Like Romare Bearden’s collages, Musson brings together a spirit of formal experimentation with a deep-rooted cultural awareness. The title of his canvas Knowledge God may refer to the 1995 song of the same name by Raekwon, of the Wu Tang Clan. The repeated patterns of the Coogi fragments echo like musical phrases across the canvas, creating a sort of sweater sound collage. Just as Bearden’s collages often evoke sense of communal ritual (as in his series, The Prevalence of Ritual), Musson draws on shared reference points that span high-brow to low-brow to create visually arresting and thought-provoking work.
Read MoreActivating the unique Kensington industrial warehouse annex with sound, Botello and other sound-artists-in-residence are filling the Icebox’s white cube with unusual sounds during the year of 2016. In contrast to Jane Carver’s analog performance, Botello and the others are “painting” multiple sound images in the Icebox using digital computer software and electronic voices. Echo, feedback, movement, and tonal reduction in the high-ceilinged cinder-block and concrete space make sound almost physical, palpable, synesthetic.
Read MoreMost rooms in The Colored Girls Museum are dedicated to women of color; their names are framed in the doorways. This is a museum of Herstory told through art, through shout outs to accomplished and heroic women, and through everyday stories about ordinary and extraordinary lives.
Read MoreFor over forty years, Quentin Morris has explored the possibilities of blackness. Larry Becker and Heidi Nivling have selected twelve of Morris’ works, dating as far back as 1980 and as recently as March, 2016, in the current exhibition, “Quentin Morris, Untitled.” I found this thoughtfully organized show moving and meditative. While all the pieces belong to the same dark universe, each one draws the viewer in with its subtle variations of shape, texture, and tone.
Read MoreHoused at the Tyler School of Art, reForm tells the story of Fairhill Elementary’s untimely closure and of the students evicted. Fairhill was but one of two dozen schools shut down by the city of Philadelphia due to budgetary concerns in 2013. The school remains closed to this day. Osorio collaborated with teachers, students, parents, and neighbors to retrieve abandoned items from the school and create a work of installation art that would decry the injustice Osorio saw in the closing of Fairhill.
Read MoreAnd perhaps this last is one of the most significant points the exhibition makes: despite an international interest in the commercial vernacular and the visual impact of the media, the works in the exhibition can only be truly understood within the cultures that produced them. This leaves serious viewers with the realization that the information in many of the introductory labels is insufficient background for a real understanding of the art and how it functioned in its native territory.
Read MoreThe film has been widely described as a Nigerien remake of Prince’s iconic 1984 film, “Purple Rain,” shot in Tuareg and French with English subtitles. The music is intoxicatingly groovy. The visuals are dreamy and striking. And my feelings after seeing the film are absolutely electric–like the guitars.
Read MoreThough varied in media, all the works selected are figurative and highly literal, and contextualize black identity and female identity through the lens of burden, even as a burden unto itself, a trope that can be both stereotypical and empowering.
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