each group will have a set of questions to answer. The teacher will come around to each group and informally assess their progress and participation. Each group member will spend 5-7 minutes on each piece of art.

Says Elise: "I taught this lesson when I was an intern teacher and one of the pieces from the class was recently chosen for the Michigan Art Education Association show... This lesson was inspired by [Kara Walker] and I'd love to see more Contemporary artists lessons out there."
Evaluation:
Self-evaluations
Sketchbooks (answers to questions and sketches)
Group Critique
Rubric
VTS question/KW Handout
Michigan Standards and Benchmarks:
PERFORMING
Content Standard #1: All students will apply skills and knowledge to perform in the arts.
A. Select materials, techniques, media technology, and processes to achieve desired effects.
B. Use art materials and tools safely and responsibly to communicate experiences and ideas.
C. Select and use the visual characteristics and organizational principles of art to communicate ideas.

CREATING
Content Standard # 2: All students will apply skills and knowledge to create in the arts.
A. Select materials, techniques, and processes to effectively communicate ideas.
B. Employ organizational principles and analyze what makes them effective or not in the
communication of ideas.
C. Integrate visual, spatial, and temporal concepts with content to communicate intended meaning in artworks.
D. Use subjects, themes, and symbols that communicate intended meaning in artworks.
E. Integrate organization structures and characteristics to create art for different purposes.

ANALYZING IN CONTEXT
Content Standard #3: All students will analyze, describe and evaluate works of art.
A. Form and defend judgments about characteristics and structures to accomplish commercial,
personal, communal, or other purposes of art.
B. Observe and compare works of art that were created for different purposes.
C. Describe how materials, techniques, technology, and processes cause responses.
D. Describe and compare the characteristics of personal artwork to the artwork of others.
E. Describe how personal experiences influence the development of specific artworks.

ARTS IN CONTEXT
Content Standard #4: All students will understand, analyze, and describe the arts in their historical, social and cultural contexts.
A. Know and compare the characteristics of artworks in various eras and cultures.
B. Describe and place a variety of art objects in historical and cultural contexts.
C. Analyze, describe, and demonstrate how factors of time and place (such as climate, resources,
ideas, and technology) influence visual characteristics that give meaning and value to a work of
art.

CONNECTING TO OTHER ARTS, OTHER DISCIPLINES, AND LIFE
Content Standard #5: All students will recognize, analyze, and describe connections among the arts, between the arts and other disciplines; between the arts and everyday life.
A. Analyze personal, family, and community connections that involve work by visual artists.
C. Compare the characteristics of works in two or more art forms that share similar subject matter, historical periods, or cultural context.
D. Describe ways in which the principles and subject matter of other disciplines taught in the school are interrelated with the visual arts.

Resources
Books
Kara Walker: After the Deluge - Known for her bold images using the traditional silhouette, Walker upends the genteel, Victorian origins of the medium by graphically portraying scenes from the antebellum South to explore the politics of slavery, race, and gender.

Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress - This collection of Walker's astonishing tableaux dramatizes black-white interactions via horrifically accurate imaginings of one-on-one encounters-encounters that, in their microcosms of exploitation and mutual dependency, seem to speak directly to current forms of black-white relations.

Kara Walker: Bureau of Refugees - Walker applies that jocularity to her depictions of violence against African-Americans, lending them a hollow, almost slapstick character that is very much at odds with their original function.

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Students will research a historical event that has some significance to them and explain why they chose to represent that particular event. Students will approach their project as a visual narrative and will examine the work of Kara Walker as a resource. Students will understand the importance of history and the relationship that it shares with art.

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9 Black artists and lesson plans around their work for the Visual Arts Classroom

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9 Black artists and lesson plans around their work for the Visual Arts Classroom

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Featuring mainly American artists, but also some from the larger African diaspora.

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Inside: A collection of posts and resources with artworks by black artists, civil rights art, African art, art projects, book suggestions, and more to teach Black History art lessons.

When students are exposed to a variety of works of art, they learn about the world and themselves. Children deserve to see the wide variety of possibilities in art, both in terms of art making and the artists behind the works.

Black History Month is a time to discuss the history and celebrate the contributions of black culture and individuals. These lessons should not be kept solely in the history classroom. Looking at art helps students develop empathy, flex thinking and observation skills, connect with history, get in touch with their creative side, and savor the human spirit. Black History Month offers art teachers a fantastic opportunity to feature black artists and artworks about black history in their classroom.

To support art teachers and ensure that they have a variety of artworks to choose from, this post is a collection of Black History Month art lessons from Art Class Curator, all of which you'll find links to below. Most of the posts include looking questions, tips, information, and resources to help you teach the works of art.
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The more time students spend looking at art, the easier it is for them to explore the narratives, techniques, and meanings behind the artworks. Take learning to a deeper level with a ready-to-go art lessons from the Art Appreciation Worksheet Bundle.

It's as easy as 1, 2, 3!
1. Pick a black history artwork below
2. Print one of the Art Appreciation Worksheets
3. Watch with joy as your students connect with and interpret art

Free Worksheets!

This list of black history month art lessons is of course not a full representation of all black artists. These are the artists we have written about to date on Art Class Curator. We will update this post as we create new resources!

Black Artists

Kehinde Wiley

Kehinde Wiley is an American artist known for his powerful portraits of African Americans. He was chosen to paint Barack Obama's official presidential portrait in 2018.

Kehinde Wiley Art Lesson

Wiley is best known for painting young black people, often placing them in into versions of portraits from art history. His paintings fuse the past and present in ways that force us to confront our notions of wealth, importance, race, and gender. In this lesson, put a Wiley artwork next to the artwork is was inspired by and lead an art discussion. This Kehinde Wiley Art Lesson blog post includes discussion questions, interpretation activities, as well as classroom extensions.

Lesson: Portraits for a New Century: Kehinde Wiley Art Lesson

Comparing Mary, Comforter of the Afflicted I, 2016, with the original

Get the Full Lesson!

Betye Saar

Betye Saar is an American artist known for her assemblage and collage artworks.

Betye Saar Art Lesson

Saar uses stereotypical and potentially-offensive material to make social commentary, which makes her work an excellent way to teach kids about the world, acceptance, and empathy. In this lesson, students discuss an assemblage Saar created around a depiction of Aunt Jemima and watch a video of the artist discussing the work. This Betye Saar Art Lesson also includes several project ideas and extensions.

Lesson: The Liberation of Aunt Jemima

Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972

Augusta Savage

Augusta Savage was an American sculptor and prominent member of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. She opened her own studio and became an influential teacher.

Augusta Savage Art Lesson

There have been few sculptors who can capture emotion in a subject like Augusta Savage. In this Augusta Savage Art Lesson, students learn about her life, discuss some of her work, and read In Her Hands: The Story of Sculptor.

Faith Ringgold

Faith Ringgold is an award-winning American painter, writer, sculptor, and performance artist. She is best known for her narrative quilts.

Faith Ringgold Art Lesson

Ringgold started out as a painter and focused much of her art on telling the stories of the Civil Rights Movement and her experiences growing up in Harlem. On a trip to Europe in 1972, Ringgold experiences some Nepali artworks that used fabrics around the border. This inspired her to start making quilt paintings, and those are the artworks she's become best known for. In this Faith Ringgold Art Lesson, students dive into Ringgold's The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles and imagine what it would be like to be the fictional woman featured in the artwork. To extend the lesson, students complete a portrait project and read Dinner at Aunt Connie's House or one of Ringgold's other children's books.

Lesson: Faith Ringgold's Celebration of African American Women
Artist Biography

Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden was an American artist and author who created cartoons, oil paintings, and collages. He grew up in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance.

Romare Bearden Art Lesson

Featured in Multicultural Kid Blogs, this Romare Bearden Art Lesson recaps Bearden's life, explores his art, and includes a collection of projects, books, and lessons.

Lesson: The Art of Romare Bearden

Romare Bearden, Factory Workers, 1942

Henry Ossawa Tanner

Henry Ossawa Tanner was a world-renowned American artist best known for his religious artworks.

Henry Ossawa Tanner Art Lesson

This Henry Ossawa Tanner Art Lesson features several artworks from the man who was "one of the first African-American artists to achieve a reputation in both America and Europe". Six of Tanner's artworks are presented for use with the Charlotte Mason Picture Study Technique.

Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare is a British-Nigerian artist whose work delves into cultural identities, colonialism, and globalisation. He is best known for his sculptural installations.

