#Black Women Artists

[elitehanitje]

The Wrestling Club had a special guest stop by today to surprise them during their lunch and recess 🥰

[standingatthefence]

Faith Ringgold  | (October 8th, 1930 - April 13th, 2024)

Circa 1987, Photographer Unknown

Source: Smithsonian Institution

[uwmspeccoll]

Decorative Sunday

GEE’S BEND QUILTS

Since the 19th century, the women of Gee’s Bend in southern Alabama have created stunning, vibrant quilts. In 2002, folk art collector, historian, and curator William Arnett organized an exhibition entitled "The Quilts of Gee's Bend," which debuted at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and later travelled to a dozen other locations across the country, including our own Milwaukee Art Museum (September 27, 2003 - January 4, 2004). This exhibition brought fame to the quilts, and Arnett's foundation Souls Grown Deep Foundation continues to collect and organize exhibitions for Gee’s Bend Quilts.

The images shown here are from Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts, with essays by John Beardsley, William Arnett, Paul Arnett, and Jane Livingston, an introduction by Alvia Wardlaw, and a foreword by Peter Marzio. The book was published in 2002 by Tinwood Books, Atlanta, and published in conjunction with the 2002 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. It includes 350 color illustrations and 30 black-and-white illustrations. The dust jacket notes observe:

The women of Gee’s Bend - a small, remote, black community in Alabama - have created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. . . . [The] quilts carry forward an old and proud tradition of textiles made for home and family. They represent only a part of the rich body of African American quilts. But they are in a league by themselves. Few other places can boast the extent of Gee’s Bends’s artistic achievement, the result of geographical isolation and an unusual degree of cultural continuity. In few places elsewhere have works been found by three and sometimes four generations of women of the same family, or works that bear witness to visual conversations among community quilting groups and lineages.

Our copy is a gift from our friend and benefactor Suzy Ettinger.

View more Black History Month posts.

View more Decorative Sunday posts.

[chilewithcarnage]

For the Culture Product Jacket (2021)- Shaquita Reed (b. 1994) crystals, plastic barrettes, plastic hair ties, metal hair clips, plastic combs, hair beads, pony beads, rubber bands, synthetic hair, shoe laces, hair ribbon and vinyl

[ninasatie]

em meus braços, retorno à terra (in my arms, returns to earth) mixed media (acrylic and oil paint) 100 x 130 cm 2023

[abwwia]

Lorna Simpson, Unanswerable (detail), 2018. Found photograph and collage on paper. Photo: J.Wang / © Lorna Simpson / Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

[wtfitskae]

My current avatar from Hello Sweet Days! I’m so much happier with this one than I am with the one from The Megan Incident (which I will not be repeating lol). This is much more representative of my usual style and quality.

[brettesims]

Drawing Outside…

The mixture of drawing & nature is so healing! Give it a try today. Lately I’ve also been writing a lot of Love poetry outside. It’s been lovely and refreshing! Have the best day!

~ B

[gingerylangylang1979]

I'm ready for a new language in black art

I attended a symposium today that was a retrospective of a groundbreaking black woman artist. I was happy to be introduced to her work and to witness dialogue about her. But one thing that struck me as other black artists engaged in dialogue about "the work", hers and their own, as part of the collective creation of black artists is, I feel like we are stuck as black creators.

Artists should draw from lived experience and observation to make the most impact. Our trauma as a marginalized people shouldn't and can't be ignored. But I almost feel like I'm ready for some of us to be moving away from kind of an archival representation of diasporic legacy and towards, I'm not sure exactly. I feel like we are stagnant in presenting displays of trauma that don't make an effective call to action, if they are social justice or community building minded, or stay lingering on the vague promises of Afrofuturism.

Maybe I'm yearning for a way forward even if an imagined resolution, And Afrofutrism seems frozen in an aesthetic, one that upholds technological symbiosis as an evolution.

I don't even know if what I'm saying makes sense but I do know I'm tired of being in spaces that feel like all the narrative is rehashed and preaching to the choir of instead of truly introducing a new narrative or frame of reference.

As a creator I do get it. I don't make visual art as a serious practice, my medium is writing. And one of my biggest struggles is, is what I'm saying new and fresh, true to me, imaginative, and offering a worthwhile contribution to the canon of black female voices. If I'm not able to do that, I'm not creating anything transcendent.

Maybe I'm just whining because I was a bit more bored and jaded today than I wanted to be. I dunno.

[thoughtportal]

In this film visual artist Barbara Walker MBE, RA shows us around her studio in Birmingham and talks about the themes present in her practice, including temporality, power and body politics.

We also see her creating a free-hand wall drawing in Towner Gallery as part of her series Burden of Proof, whereby she creates large-scale in-situ portraits of individuals affected by the Windrush Scandal

Barbara Walker is nominated for the 2023 Turner Prize, hosted by Towner Eastbourne. The winner will be announced on 5 December 2023.

[ausetkmt]

Have you been to ALLTHINGSCONSCIOUS.COM yet?!?!

