While studying painting and printmaking at Yale University, Tomashi Jackson noticed that the language Josef Albers used to describe color perception phenomenon, in his 1963 instructional text Interaction of Color, mirrored the language of racialized segregation found in the transcripts of education policy and civil rights court cases fought by Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF).
Read more here.
in a moment last week, this song reentered my life after a long absence. so powerful & mysterious. it has lifted me up so many times and continues to do so.
Mos Def . released 1999. Album: Black on Both Sides
Akwaeke Emezi is an Igbo/Tamil writer and video artist based in liminal spaces. She was Born in Umuahia and raised in Aba, Nigeria. In creating ‘Ududeagu’, Emezi wanted to invent a piece of visual mythology that examines loss and leaving from multiple perspectives. See more of her work here.
I am particularly interested in the way she use language, time, and personal mythology to sculpt this short.
Check it here: http://www.toomanydegrees.com/tmd-blog.
“ADAMPEnDLETon,‘BLAcKDADAMAnIfESTo’,2008″
http://adampendleton.net/wp-content/media/pendleton_beasley.pdf
Thom Donovan, “Adam Pendleton,” Bomb, 114/Winter 2011.
Here’s the video:
y’all.
i saw Arthur Jafa’s “Love is the Message, the Message is Death” yesterday. it’s a 7 min video of found-footage overlayed with Kanye’s “Ultralight Beam.”
along with the press release, there were free pamphlets for visitors – Arthur Jafa: My Black Death – i read it on the subway last night after seeing the show. the link above is the complete set which also features Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and W.E.B. DuBois.
mind blown.
the pamphlet touches on picasso, duchamp, polluck and more. it contextualizes their artistic production in relation to african art, black music i.e. jazz and how both (african art + black music) redirected western art practices toward a black aesthetic, yet by way of sponging off the genius and removing black bodies, etc.
it felt like a lot of what we discussed in classes last semester, but of course a vastly different analysis. fingers crossed it travels and we all get a chance to see it soon in the bay or elsewhere.
KJM gave a very honest talk for his retrospective at the MET. Would love to hear ya’lls thoughts! link below.
http://www.metmuseum.org/metmedia/video/lectures/evening-with-kerry-james-marshall
Yo.. he’s sick!!
Blitz the Ambassador just released his fourth studio album Diasporadical. He’s a Ghanaian-American hip-hop and visual artist I’ve been following for a while. The 3 music videos below were each shot in a different location: Accra, Ghana, Brooklyn, USA and Bahia, Brazil. Together they form a 15-minute short film.
“The album title ‘Diasporadical’ was born out of this experience” Blitz explains. ” The radical notion that no matter how fragmented the African diaspora is, the influence of rhythm and spirituality remains largely the same.”
5/5ths 