Yinka Shonibare Art Lesson

The Swing is Jean-Honoré Fragonard's best known work and is an icon of the Rococo style. Shonibare recreated the famous artwork and gave us a lot to think about regarding race, class, and multiculturalism. In this Yinka Shonibare Art Lesson, students compare and contrast the two artworks.

Lesson: Yinka Shonibare's The Swing: Culture & Identity in a Global Society

Prince Twins Seven-Seven

Prince Twins Seven-Seven was a Nigerian painter, musician, actor, writer, and poet. He was named a UNESCO Artist for Peace in 2005.

Prince Twins Seven-Seven Art Lesson

In this Prince Twins Seven-Seven Art Lesson, students consider his Healing of Abiko Children, watch a video of the artist discussing the artwork, and can read a book about his art and life.

Lesson: Twins Seven-Seven's Healing of Abiko Children

Black History Month Art Projects

The internet outside of Art Class Curator has lots of great black history month art lessons as well! Check out these links.

Freedom Quilts by Colors of my Day - Upper Elementary students create quilt squares and write poems or short stories based on the book The Patchwork Patch: A Quilt Map to Freedom.

Grades K-1: Art Projects for Black History Month by Scholastic - Four art projects for young elementary students inspired by famous black individuals.

Historical Genre Drawing Silhouettes by Incredible @rt Department - Inspired by Kara Walker's silhouettes, middle to high school students research a historical event and create an silhouettes based on the subject and insert their likeness into the work.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jazz-Inspired Painting, Mind Maps, and Getting Your Work Out There by Lauren Rouatt - 3rd grade students learn about Jean-Michel Basquiat and create paintings inspired by his work.

Basquiat-Inspired Self-Portraits by Art Room Britt - Early elementary students look at and discuss Basquiat's work, then create self-portraits with free-association elements.

Horace Pippin Imagination Drawings by Deep Space Sparkle - Upper elementary students create self-portraits based on Pippin's work and inspired by the book, A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin.

Horace Pippin Lesson Plan by Trish Maunder - An art-making workshop designed for students in grades 3-6, based on Pippin's The Domino Players.

Decoding Jacob Lawrence by The Art of Education - Upper elementary students analyze Lawrence's Forward, reflect on Harriet Tubman and the institution of slavery, and create an artwork that tells an important story.

Jacob Lawrence's Painted Stories by Crayola - Upper elementary students learn about Lawrence's life, research a significant historical event, and create an artwork based on what they learn.

Children's Books about Black Artists

This collection of highly rated children's books about black artists are a wonderful way to share information about the lives of black artists with elementary students. Each book is marked with recommended student ages and a link to purchase the book.

Famous Black Artists Biographies

Integrate historical and cultural knowledge into your Black History Month art lessons with in-depth biographies and short videos about famous black artists.

Civil Rights Art

Art is such a vital tool to understanding the emotions, beliefs, and ideas of people throughout history. Art gives us insights into people like no other medium can. Consider using artworks about the Civil Rights era from the collections below for your Black History Month art lessons.

Black History Month Art Lessons

From native African art to modern artworks by black artists from around the world, these pieces will get your students talking and connected to art.

African American Artists

Black Artists from Around the World

African Art

Art Around the World in 30 Days - Angola - This African Art Lesson features a sculpture from the Chokwe people of Northeastern Angola with discussion questions, a learning activity, and museum resources.

Art Around the World in 30 Days - Nigeria - The artwork in this African Art Lesson comes from the Court of Benin and includes discussion questions, a project idea, and several resources covering the history of the Kingdom of Benin.

Interpreting the Power of the Kongo Nkisi N'Kondi - A fantastic African Sculpture Art Lesson for middle schoolers to explore the meaning, function, and purpose of the Nkisi N'Kondi sculptures, complete with discussion questions, kinesthetic and drawing activities, a PowerPoint, and information on the history of these intriguing figures.

Art Around the World in 30 Days - Democratic Republic of the Congo - Focused on a contemporary artwork from artist Trigo Piula, this African Art Lesson ties in with the Nkisi N'Kondi Art Lesson above and includes discussion questions and a project idea.

Kuba Mask - This Wordless Wednesday post includes resources related to mask from the Kuba Kingdom, a pre-colonial kingdom in Central Africa.

Wordless Wednesdays for Black History Month Art Lessons

Wordless Wednesday posts on Art Class Curator offer artworks with little to no commentary. The artworks in these posts make for excellent bellringers when paired with an art appreciation worksheet or questions about art.

Teaching Black History Month Art Lessons

Sometimes teachers shy away from teaching about other cultures or difficult historical periods, but doing so robs our students of the opportunity to dialogue about important social issues and connect with art on a deeply personal level. The post below addresses some of these issues and why it is important to teach art from across cultures and time.

In this lesson, students learn how ethnocentric attitudes can shape how we look at art from other cultures, especially when studying non-Western art. Using three examples from the art world, high school or college students examine cultural reactions to art and how xenophobia shapes worldviews through classroom discussions and writing assignments.
Lesson: Cultural Sensitity, Xenophobia, and Ethnocentricism in Art Education
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Teaching the Past, Creating the Future: Black History Month Art Lessons

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Inside: A collection of posts and resources with artworks by black artists, civil rights art, African art, art projects, book suggestions, and more to teach Black History art lessons. When students are exposed to a variety of works of art, they learn about the world and themselves.

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Inside: In this Kehinde Wiley art lesson, have students compare and contrast the Kehinde Wiley stained class, Mary Comforter of the Afflicted with an earlier depiction of the same subject. Use the art appreciation worksheet bundle to further your student's exploration of this artwork.

I'm shining the spotlight on contemporary portrait painter Kehinde Wiley. His timely artworks are exciting to students and teachers alike as they confront the social and political issues that dominate many of today's news cycles.

Get the Full Lesson!

This Lesson is in The Curated Connections Library!

Kehinde Wiley, Barack Obama, 2018

His powerful works are well-known in the art world and gained wider notoriety after being featured on the television series "Empire" in 2015. The recent decision to have Wiley paint Barack Obama's official presidential portrait has no doubt cemented his popularity for decades to come.

Wiley is best known for painting young black people he encounters and placing them in revamped versions of traditional portraits. The glory, power and prestige once reserved only for white subjects is transferred to modern black men and women wearing everyday clothing. His paintings fuse the past and present in ways that force us to confront our notions of wealth, importance, race, and gender.

At left: Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1801; At right: Kehinde Wiley, Napoleon Leading the Army over the Alps, 2005

Wiley's bold backgrounds often feature flowers and greenery or intricate baroque patterns that clash with the photo-like realism of his subjects. Many of his portraits are larger than life and stand over six feet tall. Looking at Wiley's portraits, it's impossible to miss the gaze of his subjects. They make eye contact and hold the viewer in place, towering over and transfixing them until they ponder the decisions the artist made and the meaning he hoped to convey.

There is a political and racial context behind everything that I do. Not always because I design it that way, or because I want it that way, but rather because it's just the way people look at the work of an African-American artist in this country.
-Kehinde Wiley

Race is an inescapable element of Wiley's work. We experience it in light of the culture that surrounds us. We connect the meaning of the art to his race and the race of his subjects. How would our perspective change if he or the people in his paintings were another race? Regardless of Wiley's intentions, his work speaks volumes about us and our society. This topic alone can provoke hours of conversation.

Kehinde Wiley Art Lesson

Comparing Mary, Comforter of the Afflicted I, 2016, with the original

In the artwork above, Wiley uses religious iconography and modifies it to fit today. He replaced Mary, a symbol of comfort, protection, and virtue in Christianity, with a black man holding a child. The juxtaposition of these artworks is sure to spark curiosity in your students and invite a lively discussion into your classroom.

Discussion Questions

What's going on here? What do you see that makes you say that?

Who is this man? What is he doing?

Explain the expression on his face. What do you think he is thinking?

What symbols do you notice in this artwork? (Note the Illuminati eye, shackles, blindfold, and the feather headdress.) What could these things symbolize?

What does afflicted mean? How do you see "Afflicted" in this artwork?

Examine each character in the artwork (or use one of the activities below). Who are they? What do they think/feel?

Activity Suggestions

Free Worksheets!

Art Appreciation Worksheets

Classroom Extensions

Young Students: Have students create portraits with a patterned background. See Devon Calvert's lesson for an explanation.

Older students: Have students create an updated, contemporary version of an older artwork.

