The Grapevine
Video of the Week: Haitian Master Artists
This week’s videos wing their way to you from Gail Pellett Productions. These short 5 minute and under ‘mini-docs’ accompanied the exhibition ‘Haitian Art’ held at the Brooklyn Museum in 1978. Curated by Ute Stebich this exhibition was a landmark in the U.S. both in terms of its focus – as a major exhibition – on Haitian Art and its use of video within the gallery spaces.
Click the image links below to access five short videos: 1 introductory overview and 4 surviving videos out of 13 which each contain an interview with individual Haitian artists:
“In 1978 the Brooklyn Museum mounted the first major exhibit of Haitian art in the U.S. — which later traveled to several other cities… Ute Stebich, the curator of this major exhibit, convinced the Brooklyn Museum to send a videographer to travel around Haiti, shoot interviews with the artists and capture…
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Art Exhibition: Sophia Martelly Inaugurates « L’art haïtien vu par nos femmes »
ICS Lecture and Screening: Patricia Mohammed’s “The Temples of the Other: The South Asian Aesthetic in the Caribbean” and “Coolie Pink and Green”
Watts Towers Q&A with Artist Dominique Moody
Last year, LACMA began a partnership with the City of Los Angeles’s Department of Cultural Affairs to work toward the long-term preservation of Watts Towers. Lucas Casso, an intern with LACMA’s Department of Curatorial Planning has been conducting interviews with artists and others who have been involved in or influenced by the Towers.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, I traveled to Watts to interview assemblage artist Dominique Moody. Dominique is currently the R Cloud Artist in Residence and works on East 107th Street, only a stone’s throw from the Watts Towers. Moody’s work was recently featured in a yearlong solo exhibition at the Watts Towers Art Center and can be seen on her website.
Moody and I first walked around the property on which she lives and works, including the installation version of her NOMAD project, the final product of which will give her a traveling studio and living…
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Totem Pole Art Preserves Native American Culture
NAZIS, AND GREMLINS, AND SPANDULES, OH MY! WWII CARTOON CHARACTERS AT THE WOLFSONIAN LIBRARY
In thinking about some of the Wolfsonian library materials that might be of interest to the Florida International University students taking my America & Movies history class on wartime propaganda this semester, I first thought of the numerous children’s propaganda books in our collection. Many of these children’s books were donated to the library by Pamela K. Harer.
Cartoon characters, of course, were enlisted in the fight against the Axis during the war years, and some of our most cherished and popular cartoon heroes were featured in animated films and printed pamphlets, sheet music covers, and children’s books. A couple of popular Sunday newspaper comic strip characters appeared as well in a wartime alphabet book published for young children. In addition to teaching youngsters their ABCs, Blondie and Dagwood, instructed these children (and parental readers) in proper patriotic behavior.
GIFT OF FRANCIS XAVIER LUCA & CLARA PALACIO-DE LUCA
While younger audiences may not know…
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Art Exhibition: “Afrolatinos”
CFP: African American Artists in the Midwest @ MACAA 2012
Call for Papers (Deadline April 10, 2012)
African American Artists in the Midwest
Session Chair: Julia R. Myers Ph.D., Eastern Michigan University
Email: jmyers@emich.edu
While American art history tends to be fairly parochial with its emphasis on East Coast artists, African American art history seems to suffer even more strongly from this bias. This session will be devoted to African-American artists or art institutions in the Midwest. The Great Migration from 1913-1949 brought hundreds of thousands of black Americans to Midwest industrial cities like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Minneapolis, and St. Louis. And some of these people and their descendents made art. Indeed on a trip to Detroit in 1964, Langston Hughes said, “Harlem used to be the Negro cultural center of America. If Detroit has not already become so, it is well on its way to becoming it.” Literary historians have frequently taken up the topic of Midwestern African-American writers, but this is far less true in the case of black visual artists. In line with the conference’s content session of Community and Collaboration, papers treating African American mural projects in the Midwest are especially encouraged, as are papers dealing with the educational outreach activities of artists and art institutions. However, all papers dealing with Midwestern African-American art from all time periods, colonial to the present, are welcomed for consideration.
CFP: Between the Literary and the Visual: Inter-Artistic Approaches to African-American Art History @ MACAA 2012
Call for Papers (Deadline April 10, 2012)
Between the Literary and the Visual: Inter-Artistic Approaches to African-American Art History
Session Chair: Jennifer J. Marshall, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Email: marsh590@umn.edu
A stubborn truism vexes African-American art history: the canon of black American literature is viewed as more established and robust than that of black American visual arts. This misconception has more to do with conventional disciplinary divisions, than it does with either the quantity or quality of black visual expression. Segregating the “literary” from the “visual”–and assigning these to English and Art History departments, respectively–has obscured the originally inter-artistic nature of much black cultural expression as well as the terms of its early reception and critique.
African-American artists have repeatedly worked in black literary contexts–from Aaron Douglas’s illustrations for Alain Locke’s The New Negro to Glenn Ligon’s painted excerpts from Ralph Ellison and Richard Pryor. At the same time, many (nonblack) literary critics have been enthusiastic interpreters of black visual arts. Theater critic and novelist Carl Van Vechten promoted the painters of the Harlem Renaissance; Sidney Hirsch, one of Vanderbilt University’s influential literary modernists, “discovered” black folk sculptor William Edmondson; and French poststructuralist Roland Barthes famously used a photograph by James Van Der Zee to explain his concept of the photographic punctum.
This panel seeks papers that take stock of this prodigious overlap between the literary and the visual arts. Participants are invited to address how literature and literary criticism may productively inform African-American art history, to recount the specific historical circumstances that compel this approach, and to consider broadly how attention to inter-artistic histories might helpfully reform both approaches to and canons of black cultural expression.
ACRAH 