knowledge equals black power

(via canikon-bokeh)

soulbrotherv2:

Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video (Frist Center for the Visual Arts)

The work of contemporary artist Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1953) hits hard with a powerful mix of lived life and social commentary. Since the late 1970s, her photographs, films, and installations have become known for presenting realistic and authentic images of African Americans while confronting themes of race, gender, and class. This book, the first major survey of Weems’s career, traces the artist’s commitment to addressing issues of social justice through her artwork. Her early photographs, which focused on African American women and families, have since led to work that examines more general aspects of the African diaspora, from the legacy of slavery to the perpetuation of debilitating stereotypes. Increasingly, she has broadened her view to include global struggles for equality and justice.

This beautifully illustrated book highlights over 200 of Weems’s most important works. Accompanying essays by leading scholars explore Weems’s interest in folklore, her focus on the spoken and written word, the performative aspect of her constructed tableaux, and her expressions of black beauty.

soulbrotherv2:

Winfred Rembert: Amazing Grace

Winfred Rembert: Amazing Grace features the work of Winfred Rembert, a self-taught artist, who documents his life and the tumultuous moments of the American Civil Rights Movement.  The portraits were exhibited at the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, January 21 through May 6, 2012.

In more than 50 works on hand-tooled leather stretched, stained, and etched Rembert constructs scenes from the rural Southern town where he was born and raised, and peoples it with characters working the fields, joyous at church meetings, and enjoying its pool hall, jazz club, and café. His images are alive with figures and color, and dense with pattern. Some, more somber, convey the strife and grief of his own experiences of a near lynching and prison life.

(via browngurlwfro)

“WHO ASKS THIS THING?” by Richard Bruce Nugent

I walk alone and lone must be
For I wear my love for all to see—
It matters not how close our hearts appear to be
Since I tell my love in song for all to know—
Love must not be blind or small or slow,
But that I wear my heart for all to see
Means I am bound while he is, sadly, free.
He walks alone who walks in love with me.

Richard Bruce Nugent was born in 1906, to a family of high social position in Washington, D.C.’s black community. His mother was an accomplished pianist who was trained as a schoolteacher and his father was a Pullman porter. Nugent attended public grade schools and the acclaimed Dunbar High School. He was a frequent attendee of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s famous artistic salon, where he met and befriended Langston Hughes, who rescued Nugent’s poem “Shadow” from the trash and eventually helped send it for publication in Opportunity magazine.

Fire!!, the revolutionary literary magazine that formed a vocal break from the black literary establishment. Nugent was also a painter and illustrator, and the magazine contained two of his drawings as well as the short story “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade“—the first published African American literary work with a gay theme.

Like Nugent, Alex, the story’s protagonist, proudly embraces his gay orientation and lifestyle declaring, “You see, I am a homosexual. I have never been in what they call ‘the closet.’  It never occurred to me that it was anything to be ashamed of, and it never occurred to me that it was anybody’s business but mine.” Unlike his more closeted renaissance peers, including, Hughes, Thurman, Hurston, and Claude McKay, Nugent was an unabashedly happy, openly same sex loving man, an identity that may have cost him a more prominent publishing career.

Despite the lack of recognition, Nugent was a key player in the Harlem Renaissance.

Nugent’s credits included publication in the journals Crisis and Opportunity as well as in Locke’s New Negro anthology, a role on Broadway in Du Bose Heyward’s Porgy from 1927 to 1928 which included the London cast of the play, and much later as Co-Chair of the Harlem Cultural Council in the 1960s.

He died in 1987 from congestive heart failure. Since his death, interest in his life and works has grown.  In 2002, Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance: Selections from the Work of Bruce Nugent was published and in 2004,  “Brother to Brother”, a film about what it meant to be a black gay artist in the past and what it means to be one today was released. In addition, his first novel, Gentleman Jigger, was published in 2008, more than seventy years after he wrote it and twenty one years after his death.

(via Brother to Brother, Black Past, Bruce Nugent.com)

daisypaints:

More photos of Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller and her art. I’m absolutely in love with her Ethiopia Awakening Sculpture.