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Portraits for a New Century: Kehinde Wiley Art Lesson

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In this Kehinde Wiley art lesson, have students compare and contrast the Kehinde Wiley stained class, Mary Comforter of the Afflicted with an earlier depiction of the same subject. Use the art appreciation worksheet bundle to further your student's exploration of this artwork.

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10 Black Canadian Artists to Follow and Celebrate

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10 Black Canadian Artists to Follow and Celebrate

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By, Lauren Battagello
The contributions of Black art and Black artists to the Canadian fine art world are immeasurable. Although they are seldom acknowledged for their boundless efforts, Black creatives have long functioned as the backbone of all mediums of artistry and creative expression, their art inspiring, mobilizing and healing communities.

This article pays tribute to the incredible and powerful Black Canadian artists that are reshaping and revolutionizing art as we know it. Check out their Instagrams, give them a follow and watch as your feed becomes a space of beauty.
1. Kosisochukwu Nnebe, previously based in Ottawa, Ont.

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10 Black Canadian artists to follow and celebrate - CanCulture

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A curated list of Black Canadian fine artists you should be supporting on Instagram. By, Lauren Battagello The contributions of Black art and Black artists to the Canadian fine art world are immeasurable. Although they are seldom acknowledged for their boundless efforts, Black creativ

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An American resource, Teachers Pay Teachers also includes free resources, such as this list of scripts.

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Browse resources on Teachers Pay Teachers, a marketplace trusted by millions of teachers for original educational resources.

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Artist Mentorship Program

The Artist Mentorship Program is a 7-month training program offered to emerging theatre artists at the beginning of their careers. The mission is to provide Black and other emerging artists a unique opportunity to strengthen and deepen their skills preparing them for professional careers in the arts, while also enhancing their ability to articulate their artistic practice.

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Black Theatre Workshop | Canada's longest running Black theatre company

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Artist Mentorship Program The Artist Mentorship Program is a 7-month training program offered to emerging theatre artists at the beginning of their careers. The mission is to provide Black and other emerging artists a unique opportunity to strengthen and deepen their skills preparing them for professional careers in the arts, while also enhancing their ability to articulate their artistic practice.

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Based in St-Henri, Montreal, QC

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EKSPRESYON - Danse traditionnelle haïtienne

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La troupe EKSPRESYON a pour objectif de faire connaître la culture haïtienne à travers la danse traditionnelle d'Haïti.

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MORE THAN 30 YEARS CREATING A DANCE THAT SHOWS AND ASKS MAKES THE SILENCE VIBRATE AND ALLOWS RYTHMS TO SPEAK DRAWN FROM THE MUSIC OF BODIES TO REINSTATE THE INTIMATE AND THE STRENGTH WITHIN

ZAB MABOUNGOU/COMPAGNIE DANSE NYATA NYATA is a unique contemporary dance company on the Montreal and Canada scenes. Its artistic director, a choreographer, thinker and renowned performer Zab Maboungou, has asserted her firm commitment to produce her choreographic works, throughout the world, on and off stage, to teach the techniques of African dance, to support dancer education, develop audiences and take an active part in the institutional renewal of policies concerning the arts field.

Zab Maboungou/Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata was founded due to a deep vocation for art, for creative works and their role in society. Together these two aspects make up the backbone of this arts organization, whose mission is to create choreographic and musical works, but also literary and didactic productions based on its commitment to develop the art of contemporary dance, not only in terms of creating and producing shows, but also encompassing the full range of artistic development activities (research, training and education, creation and production).

ARTISTIC CREATION

The choreographic, musical and dance works of Zab Maboungou/Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata strive to elicit the poetic power that emanates from the art of movement, bodies and rhythms. This power is inseparable from the intelligence of body language, emerging from the art of movement, bodies and rhythms. In the company's works, abstract forms vie with physical space crossed by multiple pathways, whose tracks reveal their sophisticated poly-rhythmic composition. The casts of the different pieces are chosen among a group of dancers and musicians from a range of training backgrounds and origins.

REPUTATION

Finally, in terms of global artistic development and art's ability to root itself in diversity of knowledge and communities, Nyata Nyata is a model among its kind.

After 30 years of tireless work in creation and teaching, the Company has earned an enviable reputation both in Québec and abroad. The works of Zab Maboungou/Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata are recognized for this strong and manifest alliance between the physical and intellectual levels, and even the spiritual one. This sets its creations apart. Inspired by artistic and cultural action inseparable from the choreographic works driving it, Zab Maboungou/Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata's entire organization and activities play a part in creating a hotbed of creation and renewal.

Its credo: Arts, knowledge and people; People, arts and knowledge.

"At a time when exotic cultures are often merely tagged on to Western works, Maboungou utilizes her sources with artistic integrity." - Victor Swoboda, The Gazette, May 22, 2010

"Maboungou reveals a body language never yet explored" - Frédérique Doyon, Le Devoir, February 2003

"Zab Maboungou is one of the many talented African artists who have come to Canada in search of a new life and made outstanding contributions to Canadian culture." - Foreign Affairs Canada.

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Zab Maboungou/Compagnie Danse Nyata Nyata

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ZAB MABOUNGOU/COMPAGNIE DANSE NYATA NYATA is a unique contemporary dance company on the Montreal and Canada scenes. Its artistic director, a choreographer, thinker and renowned performer Zab Maboungou, has asserted her firm commitment to produce her choreographic works, throughout the world, on and off stage, to teach the techniques of African dance, to support dancer education, develop audiences and take an active part in the institutional renewal of policies concerning the arts field.

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Holla Jazz is an award-winning dance company based in Toronto that explores soulful and funky approaches to jazz dance.

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12 Notes Video Series Upcoming Workshops & Classes In Development Performances & Events Blog Contact

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Toronto-based dance company

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Ballet Creole is One of Canada's 1st Professional Black Dance Companies Presenting African and Caribbean-Centred Programming on Stage and in Communities.

One of Canada's first Black dance companies, Ballet Creole is a charitable organization representing the best of traditional and contemporary dance rooted in African and Caribbean forms. From performance to professional training to Summer camps, you can immerse yourself in our "creolization" - celebrating the rich heritage of African and Caribbean cultures as they interface with European traditions. Ballet Creole represents Diversity in Harmony both on stage and in the community.

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Ballet Creole is One of Canada's 1st Professional Black Dance Companies Presenting African and Caribbean-Centred Programming on Stage and in Communities. One of Canada's first Black dance companies, Ballet Creole is a charitable organization representing the best of traditional and contemporary ...

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Haitian dance classes in Montreal - access to dance teachers for projects.

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Konpa, konpa ladystyle, zouk, troubadour, carnival, creolized or urbanized music (Gospel music, urban rabòday, creole rock, creole rap, R&B, dancehall, etc.), more than 100 traditional dances (yanvalou, maskawon, ibo, nago, banda, zanrenyen, kongo, parigòl, rasin, petro, gede, djoumba, mayi, zepòl, rara, rabòday, konbit, mazoun, kontredans, kòy, dogi, afranchi, etc.)

We use all of these styles to offer dance classes fitness Haitian

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JOIN OUR NEXT HAITIAN DANCE GROUP The Haitian musical landscape is so vast! We have the famous konpa, the zouk, the twoubadou, the carnival meringues ... Not to forget all our traditional dances (more than a hundred in total such as yanvalou, ibo,

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Website with performances and classes, including online classes.

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Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was founded in 1958 by dancer, choreographer, and visionary Alvin Ailey, to bring African-American Dance to all audiences.

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Archival footage of African-American social dances from around 1920 - 1950

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Amazing dancing, but the clip needs historical context vis à vis the racial stereotypes as seen in the costuming and facial expressions (mugging).

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Hellzapoppin' in full color | Colorized with DeOldify

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Katherine Dunham created the Dunham Technique for contemporary dance: she was the first to combine the individualistic dance movements of Caribbean and African cultures with European-style ballet.

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Katherine Dunham Timeline | Articles and Essays | Selections from the Katherine Dunham Collection | Digital Collections | Library of Congress

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Katherine Mary Dunham is born on 22 June 1909 in a Chicago hospital. Her father, Albert Millard Dunham, is black; her mother, Fanny June Dunham, is a woman of French-Canadian and American Indian heritage. Shortly after her birth, her parents take the infant Katherine to their home in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a village about fifteen miles west of Chicago.

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Library of Congress, with more samples of Dunham Technique to explore.

