In this podcast interview, Matt Kalasky talks with Amanda Buck and Alexa Smith, two of the editors of Apiary Magazine, a beautiful Philadelphia literary publication in print and online, started in 2009 and publishing a wide variety of community voices, in a variety of genres including poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Apiary also includes visual art.
Read MoreIn this From the Vault post from 2011, Libby and Roberta talk with Amze Emmons about his work creating pastel-hued dystopias that are magnetic and enigmatic. Emmons’s works are featured at the Gershman Y right now in a pairing with (also wonderful) work by Lynne Clibanoff. The show is up to August 27, 2017. Be sure to get over and see it.
Read MoreIn this From the Vault post, listen to our 2016 audio podcast with Pap Souleye Fall, a 2017 UArts graduate, whose work is featured at the Galleries at Moore in the 5 into 1 exhibit, up til June 24, 2017. Pap’s performance- and sewing-based works are spiritual and community focused and great.
Read More2016 was a standard year by many measures, with one major difference (ahem you know what that is). Regime change is coming and like most in the art community, Artblog is greeting Jan. 20 with trepidation — and resolve. We are re-committing ourselves to our core mission of diversity — to write about and celebrate the excellence of artists, who are routinely shunned by the mainstream media. The task seems more urgent now than ever.
Read MoreJulie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust” is a haunting story of a family torn apart by change. Set in 1902, the film unfolds at the sea island family Peazant’s reunion on the beach called Ibo Landing, where a younger generation talks of moving to the mainland and the older generation fights to stay. The beach is paradise but there’s trouble. A wife is pregnant with another man’s child, a sister returning from the North is a prostitute, another is a Christian religious fanatic. In a movie where characters play symbolic roles, these two returning sisters, shaped by their experience in the big cities, are cautionary examples of something pure having been tainted.
Read MoreWe wish you peace and happiness at this time of family, friends and feasting.
Read MoreJulie Dash’s The Great Migration observes the closing of one chapter of history for many African Americans–life in the unforgiving South–and the beginning of another–an arduous journey North towards an uncertain future. The opening scene of the film, a beach at first light shot in soft muted color, is a fitting metaphor for this transition. A solitary suitcase sits on the sand, a totem for countless histories both individual and communal. At this point of departure where land ends and sea begins, the memories of these emigrants bridge all physical borders, and as the sole remaining traveler, the suitcase is our window into a narrative whose roots run deep and whose branches continue to grow.
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