All Photos By Gail
The role that adornment plays in identity formation is central to Tiff Massey’s multimedia artistic practice. I Remember Way Back When was included in her 2019 exhibition, Proud Lady, which explored black women’s lives through artworks centered on hair. Continue reading Pink Thing Of The Day: I Remember Way Back When By Tiff Massey
All Photos By Gail
Like many feminist-aligned artists in the 1970s, Faith Ringgold embraced collaboration as a politically significant part of her practice. Ringgold’s primary collaborator was her own mother, the fashion designer and dress maker Willi Posey. Mrs. Jones and Family (1973, also known as Mrs. Jones, Andrew, Barbara, and Faith) was created with Posey, who designed and sewed garments for many of Ringgold‘s mask sculptures throughout the 1970s. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Mrs. Jones and Family By Faith Ringgold
Photo By Gail
American People, Faith Ringgold’s first exhibition outside Harlem, opened at Spectrum Gallery on 57th Street in December 1967. The exhibition featured her three murals, including U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating The Advent of Black Power (1967). Despite Ringgold’s determination to exhibit her paintings throughout the mid-1960s, she initially met with little success. The white-owned commercial galleries on 57th Street were dismissive, and Spiral, identified affectionately as the “old men of Black art“ by the painter Vivian Brown, declined to admit her into the group. But following public displays of her work in Harlem in 1966 — including in a traveling caravan exhibition organized by Amiri Baraka “(then LeRoi Jones) and Betty Blayton-Taylor for the Black Arts Repertory Theater — she was invited to join the cooperative Spectrum Gallery, where New York school abstraction was still prominent and every artist on the roster except Ringgold was white.
Story and All Photos By Gail Worley
When you think of the concept of Retrofuturism –an exploration of past visions of the future — this five-sided, console Television set might fit in perfectly.
Photo By Gail
Alma W. Thomas derived her vibrant color palette and lyrical brush work from the shapes and movement of foliage, flowers, and other natural forms. The stripes of bright pigment in Wind, Sunshine and Flowers (1968) create an engrossing effect that recalls feelings of awe inspired by nature
For Thomas, the visual realm of natural phenomena offered a way to transcend the racial biases she experienced as a black painter and educator in the early to mid -20th century. In 1972 she wrote, “man’s highest aspirations come from nature. A world without color would seem dead. Color is life. Light is the mother of color. Light reveals to us the spirit and the living soul of the world through colors.”
Photographed in The Brooklyn Museum.