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The Library of Congress is providing access to these materials for educational and research purposes and makes no warranty with regard to their use for other purposes. The written permission of the copyright owners and/or other rights holders (such as holders of publicity and/or privacy rights) is required for distribution, reproduction, or other use of protected items beyond that allowed by fair use or other statutory exemptions.

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Please contact: Performing Arts Reading Room.

Suggested credit line: Library of Congress, Music Division.

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In 2002, with funds from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Library of Congress undertook the documentation of Katherine Dunham's dance technique.

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7 Iconic Black Women Who Changed the Course of Ballet History

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7 Iconic Black Women Who Changed the Course of Ballet History

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And arguably dance history itself.

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Just three years ago, Misty Copeland made ballet history when she became the first Black woman to ever be promoted to principal in American Ballet Theater. It was a groundbreaking moment for the company, which is considered the crème de la crème of the ballet world, and for Black dancers everywhere. Now, Copeland is a household name, with an Under Armour endorsement and a Barbie made in her likeness.

But to understand why Copeland's rise to fame is so significant, it's important to acknowledge the classical dancers who broke into the historically whitewashed art form long before her. In honor of Black History Month, here are the some of the other Black dancers who set the stage for Copeland's success.

It's Black History Month, but at Refinery29, we believe in celebrating Black voices, Black art, and Black women 365 days of the year. Follow us on Instagram at @r29unbothered for more on issues that affect Black women's everyday lives.

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7 Iconic Black Women Who Changed The Course Of Ballet History

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Just three years ago, Misty Copeland made ballet history when she became the first Black woman to ever be promoted to principal in American Ballet Theater. It was a groundbreaking moment for the company, which is considered the crème de la crème of the ballet world, and for Black dancers everywhere.

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This is a new language in artistry. It is the pushing of photography beyond the boundaries of the conventional. Each of Joan's new works originates from a photo, she recognized anything photograph can be pushed further. An innovative way of layering, blending and applying various effects and filters, thus allowing her to create limited edition works that are printed on Fine Art canvas. Joan's newest collection was inspired while on safari in Africa.

This new and innovative technique allows the ability to capture and emit, bold, beautiful and vibrant colours. It interprets and conveys her vision and gives her the freedom to create works that intrigue and allows room for the viewer's interpretation.

All works are printed on gallery style

Small Works - Polished Gems

A delightful collection of "Acrylic Pours" on 8"x10"

Canvas boards wired and ready to hang.

You will easily fall in love with these colourful little paintings

Visit this gallery sometime...

www.joanbutterfield.ca

It has been my aim from the onset of my career to produce art that would become a vehicle, aesthetically linking the past to the future. I strive to document and educate myself and others about my rich culture and heritage and have endeavored over the course of my journey to present an artistic, positive, presentation of the African Diaspora. -jb

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JOAN BUTTERFIELD Artist Art Innovator Art Curator Art Collector

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This is a new language in artistry. It is the pushing of photography beyond the boundaries of the conventional. Each of Joan's new works originates from a photo, she recognized anything photograph can be pushed further. An innovative way of layering, blending and applying various effects and filters, thus allowing her to create limited edition works that are printed on Fine Art canvas.

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The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, has an extensive collection of painter Edward Mitchell Bannister's work, mostly oil paintings depicting pastoral life. Although Bannister was born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, he is largely recognized in the United States, where he lived much of his adult life, as a pioneer of Black American art. His painting Under The Oaks, now lost, earned him a major American art prize at the Centennial Exposition, held in Philadelphia in 1876. But he's been all but omitted from Canadian art history.

"I've been promoting Bannister since the 1980s because I became aware that he was a Maritime-born Canadian artist whom very few people knew about," says artist and curator David Woods.

Woods was 15 when he learned of Bannister by chance. Woods's family emigrated from Trinidad to Canada in 1972, settling in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. He remembers listening to WUNR, a radio station that came through the airwaves from Boston late at night-his only regular opportunity to hear Black music on the radio. One night they did a Black History Month segment on Bannister, which introduced Woods to the artist and his work.

As Woods got older, his fixation with Bannister continued, but he was confounded by the fact that few others seemed interested in the artist's historical importance. "The white art establishment knew nothing about him. And sadly, the Black folks didn't know much about him either. So, I was kind of a lone ranger in that field."

Woods, who in addition to being a curator is also a visual artist, poet, playwright, theatre director and cultural organizer, has devoted his career to artists and stories like this. He's perhaps most known for co-curating the 1998 exhibition "In This Place: Black Art in Nova Scotia" at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design's Anna Leonowens Gallery. It was a vital survey of art, dating as far back as 1886, from both urban and rural Black communities throughout Nova Scotia. By uncovering the histories of many Black Maritime artists, Woods created a sense of place, a way to teach emerging artists about the work of those who preceded them, whose legacies had largely gone undocumented and unpreserved.

This penchant for teaching makes sense: Woods's foray into art started in education. In 1981, after three years studying political science at Dalhousie University, he was offered a job running cultural youth programs with the Black United Front, a Nova Scotian Black advocacy organization founded in the mid-1960s. He agreed to do it for a year, thinking he would then go back to Dalhousie for law school. He never did. "I'd never had the opportunity to artistically express myself growing up in a family where the immigrant demand for lawyers and doctors was the preeminent thing. You couldn't have aspirations outside of the conventional," he recalls. "I moved out and soon discovered that my other ambitions had taken over. I was always involved in the arts-writing and painting and all those things-but I never elevated it as central."

The program was intended to teach Black children adopted into white families about their cultural heritage. Woods insisted the eligibility criteria be broadened to include any Black students who wanted to participate. "I basically said, 'I don't think anybody's being taught their culture properly. These kinds of superficial things, where you have a workshop here and there sporadically, don't work.' If I was going to do anything, I wanted it attached to the school system."

Black students from all over Halifax and Dartmouth flocked to the program, which taught cultural identity through poetry, plays, painting, history lessons and quizzes. The program ended after the first year. But the students refused to let it go, and they started their own organization, the Cultural Awareness Youth Group (CAYG). Woods led the organization and curriculum until 1989.

Pamela Edmonds, who is now senior curator at the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, was a member of the CAYG while she attended Prince Andrew High School in Dartmouth. She says she was one of few Black students at her school, which made the CAYG a kind of haven: "It created a sense of community around artistically inclined Black students. It gave me an inkling that this was actually something I could work towards, being an artist or being in an artistic field. [Woods] was really a mentor to a lot of artists, then and beyond."

The students wrote and acted in their own plays, created artwork and participated in inter-school quiz competitions. Edmonds refers to the experience as "knowledge-building about Black identity." One of these plays is the subject of Sylvia D. Hamilton's 1992 documentary Speak It! From the Heart of Black Nova Scotia, which focuses on a group of students as they explore their Blackness through the CAYG and perform in Woods's production Black Journey. Like Woods's work, Hamilton's arsenal of acclaimed documentaries and writing, centred on place-making and reclamation, is a crucial document of Nova Scotian history and artistic practice.

Woods became versed in Black Nova Scotian history because he felt an obligation to teach more than just the few regurgitated facts about Black Loyalists that students usually learned during Black History Month. His first curatorial project was a photography exhibition on the Black history of Halifax's North End neighbourhood. Following the launch of Voices Black Theatre Ensemble, in 1990-where he honed his playwriting skills and wrote radio dramas for the CBC-Woods also helped found the Black Artists Network of Nova Scotia in the early 1990s, getting deeper into cultural organizing and advocacy.

Around the same time that Woods's projects began to probe the province's histories, events in the region highlighted the urgency of his work. The social landscape of Halifax had been rocked by the 1989 Cole Harbour District High School brawls, which brought the racial tensions between the city's white and Black communities to a head. A violent fight broke out at the school in January 1989 between students from the predominantly white Eastern Passage and Cow Bay regions, and the predominantly Black regions of North Preston, East Preston and Cherry Brook. A CBC article reporting the incident details someone getting "smashed in the face" and having "their face split open." In another CBC article published 30 years later, Corey Beals, who was a student at Cole Harbour at the time, described how the fight led to the province reconsidering its response to anti-Black racism and the experiences of Black students, who felt underrepresented. Woods was part of a race-relations committee created by the local school board, one of many such committees that emerged in the wake of the violence.

