Colored Frames: A film about black visual art

A rich and varied look at what we call black art and the people who make it.

 

 

Make Art Instead of Atrocities: Kara Walker’s Perspective

The massacres in Newtown, CT, reminded me of this short interview from 2005 with Kara Walker in which she acknowledges that making art about atrocities is preferable to actually committing them. It may even help people with dangerous imaginations flush those evil thoughts out of their system.

Make art, not murder.

30 Shades of Black, Visually

Last year, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, mounted 30 Americans, “a wide-ranging survey of work by many of the most important African American artists of the last three decades. Selected from the Rubell Family Collection, the exhibition brings together seminal figures such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Hammons with younger and emerging artists such as Kehinde Wiley and Shinique Smith. Often provocative and challenging, 30 Americans focuses on issues of racial, sexual, and historical identity in contemporary culture. It explores how each artist reckons with the notion of black identity in America, navigating such concerns as the struggle for civil rights, popular culture, and media imagery. At the same time, it highlights artistic legacy and influence, tracing subject matter and formal strategies across generations.”

The irony, of course, is that the Corcoran is a white institution and the works in 30 Americans are all the property of the Rubells. Yes, we’re still in this condition.

Radcliffe Bailey and Memory of the Middle Passage

Radcliffe Bailey,  ”Western Current” 2010.Watercolor, collage and mixed media. The Hobdy Collection in memory of Walter Hobdy, Jr.