Three Day Weekend of Art, Music & Great Food in Downtown Mt Airy, Philadelphia, PA 19119
October 14, 15 & 16, 2011
26th Annual Philadelphia International Art Expo is a three day indoor / outdoor art event along the 7000 - 7200 block of historic Germantown Avenue in the Mt Airy section of Philadelphia, PA 19119.
Every Monday !!!lamar@octobergallery.com
The North Carolina Museum of Art is opening an exhibit of 75 works by many of the most significant contemporary African-American artists of the last three decades.
Sacramento, CA-- Every first Saturday, the Sacramento African-American Art Collective (SAAAC) hosts a self-guided art tour exhibiting the works of established and emerging African-American artists. In addition, a wealth of talent by poets, musicians and other artists in various disciplines will be showcased. Participating artists are predominately from the greater Sacramento region and surrounding communities.
Art lovers will be able to view creative works in all media at over 10 venues throughout the city. People of all ages are encouraged to come out and enjoy this family-friendly event. The First Saturday Art Tour is free and open to the public from 12noon-9pm. Reception times for “Meet the Artist” opportunities are listed on the SAAAC Facebook page (www.facebook.com/SAAAC).
Art patrons may choose to go to some or all of the venues. The self-guided tour guides viewers from location to location ending at a Point of Destination closing reception. The Point of Destination spotlights, and is hosted by, a venue included in the tour. Artists and business owners from all the venues will be present. For the month of April 40 Acres Art Gallery 3428 3rd Avenue (Historic Oak Park) Sacramento, is the Point of Destination. This free event starts at 6:30pm.Seating is limited and guests are encouraged to arrive early.
Fine artist and cultural activist, Milton “510” Bowens presents “Food Stamps, Free Lunch and Fine Art” A Self Portrait. Join us as we artistically flash back to the sixties, seventies and eighties in a celebration of music, poetry and memory. A live DJ will spin old school hits and a select ensemble of the Sacramento area’s finest spoken word artist will perform. The evening will include a silent auction with proceeds benefiting Mr. Bowens’ Civil Arts Project.
by Andrea Sardone
The College of William & Mary's Mason School of Business in partnership with the Muscarelle Museum of Art hosts Bernard, Shirley and Khalil Kinsey at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 24 in the James W. and Dana Brenner Brinkley Commons Room, located in Alan B. Miller Hall.
The Kinseys are known for their collection of African-American Art, books and manuscripts that document and tell the remarkable story of African American triumphs and struggles from 1600 to present. The Kinsey Collection: “Shared Treasures of Bernard and Shirley Kinsey - Where Art and History Intersect “ has been on national tour to seven cites and is currently on display at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution until May, 2011. For more information, visit www.thekinseycollection.com.
Bernard Kinsey had a 20-year career with the Xerox Corporation and was an early pioneer in generating corporate support for a program for bringing African Americans and other minorities into the company and training them for jobs with opportunities for advancement. Having managed Xerox’s largest sales and marketing division, Kinsey held the top status in every sales and marketing position from 1968 through 1984. Under his leadership of the Xerox Black Employees Association, Xerox significantly increased the diversity of its workplace.
Kinsey has also been recognized for his efforts in rebuilding Los Angeles. As Co-Chairman of ReBuild Los Angeles, Bernard Kinsey was responsible for generating more than $380 million dollars in investments from the private sector for the inner-city of Los Angeles. He helped to bring over 33 grocery stores, pharmacies, hardware stores and other retail outlets, over 20 training programs, and loan funds into the heart of the inner-city community.
The Kinseys have raised over $22 million for charitable and educational organizations.
Of all the images I encountered in Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens, which completed its North American tour this winter with a stay at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology (the catalog also won the International Tribal Book Award) the one that most caught my imagination was a photograph by British Surrealist Roland Penrose. It shows fellow Surrealists Paul Eluard and E. L. T. Mesens posed in conversation, gesticulating vigorously, wearing dark suits and carved African masks.
What startles the eye is how completely the two men are transformed. The masks seem no more or less arbitrary a form of self-fashioning than Eluard’s rumpled socks or Mesens’s white pocket square. The picture opens itself up to a range of readings. Do the masks conceal or reveal? Did Penrose intend a Freudian allegory, using African artifacts to reveal the “savages” beneath the suits? Or are we to think of the masks of Athenian tragedy and Japanese Noh, elements of the rituals by which life becomes art?
There are other questions to ask as well. Can this be anything other than two white men reducing the artifacts of a nonwhite culture to the status of props in their cerebral games? In my years as a graduate student, the academic word on artistic primitivism seemed unambiguous. It was straight-up cultural imperialism, an act of appropriation by western artists and intellectuals eager to project their own Hearts of Darkness onto the so-called savages. But this always seemed less than completely satisfactory to me, part of the story but not the whole of it.
Many of the pleasures of Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens lay in its exploration of the many facets of the modernist fascination with African art, from serious engagement to frivolous exoticism and back again. Celebrities of the Harlem renaissance posed with African sculpture in the studio of African-American photographer Carl van Vechten. Haute couture milliner Lilly Daché collected Congolese hats, which inspired some of her own avant-garde designs. At the lowbrow end of the spectrum, a French publication entitled “Une nuit de Singapore”, would-be highbrow erotica full of dusky maidens, used images of African art to illustrate a textbook example of Edward Said-style Orientalism.
By Stanley A. Miller
When technology and art meet, the fusion can make digital wizardry the star of the show or it can simply be a creative means to an end.
A new exhibit featuring craftwork at the Milwaukee Art Museum shows how technology can be harnessed as basic building blocks of creativity. “The New Materiality: Digital Dialogues at the Boundaries of Contemporary Craft” shows technology broken down and blended into craft as seamlessly as wood, glass, metal or clay.
“Technology is inherent to the expression of these works, and they might not exist without it,” says Fo Wilson, curator and assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “The thing that ties all these together is how they use the ones and zeros.”
For example, Nathalie Miebach’s “Warm Winter” lists “data” as a material used to weave her work of reed and wood. The intricate and chaotic combination of curves and abrupt angles represents research recorded from the environment. It even includes a key listing which materials represent what elements, including water, wind and sand. “Data determined what the piece looks like,” Wilson says. “You can read her work as a piece of science.”
The use of digital technology is just as important but more subtle in “Madam CJ Walker,” a massive array of black plastic hair combs arranged in the image of the African-American businesswoman.
Artist Sonya Clark took an image of the historical business icon, pixilated it using a computer and then used the positive and negative spaces of missing teeth in the combs to build the visage.
The pixilation intensifies as viewers move around the black-and-white plastic tapestry, which is as curious to see up close as it is from far away. The materials and technological technique magnify Clark’s metaphor: Walker made her fortune as a hair care entrepreneur marketing products to African-American women.
“The New Materiality” also has interactive craft creations reacting in the presence of people.
Rust and seaweed from its time under the sea are flaking off, and some rests on the museum’s floor. It’s a piece that looks as if it came from an alternate universe or a parallel timeline, fusing the synthetic and organic.
Many other works in “The New Materiality” show artists melding digital technologies into their handiwork in diverse ways. It’s an approach that worries some in the craft arts community, which honors the work of hand over the power of machines.
“The concern is that anything that moves us toward the machine is trying to take away something,” Wilson says. “I am not trying to take anything away from craft. I am just trying to add something.”