In 1992, an exhibition at the Dalhousie Art Gallery featuring six works from Black American artist Carrie Mae Weems's Ain't Jokin' series (1987-88) revealed the chasm between Halifax's Black community and the art establishment. Weems's attempts to force audiences to confront their own racism-through the satirical use of racist jokes and tropes about Black people, such as equating them to apes-were interpreted by members of Halifax's Black community as insensitive. Black students at Dalhousie staged a sit-in at the gallery, demanding the works be removed. "There was not a good relationship between the arts community and the Black community [at that time]," says Edmonds. Representation of Black art had been historically lacking in the area's institutions, so a display of works that illustrated harmful stereotypes, even while critiquing those same stereotypes, left a sore feeling.

"In This Place," co-curated with Harold Pearse, was initially going to show work from current and former Black NSCAD students, but the first call for submissions received few responses. When Woods was brought on as a co-curator, he wanted to see if he could widen the exhibition's scope. "There was no route to search for art," he remembers, "because there had been no art shows in the institutional sense." Curating would have to be done very differently: "Black artists did not exhibit in galleries, so you couldn't just phone up galleries and make a request. I knew people in every Black community, so I just got in a car and drove. A month later, I showed up with 300 photographed pieces of art. And that's when we realized we had something."

"In This Place" opened on February 16, 1998, and included more than 100 works from 46 artists, many of which had never been exhibited before. Paintings, ceramics, handmade prints, quilts, wood carvings, woven baskets and collages-it was a true myriad of mediums. The exhibition included work by student, self-taught and professional artists: Justin Augustine's paintings; Jim Shirley's monotypes; Ruth Johnson's handprinted greeting cards; contributions from mixed-media artist Crystal Clements; and work by craft artist Audrey Dear Hesson, the first Black graduate of NSCAD. Woods's poem Abode (1996), from which the exhibition gets its title, was mounted on Plexiglas in the centre of the gallery. He used the poem as a guide to tie the multidisciplinary works together, since he started looking for work before any curatorial aim was determined. Its last stanza speaks to the agency Black artists have over their own narratives:

So that here in this place-
Even amidst oppression,
When both they and I look-
My soul will still be housed in an abode of beauty,
And its riches will still be mine.

Woods emphasizes that "In This Place" presented work that Black people knew had been happening; it was largely the white art world that was unaware of its history. In a way, Woods worked like an archivist, documenting these pieces before they could be lost to memory. Meril Rasmussen's 1998 thesis essay is a thorough firsthand account of the history of the exhibition, an essential source unveiling the impact of "In This Place." In it, Rasmussen writes that "Powerful legacies, both individual and collective, were unveiled, forever changing the expectations of Black artists in this province."

The exhibition toured Nova Scotia, starting in Halifax and then travelling to Shelburne, Sydney and New Glasgow. It received mostly positive reviews, but not everyone lauded the collection. Award-winning poet George Elliott Clarke, who grew up in Halifax and became a critical voice in literature chronicling the lives of Black Nova Scotians, reviewed the show for Mix, a now-defunct national art magazine. "Given the random fashion in which this treasure trove has been assembled," he wrote, "it lacks any sense of period or even geographic consistency."

Still, it was an opportunity for engagement and honest discourse about Black Nova Scotian art in the public sphere. "Weymouth Falls is [an example of] a particularly talented community, but nobody ever showed their art anywhere. If you're doing wood carving in the back of Weymouth Falls, you don't consider [your work] the art that goes into galleries. It's not from any deficiency of anything. If nobody has ever approached you and treated your work as art, you don't automatically get this idea that it should be shown in galleries," says Woods.

"In This Place" came during "a little renaissance of Black exhibitions" in the 1990s, recalls Edmonds, who organized a few exhibitions with Sister Visions, a collective of Black women artists, in the years following. This renaissance was marked by artists such as Buseje Bailey, who was in residence at the Centre for Art Tapes and exhibited frequently in Nova Scotia, and work by Harold Cromwell, Ralph Cromwell and Ada Cromwell on display at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and MSVU Art Gallery. It seemed like an opportune time.

In 2006 Woods was hired by Art Gallery of Nova Scotia director Jeffrey Spalding to be associate curator of African Canadian art there. He curated two exhibitions ("Visions in African Nova Scotian Art" and "The Soul Speaks"), started developing a permanent collection of African Canadian art (even acquiring a Bannister painting for the collection) and fundraised for more exhibitions. It was a short-lived stint; Woods was let go just a few weeks after Spalding left the gallery, in 2007.

According to Woods, he was working on creating structural change from within the institution, but his brief time there allowed for little progress: "There's a difference between structured commitments versus tokenism. Tokenism is easy. You just hire a person for a brief period of time or you book a show and then brag about it for the next 20 years." Since then Woods has mostly worked independently. He's tenacious and uninterested in depending on the whims of institutions. "After the AGNS, I learned, 'Brother, if they could look at all that wealth [of Black creativity] and still treat it like that,'" he says, "I ain't going to burn myself out for other folk. I believe in what I can do but I also don't believe I can be some kind of messiah figure."

Woods is in the early stages of writing a book exploring the history of Black art in Nova Scotia. He's hoping it will spawn other work and research into Black art histories across the country. Other than the recent Towards an African Canadian Art History (2018), a collection of essays edited by Charmaine A. Nelson, there is little in the way of a comprehensive literature. The absence makes the risk of ahistoricism more immediate: contemporary academics and curators have few places to look.

Woods's concern is that there are also so few people who can speak to these histories. "The kids don't stay in these communities. The old people get old. The churches rot. I'm not elevating these stories as anything more than what they are. It's just that I understand these places. I travel these places. I talk to these people. And it would be great to just represent their stories before they completely expire."

In early 2022, an expanded version of an exhibition of quilts Woods curated (and contributed work to) in 2012, "The Secret Codes," will be going on a national tour, starting at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown. The quilts capture community history and are a distinguished vehicle for storytelling. The exhibition title refers to how quilts were used to guide enslaved peoples fleeing to freedom via the Underground Railroad. There has yet to be a major exhibition of Edward Mitchell Bannister's work in Canada, but Woods is working toward borrowing paintings from the Smithsonian to finally give the artist the star treatment in his home province. Slated for early 2023 at the Owens Art Gallery at Mount Allison University, Bannister's homecoming will happen more than 50 years after Woods's fateful late-night radio discovery. National recognition is a long time coming for them both.

This is an article from our Fall 2020 issue, "Chroma."

Kelsey Adams

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The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, has an extensive collection of painter Edward Mitchell Bannister's work, mostly oil paintings depicting pastoral life. Although Bannister was born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, he is largely recognized in the United States, where he lived much of his adult life, as a pioneer of Black American art.

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5 Black Canadian artists whose names should be known alongside the Group of Seven | CBC Arts

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5 Black Canadian artists whose names should be known alongside the Group of Seven | CBC Arts

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5 Black Canadian artists whose names should be known alongside the Group of Seven | CBC Arts

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Artists appearing in Here We Are Here, the ROM’s show about Black Canadian contemporary art, share their picks.

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B&W Illustrations

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Autobiographical and dreamlike, Shantell Martin bridges the fine art and commercial world, as well as the objects, places and conversations of the everyday experience.

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'Life-changing' Kehinde Wiley portrait goes on show at V&A

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'Life-changing' Kehinde Wiley portrait goes on show at V&A

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A young EastEnder has described the "life-changing" moment she saw her portrait on the wall at the V&A.

Melissa Thompson was walking through Ridley Road market in Dalston when she was spotted by US artist Kehinde Wiley, who shot to fame when he painted Barack Obama's presidential portrait.

The resulting two-metre oil painting was first shown at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow but has now been bought by the V&A.

Thompson, who grew up in Hackney and now lives in Ilford, was with her family when she was approached by the painter.

She said: "It was such a surreal moment when Kehinde Wiley approached me at Ridley Road Market and asked to take my portrait - I never thought I would end up in a museum.

"His work is so unique and powerful, it was a really life-changing thing for me. I love this portrait - it captures a moment in time. Seeing it on the wall at the V&A feels really special - I can now see parts of my own culture and east London represented in a museum."

Los Angeles-born Wiley made his name by creating Old Master style portraits of people of colour and made history in 2018 when he became the first African-American artist to paint an official U.S. Presidential portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.

The painting of Ms Thompson will eventually become part of the collection at the V&A's new site in Stratford which is set to start opening in 2024.

Gus Casely-Hayford, Director of V&A East, said: " One of our first acquisitions for V&A East, the painting speaks to the creative heritage and cultural diversity of east London and will help realise our ambitions to spotlight previously underrepresented artists and movements through V&A East's programme, which tells global stories of creativity and reflects the pressing debates in society today."