Absolutely. Sis got the best for the stylish and cultured. they should be on tumblr ads so we can repost them and help them get more traction

Thanks for sending the url for the reminder - thats love fam

[lillaurenp96]

Another rant incoming in 3,2,1:

Why do y'all let black women musicians, who aren't rappers, get their flowers once they hit their thirties. But with their white peers that is a different ballgame. Like I already know next up to receive her flowers is Tinashe. Ya'll did it with Victoria Monet, SZA, you did it with Jazmine Sullivan. Don't get me wrong they had their fanbase but they weren't big or bigger like they are now. Then after Tinashe it will be Chloe and Halle when they hit their thirties. Like it's the same cycle since I have been 14. Like even Beyonce didn't become global superstar as a solo artist until thirty and that was with single ladies.

Which speaking of C and H ya'll crack me up saying that you miss the duo. 😂😂 Oh please if ya'll really missed the duo then Ungodly Hour, the album y'all claim to like would be gold by now. It's giving that ya'll were bored in 2020 and wanted to be entertained by them cause they are extremely talented and were black girls with loc. Something ya'll needed during the BLM movement. Trust I get it I have been with them since before they signed to Beyonce. When they were on Disney and and won NBT and made covers on YouTube. Instead of just admitting you only like two songs by them and you liked the image you projected on to them because they are associated with Beyonce. Until y'all admit that to yourselves ya'll are just gonna have to stay mad about them being human beings and making choices in THEIR LIFE you don't like. The messed up thing is that would be fine if you are pissed, it's weird and giving parasocial, but you could just unfollow, block, mute their names. But you don't you still want to see what is going on in their lives so you can laugh, bully and again be entertained by their personal lives.

Ya'll have always been weird to black women, ya'll still do it to Beyonce, Rihanna, Normani, SZA, Tinashe, Victoria, but there is something about Chloe and Halle that makes y'all mad. Ya'll really act like these girls hurt you and they are your real little sisters/nieces and you want what's best for them cause you are "fans". But if you were really fans, you would also care about their music, but you don't. I already know this cause when they do release their third album, y'all won't stream it. It will just be the genuine fanbase who has been with them since they released "Sugar Symphony". An EP that black folks only, cause critics always liked their sound, claimed was too complex and sounded like it was from outer space and too weird for black girls to be doing. But are perfectly fine with Billie doing that sound. What's even more messed up is this is mainly coming from black women. Like why are we low-key the most judgemental group, especially with other black women. It's just whack and tiring.

[standingatthefence]

Lorna Simpson | Interiors, LA 1957 - NY 2009

[uwmspeccoll]

Spotlight: Faith Ringgold

92-year-old Faith Ringgold is arguably one of the most consequential African American artists of her generation, well-known for her paintings, mixed-media sculpture, performance work, and especially for her narrative quilts. A year ago, February 17, 2022, the New Museum in New York opened the retrospective exhibition “Faith Ringgold: American People,” the most comprehensive survey to date of the work of Faith Ringgold, whose groundbreaking art and political activism span more than sixty years.

These images are from the catalog of that exhibition, also titled Faith Ringgold: American People, edited by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari and published in New York by Phaidon Press in 2022. The catalog features 11 essays by prominent writers and an interview with the artist, and covers work from all periods of Ringgold’s career, including her early civil rights-era figurative paintings, her graphic political protest posters, and her signature experimental story quilts.

Click or tap on the images for more detail.

The Flag is Bleeding #2: The American Collection #6, 1997. Acrylic on canvas with painted and pieced fabric. 76 x 79.5 in.

View more Black History Month posts.

[glcarissa]

I haven't posted for a few months due to major health issues. From March 12, 2023, when I first located the lump in my left breast, to the present, it has been heart wrenching and challenging. I no longer have my father or mother, both have sadly passed away, to help me through this. And I don't want to be a burden on my children. Siblings ... all blood is not necessarily family, which is the saddest part of going through this alone.

After being in remission from ovarian cancer surgery in 2018, I was just diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, that has spread to my bones.

The illness and treatment have drastically impacted my physical and mental health to the point where I have not been fully active for several months. It has taken a toll on me, to say the least. Everything has changed. I am sad to admit, also, that many people have also changed. This is a devastating and horrible disease that no one should have to journey alone. But 'it is what it is' and I must keep fighting, whether with support or on my own.

Below is the link to my gofundme page to help me along my cancer journey. If you are able to donate, thank you in advance. If you are not able to donate, please consider sharing my page. I appreciate you all and hope to live as long as possible with this life-changing illness.

Cancer takes away everything. Each day is a battle, but this is my journey and forward I must go.

Stay safe. Be kind. Be humble. Be human.

Gloria C Swain [May 23, 1956 - ]

[abwwia]

Augusta Savage (born Augusta Christine Fells; February 29, 1892 – March 27, 1962) was an American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance. She was also a teacher whose studio was important to the careers of a generation of artists who would become nationally known. She worked for equal rights for African Americans in the arts. via Wikipedia