kusama pyjamas
Titled for Yayoi Kusama, who is the cat's pyjamas.
Since the African-American women Thomas portrays in her paintings are in control and decidedly done up—dressed to the nines and posed in studio spaces full of busy fabrics—there’s clearly an ironic twist in the exhibition title, She’s Come Undone! Thomas’ daring use of color and her obsessive, almost painstaking deployment of rhinestones highlight the pleasures these women take in adorning and displaying themselves. So her exhibition’s title should be read as an exclamation of relish, encouragement, and abandon.
via Mickalene Thomas, She’s Come Undone! - The Brooklyn Rail
New York-based artist Mickalene Thomas.
Thomas introduces a complex vision of what it means to be a woman and expands common definitions of beauty. Her work stems from her long study of art history and the classical genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life. Inspired by various sources that range from the 19th century Hudson River School to Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse and Romare Bearden, she continues to explore notions of beauty from a contemporary perspective infused with the more recent influences of popular culture and Pop Art. via Mickalene Thomas
New York-based artist Mickalene Thomas is known for her elaborate paintings adorned with rhinestones, enamel and colorful acrylics. Her depictions of African American women explore notions of black female celebrity and identity while romanticizing ideas of femininity and power.
(via Gladys Bentley) a better pic.
Courtney Gillette (via The real lives of celesbians | AfterEllen.com)
Way before Janelle Monae made cute suits her signature, or Lady Gaga was flaunting her alter ego Jo Calderone, there was Gladys Bentley, flirting and singing the blues in men’s clothing during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance.
Why no one has paid Betley homage with a proper documentary or biography is baffling to me. She wasn’t just into women (gossip columns were all a twitter when Bentley married a white woman in Atlantic City), she was an openly lesbian performer, who sang the blues not only at rent parties and speakeasies but at well known gay establishments. As for her style and preference for suits (and top hats! Homegirl rocks a top hat like nobody’s business!), she later told Ebony magazine, “It seems I was born different. At least, I always thought so….From the time I can remember anything, even as I was toddling, I never wanted a man to touch me…Soon I began to feel more comfortable in boys clothes than in dresses.”
The sad ending, though, came when Betley caved to the conservative pressures of the McCarthy era and “reformed,” marrying a dude, donning dresses, and saying she’d been cured. She also denounced her former ways as an effort to gain a mainstream audience, but that flopped. Gossip, style, blues, speakeasies, love affairs: Gladys Bentley’s life has the makings of some killer nonfiction. Who’s game?
Legendary 1930s blues singer Gladys Bentley. Openly lesbian, Bentley was the headliner at the Clam House, a gay and lesbian club on 133rd street in Harlem where she performed popular songs with double-entendre lyrics in top hat and tuxedo.
I’ve wondered why she hasn’t received better recognition and queer homage to. Even allowing for the combined erasure of specifically lesbians, butch/bulldagger women and WOC in queer media, Bentley was just such an innovator socially and creatively, through such influential periods in queer history. Her story would appeal to just about any audience that aren’t far right haters.
*though she had accepted conservative public norms by the time of her death, so I dunno about the implications for intellectual property.
(via heyfatchick)
(via Tikkun Daily Blog » Blog Archive » Assembling Stories: The Rubble Art of Dominique Moody)
Dominique Moody is a visual griot, an artistic storyteller whose imaginative use of found objects and rubble from the streets of Los Angeles and elsewhere has propelled her into the front ranks of contemporary African American artists in the early years of the twenty-first century. Moody, whose major visual disability makes her legally blind, transforms trash into treasure by assembling the remains from architecture, tree branches, bottles, discarded shoes, and other everyday items into some of the most engaging artworks in the contemporary era. Her three-dimensional pieces explore her personal and family history that reflects her nomadic history from her birth in Germany in a military family through her odyssey of living at more than forty addresses in various locations throughout her fifty-four years.
Lip A film collaboration between Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg 1999, 10 minutes, Color
It is Hollywood’s favorite role for black women: the maid. Sassy or sweet, snickeringly attentive or flippantly dismissive, the performers who play them steal every scene they are in, and Tracy Moffatt’s entertaining video collage reveals the narrow margin Hollywood has allowed black actresses to shine in. But shine they do. Giving lip is proven an art form in these scenes from 1930’s cinema to present-day movies featuring a remarkable roster of undervalued actresses and their more celebrated white costars. Moffatt and Hillberg’s rough, no-budget assembly effectively highlights with familiarity and humor the disturbing realization of how black characters and white characters still interact on screen, under Hollywood’s eternally backwards eye.
The poems in Nikky Finney’s breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina.
Finney’s poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother’s wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president’s final State of the Union address. Artful and intense, Finney’s poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.
via Write With Your Spine: A Poet Sings: Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split
Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, first artist to record “Hound Dog”, prodigious blues performer, namesake of the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls.
(via loveandzombies)
“WHAT DO YOU DO WITH BEING A TOKEN?”—CHERYL DUNYE asks us to ruminate on our first day in her “Intersectionality, Identity and I” course.
(via fuckyeahbrownandbutch)
via Treat: New Category: “Did You Know…”
Did you know that Jackie Ormes was the first African-American female cartoonist?
Ormes was born in Pittsburgh, PA as Zelda Maven Jackson August 1, 1911. She started her career as a Proofreader for the Pittsburgh Courier—a weekly black newspaper, and moved to Chicago in 1941 where she wrote articles for the Chicago Defender—which was the largest and most influential black weekly newspaper during her time. Ormes continued writing for the Pittsburgh Courier and later started illustrating characters who became known as Patty-Jo, Ginger, Torchy Brown, and Candy.
Ormes was part of Chicago’s black elite, and it is said that she modeled some of the cartoon characters after herself—”beautifully dressed and coiffed females, appearing and speaking out in ways that defied stereotyped images of blacks in the mainstream press” (credit: from jackieormes.com website).
via Treat, the blog of Designer Derilyn Chambers.
threadbared: RIP: Eunice Johnson
Sad news. Eunice Johnson, the legendary co-founder of Ebony magazine and creator of the Ebony Fashion Fair, died this past weekend. From the AP, the Fashion Fair was a “traveling high fashion charity event that showcases black designers and models is staged in nearly 200 cities each year. Ads for the show have featured singer Aretha Franklin, and actor Richard Roundtree made his debut as a model with the show.” More than half a century ago, she created the Fashion Fair Cosmetics line which was designed specifically for the complexions of women of color, advocated for models of color, and discovered Pat Cleveland who is considered the first black supermodel.
NPR just had a short interview with Andre Leon Talley, editor-at-large for Vogue magazine, on his memories of Mrs. Johnson. You can read the transcript here.