Read More
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'Life-changing' Kehinde Wiley portrait goes on show at V&A

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Melissa Thompson was walking through Ridley Road market in Dalston when she was spotted by US artist Kehinde Wiley, who shot to fame when he painted Barack Obama's presidential portrait. The resulting two-metre oil painting was first shown at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow but has now been bought by the V&A.

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How Jean-Michel Basquiat Turned Art History on Its Head

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How Jean-Michel Basquiat Turned Art History on Its Head

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How Jean-Michel Basquiat Turned Art History on Its Head

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Fact was she knew more about them than she knew about herself, having never had the map to discover what she was like 2014, 54 x 43 inches, Oil on canvas Grand Dame Queenie 2013, 54 x 43 in, Oil on Canvas collection: Smithsonian African American Museum Equilibrium 2012, 100 x 67 in, Oil on Canvas collection: US Embassy Dakar, Senegal High Yella Masterpiece: We Ain't No Cotton Pickin' Negroes 2011, 59 x 69 inches, Oil on Canvas

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Black Art Matters - 14 Black Canadian Artists to Know

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Black Art Matters - 14 Black Canadian Artists to Know

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The Liberation of Aunt Jemima Art Interpretation

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The Liberation of Aunt Jemima Art Interpretation

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Today's artwork is The Liberation of Aunt Jemima by Betye Saar.

Exploring Tough Topics through Art

This artist uses stereotypical and potentially-offensive material to make social commentary. I feel it is important not to shy away from these sorts of topics with kids. We can't sugar coat everything and pretend these things don't exist if we want things to change in our world. We need to have these hard conversations and get kids thinking about the world and how images play a part in shaping who we are and how we think. Art is an excellent way to teach kids about the world, about acceptance, and about empathy.

Betye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt Jemima

This artwork is an assemblage which is a three-dimensional sculpture made from found objects and/or mixed media. It's essentially like a 3d version of a collage.

In the artwork, Saar included a knick-knack she found of Aunt Jemina. It was Aunt Jemima with a broom in one hand and a pencil in the other with a notepad on her stomach. Instead of the pencil, she placed a gun, and in the other hand, she had Aunt Jemima hold a hand grenade. In the spot for the paper, she placed a postcard of a stereotypical " mammy" holding a biracial baby. The mammy's skirt is made up of a black fist, a black power symbol. She put this assemblage into a box and plastered the background with Aunt Jemima product labels.

Art Discussion Questions

Okay, now that you have seen the artwork with the description, think about the artwork using these questions as a guide. Or, use these questions to lead a discussion about the artwork with your students.

What was your first reaction to seeing this image?

What do these images remind you of?

Describe the women in this image. What is wrong about how they are portrayed?

What is the artist trying to say by putting these objects and images together? What is her message?

Saar called this her first protest piece. What is she protesting?

Why do you think the artist included the gun and hand grenade? Do you think they symbolize violence or something else?

Interpretation of Betye Saar's The Liberation of Aunt Jemima

Saar's goal in using these controversial and racist images was to reclaim them and turn them into positive symbols of empowerment. Instead of me telling you about the artwork, let's hear it from the artist herself!

Watch this video of Betye Saar discussing The Liberation of Aunt Jemima:

Isn't it so great we have the opportunity to hear from the artist?

Related Art Learning Activities

Use these activities to further explore this artwork with your students.

Stereotypes Art Project:

Students can make a mixed-media collage or assemblage that combats stereotypes of today. It's easy to see the stereotypes and inappropriateness of the images of the past, but today these things are a little more subtle since we are immersed in images day in and day out. Have students look through magazines and contemporary media searching for how we stereotype people today through images ( things to look for: weight, sexuality, race, gender, etc.). Then, have students take those images and change and reclaim them as Saar did with Aunt Jemima.

Research and Writing Activity:

Have students study stereotypical images of African Americans from the late 1800s and early 1900s and write a paper about them. They also could compare the images from the past with how we depict people today ( see art project above).

Study More Artists:

Have students study other artists who appropriated these same stereotypes into their art like Michael Ray Charles and Kara Walker. Students can look at them together and compare and contrast how the images were used to make a statement. Note: I would not study Kara Walker with kids younger than high school. There are some disturbing images in her work that the younger kids may not be ready to look at.
This post was originally published on February 15, 2015.

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Today's artwork is The Liberation of Aunt Jemima by Betye Saar. This artist uses stereotypical and potentially-offensive material to make social commentary. I feel it is important not to shy away from these sorts of topics with kids. We can't sugar coat everything and pretend these things don't exist if we want things to change in our world.

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Private Roy, Canadian Women’s Army Corps - Molly Lamb Bobak

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Private Roy, Canadian Women’s Army Corps - Molly Lamb Bobak

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Embarkation Leave is a page from Molly Lamb Bobak's illustrated diary, titled W110278 after her service number. Lamb Bobak began recording the events of her military life soon after joining the Canadian Women's Army Corps, in 1942. The diary is laid out like a daily newspaper. But instead of reporting on national and international developments in World War II, Lamb Bobak humorously recounts her adventures as a soldier kept behind the front. She offers a surprising perspective on a little-known aspect of World War II: the role played by women in the armed conflict.

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1946 - Private Roy, Canadian Women's Army Corps by Molly Lamb Bobak | 150 years 150 works

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Embarkation Leave is a page from Molly Lamb Bobak's illustrated diary, titled W110278 after her service number. Lamb Bobak began recording the events of her military life soon after joining the Canadian Women's Army Corps, in 1942. The diary is laid out like a daily newspaper.

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Kara Walker is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through her iconic, silhouetted figures.

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Save videos to watch later, or make a selection to play back-to-back using the autoplay feature.

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Kara Walker was born in Stockton, California, in 1969. She received a BFA from the Atlanta College of Art in 1991, and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994. The artist is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through her iconic, silhouetted figures. Walker unleashes the traditionally proper Victorian medium of the silhouette directly onto the walls of the gallery, creating a theatrical space in which her unruly cut-paper characters fornicate and inflict violence on one another.

In works like Darkytown Rebellion (2000), the artist uses overhead projectors to throw colored light onto the ceiling, walls, and floor of the exhibition space; the lights cast a shadow of the viewer's body onto the walls, where it mingles with Walker's black-paper figures and landscapes. With one foot in the historical realism of slavery and the other in the fantastical space of the romance novel, Walker's nightmarish fictions simultaneously seduce and implicate the audience.

Walker's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. A 1997 recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, Walker was the United States representative to the 2002 Bienal de São Paulo. Walker currently lives in New York, where she is on the faculty of the MFA program at Columbia University.

Kara Walker & Jason Moran

53:44

Conversation Starter

Some works of art are just as much about hearing as they are about seeing.

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Art21's senior education advisor, Joe Fusaro, shares how he makes meaningful connections between his art practice and being an arts educator.

Deep Focus

Anthony Merino details the necessary overhaul of art historical traditions predicated on prejudice and exclusion.

Interview

Kara Walker discusses her 2002 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On).

Interview

Kara Walker talks about her interpretation of Gone with the Wind, and how it inspired her first silhouette piece, Gone, An Historical Romance of Civil War As it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of Young Negress and Her Heart.

Artist at Work

24 Images

Artwork Survey: 2000s

4 Images

Artwork Survey: 1990s

7 Images

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Art21 is a celebrated global leader in presenting thought-provoking and sophisticated content about contemporary art, and the go-to place to learn first-hand from the artists of our time. A nonprofit organization, Art21's mission is to inspire a more creative world through the works and words of contemporary artists.

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The Black Woman Artist Who Crafted a Life She Was Told She Couldn't Have

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The Black Woman Artist Who Crafted a Life She Was Told She Couldn't Have

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The Black Woman Artist Who Crafted a Life She Was Told She Couldn’t Have (Published 2021)

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At the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance, Augusta Savage fought racism to earn acclaim as a sculptor, showing her work alongside de Kooning and Dalí. But the path she forged is also her legacy.

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Dismantling Anti-Black Racism in Music Education [CMEA]

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Dismantling Anti-Black Racism in Music Education [CMEA]

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This CMEA article calls for curriculum reform that includes Black music and suggests practical approaches for dismantling Anti-Black Racism in music education.

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Dismantling Anti-Black Racism in Music Education [CMEA]

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Childhood and Education

Oliver Jones was born to Barbadian parents with a strong appetite for music in Montreal's Little Burgundy neighbourhood. The area is the birthplace of many musicians, including Oscar Peterson, who became Jones's friend and mentor. From an early age, Jones was fascinated by music. He was a child prodigy; by the time he was three, he could take songs he had heard on the radio and play them from memory on the piano. At five years old, he played at Union United Church in Montreal; when he was nine, he performed solo works at Café St-Michel as well as in other clubs and theatres in Montreal, including Rockhead's Paradise.

Jones studied classical piano, first with Madame Bonner and then with Daisy Peterson Sweeney, the elder sister of his idol, Oscar Peterson. When Jones asked Sweeney if she would help him perfect his art as a pianist, she accepted but warned him that he would need to devote significant time to this challenging discipline. Mastering the piano became his greatest passion. He was soon performing in the United States as part of the touring show The Bandwagon, which was also staged at Café St-Michel. Jones studied theory and composition with Sweeney in 1959 and 1960.

Career Highlights

After working in the Montreal area between 1953 and 1963 and touring Quebec with Richard Parris, Al Cowans, Allan Wellman and other musicians, Jones settled in Puerto Rico. He became music director (1964-80) of a calypso orchestra, the Kenny Hamilton Show Band. The group frequently toured in the Caribbean and the United States, mainly playing Top 40 hits. When not onstage, Jones went to see jazz musicians play, often joining in to accompany them.

He returned to Montreal in 1980, at which time the bassist Charles Biddle suggested they collaborate. They performed together in nightclubs and hotel bars. Jones became the in-house pianist at Biddle's club, Jazz and Ribs (now The House of Jazz), from 1981 to 1986. It was at this time that he began to make a name for himself as a jazz pianist. From then on, he dedicated himself to that style of music. He performed in the second annual Festival international de jazz de Montréal (FIJM) in 1981 and played the festival every year after that until 1999; he participated in the opening and closing ceremonies seven times. In 1985, he and Biddle recorded the album Oliver Jones et Charles Biddle for Spectra Scène at the FIJM.

When playing at Biddle's club, Jones caught the eye of record producer Jim West, who was about to launch the jazz label Justin Time. A contract was quickly signed, and the following year Justin Time released Live at Biddle's Jazz and Ribs. On this album, Oliver Jones directed for the first time what would become his preferred kind of ensemble: a trio, in this case featuring Charles Biddle on bass and Bernard Primeau on drums. Jones released his first solo album, The Many Moods of Oliver Jones, in 1984. His appearances at Biddle's club became less frequent as his national and international careers took off.

Jazz bassist Charlie Biddle.

(photo by Lois Siegel)

Jones was the rising star among 1980s Canadian jazz musicians, surpassing his only rivals, the Shuffle Demons. In 1985, he travelled throughout Canada, performing in concerts, festivals and clubs, as a solo artist or as part of a trio with the following musicians: bassists Michel Donato, Skip Beckwith, Dave Young and Steve Wallace; and drummers Bernard Primeau, Jim Hillman, Nasyr Abdul Al-Khabyyr and Archie Alleyne. In 1986, Jones toured Australia, New Zealand and the Fiji Islands. He also gave his first concerts in the United States, including at the Newport and Greenwich Village jazz festivals.

In 1987, he embarked on his first of many European tours; he performed in Great Britain, France, Spain, Ireland, Scotland, Portugal, Germany and Switzerland. He was also invited to perform at major jazz festivals in The Hague, Netherlands (North Sea, 1987); Monterey, California (MJF, 1988); and New York (JVC, 1989). Between 1987 and 1989, he found fame playing concerts with renowned orchestras, such as Symphony Nova Scotia; the Orchestre métropolitain de Montréal; the Orchestre symphonique de Québec; the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra; and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal during the FIJM.

As his international tours continued, Jones performed in Cuba and Brazil in 1988, and in Egypt, the Ivory Coast and Nigeria in 1989. That year, the National Film Board filmed the documentary Oliver Jones in Africa (1989). Jones also travelled to Namibia in 1990.

Albums and Recordings

From 1982 to 1999, Oliver Jones recorded more than 15 albums, including Lights of Burgundy (1985), Cookin' at Sweet Basil (recorded in 1988 at New York's Sweet Basil nightclub) and Just in Time (1998).

During the 1990s, he performed over 130 times a year. In 1992, in celebration of Montreal's 350th anniversary, he appeared alongside Vic Vogel and his Big Band as well as the Montréal Jubilation Gospel Choir at an FIJM closing event. In 1993, he recorded his second solo album, Just 88; it included his compositions "Blues for Laurentian U" and "Dizzy-Nest" and earned him the 1994 Félix Award. That same year, at the invitation of the Canadian government, he gave a concert series in China. In 1995, he released From Lush to Lively, his first recording with a full orchestra. In 1997, he recorded another trio album, Have Fingers, Will Travel, with bassist Ray Brown and drummer Jeff Hamilton, at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles.

Jones announced his retirement on New Year's Day in 2000. He had built a reputation as one of the best-known and most talented Canadian jazz pianists of all time. His retirement was short-lived, however, as he returned to the studio with bassist Skip Bey in 2002 to complete the album, Then and Now, begun in 1986. That same year, he also became artistic director of the jazz section of the Montreal Chamber Music Festival. Two years later, during the FIJM, he played at the Place des Arts, in his first public performance with his role model and childhood idol, Oscar Peterson.

In 2005, Jones released Just You, Just Me, recorded with Ranee Lee; the album was publicly and critically acclaimed. That same year, he headlined the Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival and was named artistic director of Montreal's House of Jazz (formerly Biddle's Jazz Club). Jones released three more recordings in 2006: One More Time (with bassist Dave Young and drummer Jim Doxas); From Lush to Lively (with a "big band" and a string orchestra); and Serenade (DVD). The album Just for My Lady came out in 2013.

Having experienced health problems in 2015, Jones announced his official retirement in January 2016, on the occasion of the 10th annual Port-au-Prince International Jazz Festival.

Style

Oliver Jones's late rise to fame placed him in the shadow of Oscar Peterson, with whom he shared cultural and stylistic origins - the Black community of the Saint-Henri district of Montreal, and an idiomatic fusion of swing and bebop - as well as remarkable technical prowess. Rather than downplaying their similarities, Jones seemed to encourage such comparisons, going so far as to play and record with some of Peterson's former colleagues, such as Ray Brown, Clark Terry, Herb Ellis and Ed Thigpen. IN a 2004 interview, Jones called Peterson "my greatest source of inspiration."

Thanks to his experience with classical and popular music, Jones had phenomenal technique as well as an intuition about what the public wanted to hear and what limits to work within. He would lose himself in complex improvisations on the piano; but he also mastered the art of restraint and knew how to bring out the expressive quality of a melody without overwhelming it in virtuosity.

As is typical of a pianist influenced by Bach and Chopin, Jones preferred ballads and found bebop to be repetitive and lacking in terms of its potential for development. This did not stop him, however, from injecting into his music the kind of rhythmic energy and vigour that was characteristic of an avid bebop artist. In a review of one of Jones's concerts at the Positano club in New York, John S. Wilson wrote: "One hears light-fingered reminders of the facility of [Art] Tatum and [Oscar] Peterson, but it is done in a context that is reminiscent of the big, buoyant melodic structures that were created by Erroll Garner" ( New York Times, 23 April 1987). Critics often praised Jones's technical agility and frequently compared him to Oscar Peterson.

Compositions

Jones's recorded compositions, a number of which are dedicated to friends and colleagues - particularly "Blues for Chuck" and "Big Pete," for Chuck and Oscar Peterson, respectively - include: "Gros Bois Blues," "Lights of Burgundy," "Snuggles," "Fulford Street Stomp," "Here Comes Summer Again," "Dumpcake Blues," "Hilly," "The Sweetness of You," "Looking for Lou," "Bossa for CC," "Stay Young," "Blues for Hélène," "Last Night in Rio," "Sophie," "Abunchafunk," "What a Beautiful Sight," "Jordio," "Katatura," "Mark My Time," "Tippin' Home from Sunday School," "Stan Pat" and "Peaceful Time."

Teaching

Jones taught at Laurentian University from 1987 to 1995 and at McGill University from 1988 to 1995.

Jazz pianist Oliver Jones.

(photo by Mark Miller)

Honours and Awards

In 1984, Jones received the PROCAN award for his contributions to jazz. In 1990, the FIJM awarded him the Oscar Peterson Award, presented by Charles Dutoit (then director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal). That year, he also received the Golden Ducat during the Mannheim Film Festival in Germany for the documentary Oliver Jones in Africa. In 1992, he received the Martin Luther King Jr. Award for his contributions to the Black community in Canada and in his hometown of Montreal.

Jones was named a Knight of the Ordre national du Québec in 1993 and an Officer of the Order of Canada the following year. In 1992, Laurentian University awarded him an honorary doctorate. Three other universities soon followed suit: McGill University (1995), St. Francis Xavier (1996) and Windsor (1999). He received the 1997-98 Opus Hommage award from the Conseil québécois de la musique and the Governor General's Performing Arts Award in 2005. At the 2006 National Jazz Awards, his album Just You, Just Me won Recording of the Year, and he was named keyboardist of the year.

In 2010, the borough of Montreal North paid tribute to Jones by naming an auditorium at the Maison culturelle et communautaire after him. Throughout his career, Jones won several Félix Awards (1989, 1994, 2007, 2008) and two Juno Awards: one in 1986 for Lights of Burgundy (Best Jazz Album) and one in 2009 for Second Time Around (Traditional Jazz Album of the Year). Two of his albums, Pleased to Meet You and Live in Baden, Switzerland, were nominated for a Juno in 2010 and 2012, respectively.

For Black History Month in February 2013, Canada Post issued a stamp featuring Jones. In 2015, the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal named him a "Great Montrealer." He also won the 2015 RIDEAU Hommage award from the Réseau indépendant des diffuseurs d'événements artistiques unis for being an enduring figure in the Quebec music scene.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada.

Discography

Live at Biddle's Jazz and Ribs (1983). Justin Time JUST 1.

The Many Moods of Oliver Jones (1984). Justin Time JUST 3.

Oliver Jones et Charlie Biddle - FIJM (1985). Spectra Scène SS-1708 and Justin Time JTR 8405.

Lights of Burgundy (1985). Justin Time JUST 6.

Speak Low/Swing Hard (1985). Justin Time JUST 17.

Requestfully Yours (1986). Justin Time JUST 11.

Cookin' at Sweet Basil (1988). Justin Time JUST 25.

Just Friends (1989). Justin Time JUST 31.

Northern Summit (1990). Justin Time JUST 34.

A Class Act (1991). Justin Time JUST 41.

Just 88 (1993). Justin Time JUST 51.

Yuletide Swing (1994). Justin Time JUST 71.

From Lush to Lively (1995). Justin Time JUST 73.

Have Fingers, Will Travel (1997). Justin Time JUST 102.

Just In Time (1998). Justin Time 120.

Oliver Jones & Skip Bey-Then and Now (2002). Justin Time JUST 180.

Just You, Just Me (2004). Justin Time 213.

One More Time (2006). Justin Time JUST 217.

Second Time Around (2008). Justin Time JUST 229.

Pleased to Meet You (2009). Justin Time JUST 236.

A Celebration in Time (2010). Justin Time JUST 234.

Live in Baden Switzerland (2011). Justin Time JUST 243.

Just For My Lady (2013). Justin Time JUST 251.

Albums by Other Artists Featuring Jones

Quiet Song (1989). Justin Time JUST 33.

Ranee Lee, I Thought About You (1994). Justin Time JUST 68.

Montreal Jubilation Gospel Choir, Jubilation VI: Looking Back (1994). Justin Time JUST 66/67.

Charles Biddle, In Good Company (1996). Justin Time JUST 90.

Richard Ring, Ring In Minor (1996). Justin Time JUST 82.

Filmography

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Oliver Jones was born to Barbadian parents with a strong appetite for music in Montreal's Little Burgundy neighbourhood. The area is the birthplace of many musicians, including Oscar Peterson, who became Jones's friend and mentor. From an early age, Jones was fascinated by music.

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Short documentary video (6m49)

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Famous Black Canadians: 2/10: Portia White

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Vinyl recordings with that scratchy vibe.

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Voices of Black Opera......PORTIA MAY WHITE  - Think On Me - First Black Canadian Concert Singer

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12 Black Canadians Who Changed the Music Scene

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12 Black Canadians Who Changed the Music Scene

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Student-friendly click-through article.

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Here is just a taste of the innumerable Black Canadians who have had a major positive impact on the music scene in Canada. These artists overcame adversity, racism (both overt and systemic), and discrimination to leave their mark on the charts and on our hearts.

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This famed contralto was born in Truro, Nova Scotia, in 1911 to parents who had been slaves in Virginia. She started singing in the church choir and was so determined to be a singer that she walked 10 miles every week for music lessons. White won the Helen Kennedy Silver Cup at the Halifax Music Festival in 1935, 1937, and 1938, and then became the first Black Canadian concert singer to win international acclaim. She is considered one of the best classical singers of the 20th century. As a voice teacher, she counted among her pupils actress Dinah Christie, jazz singer Anne Marie Moss, Lorne Greene (one of only two Canadians to top the charts in the '60s), and actor Don Francks. She also taught actor-singer Robert Goulet, who is a Grammy and Tony Award winner. In 1964, she performed for the Queen and Prince Philip at Charlottetown's Confederation Centre of the Arts. And she got a stamp! Canada Post issued it in 1999.

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12 Black Canadians Who Changed The Music Scene

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Here is just a taste of the innumerable Black Canadians who have had a major positive impact on the music scene in Canada. These artists overcame adversity, racism (both overt and systemic), and discrimination to leave their mark on the charts and on our hearts.

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An annotated listing - for teachers.

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Recognizing that Canadian Art Song Project has not programmed, commissioned or recorded any works by Black Canadian composers since our founding in 2011, I took time to explore some of the song repertoire that we have overlooked. I thought it might be useful for CASP to share what we have learned with other artists, teachers and those curious about the Canadian art song repertoire.

In truth, I have had difficulty finding song repertoire by Black Canadian composers. There are likely a number of reasons for this, including ongoing systemic discrimination towards people of colour in classical music globally, including in Canada. Additionally, this kind of search requires individuals to publicly self-identify as a member of the Black community, as this information has not historically been gathered and published in Canada.

A quick search of the Canadian Music Centre's website and online database brings up only one Black composer: Oscar Peterson. It is important to note that the CMC relies on composers to apply to become associate composers in order to be listed. When searching for Black Canadian musicians in the Canadian Encyclopedia website, the only composer listed is Nathaniel Dett.

Nathaniel Dett (1882 - 1943) is probably Canada's most celebrated Black composer of art music to date. I didn't realize the extent of Dett's piano / vocal repertoire, as I am most familiar with his choral works and was aware of some of his compositions for piano. But in conversation with Darryl Taylor, African American countertenor and founder of the African American Art Song Alliance, I was directed to an extensive listing of Dett's compositions through the U.S. Library of Congress. I also found an extensive listing here, which includes almost 20 songs for voice and piano.

In further discussion with Taylor, I was introduced to Maria Thompson Corley. Dr. Corley is a Jamaican-born Canadian who is now based in the U.S. She was raised in Alberta and received both Masters and Doctorate degrees in piano performance from the Juilliard School. In addition to her performing she is a commissioned composer and arranger with works for solo voice / piano and chorus. Her works are best obtained by contacting her directly through her website: www.mariacorley.com.

I have also become aware of two other composers who, to my knowledge, have not written for solo voice, but along with Dr. Corley, may be interested in future collaborations or commissions:

David Eastmond (b. 1981) holds a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Toronto, where he focused on clarinet, music education, composition and French language studies. He was a student of clarinet with Peter Stoll and of composition with Chan Ka Nin, John Hawkins, and Christos Hatzis.

Corie Rose Soumah (b. 1996) received a bachelor degree in composition at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal where she studied with composers Jimmie Leblanc and Nicolas Gilbert. Among many other recognitions, she is a prize winner of the 2019 SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers.

This is by no means an exhaustive search for all self-identified Canadian Black composers, but I hope that this is a start for those looking to amplify one segment of the underrepresented voices in the art song repertoire.

Please contact CASP if you know of other composers who should be added to this list or if you want to be in touch with us regarding this topic.

Lawrence Wiliford
Co-Artistic Director of Canadian Art Song Project

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Recognizing that Canadian Art Song Project has not programmed, commissioned or recorded any works by Black Canadian composers since our founding in 2011, I took time to explore some of the song repertoire that we have overlooked.