Black Fine Art Show: February 13-15, 2009

The 13th Annual National Black Fine Art Show (NBFAS) will take place February 13-15, with a Gala Preview on the evening of Thursday, February 12 to benefit The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. The NBFAS will present exceptional work by African, African-American and Caribbean artists.

This international art fair features a broad array of artwork by black artists. NBFAS offers an opportunity to view and choose from a huge range of work in this undervalued field. Josh Wainwright, founder and producer/manager of the National Black Fine Art Show, commented “The show presents visitors an exceptional opportunity to purchase phenomenal original art from a genre which is experiencing great growth in monetary value, even in this difficult economic time.” From masters such as Edward Bannister, Robert Duncanson, and Henry Tanner to contemporary artists like Carrie Mae Weems, Cheryl Warrick and Danny Simmons, attendees will find a diverse selection for every taste. All artwork will be for sale. (For out of town visitors, check the website for a special rate on hotel accommodations.)

40 exhibitors from around the world will participate, including: Peg Alston Fine Arts, Sragow Gallery, and G.R. N’Namdi Gallery. Harlem’s Canvas Paper and Stone Gallery will also be participating. (For a full list of participating galleries, click here.)

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the preview benefit’s recipient, is a national research library in Harlem devoted to collecting, preserving and providing access to resources documenting the history and experiences of peoples of African descent throughout the world. From its founding in 1925 during the Harlem Renaissance, the Schomburg has amassed vast collections of over 21 million items. It was designated one of The Research Libraries of the New York Public Library in 1972.

Preview:
Thursday, February 12
Patron Reception & Preview, $150, 5:00 pm - 9:30 pm
Preview Party, $100, 6:30 pm - 9:30 pm
To order Preview tickets, click here.

Dates & Hours:
Friday, February 13, noon - 8:00 pm
Saturday, February 14, 11:00 am - 8:00 pm
Sunday, February 15, 11:00 am - 6:00 pm

Location:
7 West 34th Street at Fifth Avenue, New York City

Admission:
Daily Admission $15 (includes show catalog), Students $10 (with valid ID), 2-day pass $25.

www.blackfineartshow.com

February First Target Saturday: Get On The Black List!

Saturday, February 7:
Get On the Black List
FREE admission from 5 to 11 p.m.

at The Brooklyn Museum

5:30 p.m.–7:30 p.m. Music
The Rubin Pavillion, 1st Floor

Listen to San Juan Hill’s “Afro Latin Soul”, a cross Atlantic blend of funk, soul, Latino Caribeño, jazz, Brazilian, hip-hop, and house served with sultry lyrics in Spanish, English, and Portuguese.

6:00 p.m.–7:30 p.m. Film and Discussion
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Forum, 4th Floor

Aisha Cousins screens and discusses the documentary about her public art project, Diva Dutch, then demonstrates the art of braiding. Afterwards, watch a demonstration of Diva Dutch double dutch. The project explores how culture connects Black women across time and space. Free tickets are available at the Visitor Center at 5 p.m.

6:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m. Hands-On Art
Education Division, 1st Floor

Visitors are invited to describe themselves and their loved ones through portraiture and writing. Free timed tickets (300) available at the Visitor Center at 5:30 p.m.

6:30 p.m.–7:30 p.m. Dance Conversation
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium, 3rd Floor

Acclaimed choreographer and director Bill T. Jones speaks with noted film critic Elvis Mitchell, interviewer of The Black List Project, about his artistic journey as his company celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary. The free-flowing conversation will touch on what it’s like to create two works simultaneously: Fela! A New Musical about Nigerian firebrand musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti, creator of Afrobeat, and a multidisciplinary work for his dance company to mark this year’s bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Free tickets available at the Visitor Center at 5 p.m.

7:00 p.m. Young Voices Gallery Talk
Meet at the entrance to the Contemporary Art Galleries, 4th Floor

Student Guides give a talk highlighting the works of Black artists in the Museum’s contemporary art collection.

8:00 p.m. African Art Gallery Talk
Meet at the entrance to the Arts of Africa, 1st Floor

Kevin Dumouchelle, Interim Assistant Curator, Africa/Pacific Islands, gives a talk in the Arts of Africa galleries. Free tickets are available at the Visitor Center at 7 p.m. Talk will also be Sign-Language interpreted.

8:30 p.m. Film
Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium, 3rd Floor

See the award-winning film Lackawanna Blues (George Wolfe, 2005, 95 min., PG-13), starring S. Epatha Merkerson and Mos Def, that sets the coming-of-age stories of a woman, a family, and a community to the Blues of the 1960s. Free tickets are available at the Visitor Center at 7 p.m.

9:00 p.m. Target First Saturdays Book Club
1st Floor

Pamela Newkirk, a professor of journalism at New York University and a co-recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1992, discusses her newly published book, Letters from Black America.

9:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m. Dance Party
Beaux-Arts Court, 3rd Floor

DJs Spinna and Rich Medina make the selections for a James Brown vs. Fela Kuti tribute to two giants of funk music.

Be sure to check the Brooklyn Museums website for more events that evening by clicking here.

SOURCE: BM

The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End-MET MUSEUM, NYC

Dazzling textile traditions have constituted an important form of aesthetic expression throughout Africa’s history and cultural landscape. Textiles have long been a focal point of the vast continental trading networks that carried material culture and technological innovations across regional centers and linked Africa to the outside world. Leading contemporary artists reflecting on Africa’s distinctive cultural heritage and its relationship to the world at large have drawn upon the imagery of textiles in sculpture, painting, photography, installation art, video, and other media.

This exhibition illustrates the stunningly diverse classical textile genres created by artists in West Africa through some of their earliest documented and finest works. Highlights of the Metropolitan’s own holdings will be presented along with some twenty works that entered The British Museum’s collection by the early twentieth century. Selected works will represent inventive variations on major themes of the influential classical genres. The exhibition will relate these genres to contemporary art forms by affording an appreciation of the cultural context and visual language of these traditions and exploring their synergy and resonance in works by eight living artists.

The publication The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design Without End produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press will accompany this exhibition.

The exhibition is made possible in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Fred and Rita Richman, and The Ceil & Michael E. Pulitzer Foundation, Inc.

It was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with the British Museum, London.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street
New York, New York 10028-0198
Information: 212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

Deliverance: The Art of Ben Jones 1970-2008

Main Galleries September 18, 2008 – February 21, 2009

This major retrospective of the work of Ben Jones features a complete survey of the artist's work, dating from the mid 1970s through his most recent paintings. "Deliverance" explores various aspects of the artist's body of work, and delves further into its close relationship to religions of the African diaspora. Many of the artist's key works are in the exhibition, including the iconic Black Face and Arm Unit, from 1971 (State Museum, Trenton). Organized by independent curator Ed Spriggs, whose relationship with Mr. Jones dates back to the early 1970s, when he was director at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Ben Jones was exhibiting his work there, this survey is an unprecedented examination of this important American artist's work.

With essays by Edward Spriggs, Kellie Jones, Ph.D., Associate Professor of African American, African Diaspora, and Latin American art at Columbia University; and a dialogue with the artist by Alejandro Anreus, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Art History and Latin American Studies at William Paterson University, this publication promises to be a substantial and scholarly catalogue that will serve as a document of, and create access to, Ben Jones's significant body of work. "Deliverance" is made possible by a lead grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional funding provided by The Joan Mitchell Foundation, Inc., the Lucius and Eva Eastman Fund, The Puffin Foundation, Ltd., and other generous individual donors. This program was selected by the New Jersey Council on the Arts as part of the American Masterpieces Series in New Jersey. American Masterpieces is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Credit:
Ben Jones
Black Face & Arm Unit, 1971
Acrylic on life-size plaster casts, 30 pieces, life size (arms/masks)
Collection of the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey

SOURCE: Jersey City Museum

Odili Donald Odita: THIRD SPACE at Institute of Contemporary Art, UPenn

September 5, 2008 - December 6, 2009

Odili Donald Odita's large-scale, abstract wall paintings operate at the intersection of Western modernism and African culture. Borrowing strategies of destabilized perception from Op art—a tradition condemned by formalist criticism—and adding narrative and multicultural inflection, Odita both embraces and critiques the modernist tradition. His vast, animated expanses of fractured, rhythmic planes, equally informed by television test band patterns, African textiles, post-colonial discourse, sensory overload, and digital technology, speak to a contemporary experience of dislocation and decenteredness. This is the 16th commission in ICA's Ramp Project Series.

Third Space, a symphony of irregularly shaped, fractured planes in 115 shades of housepaint, takes full advantage of the Ramp’s soaring, sloping architecture.

Odita (b. 1966, Enugu, Nigeria; lives Philadelphia and New York) has been developing his rhythmic abstract paintings since 1999, when he was engaged, with critic Olu Oguibe and curator Okwui Enwezor, in bringing African and diasporic art practices to critical attention through the journal NKA.

Born in Nigeria and raised in Ohio, Odili Donald Odita (b. 1966, Enugu, Nigeria; lives Philadelphia and New York) has been developing this body of work for 10 years, at which time he was engaged, along with critic Olu Oguibe and curator Okwui Enwezor, in bringing African and diasporic art practices to critical attention through the publication NKA, Journal of Contemporary African Art.

Odita has had numerous exhibitions around the world, and was included in the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. He has had solo exhibitions at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Jack Shaiman Gallery, New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio. His work will also be on view this fall at The Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town and this spring at the Center for Contemporary Art in Turin. He is an Associate Professor of Fine Art at Tyler School of Art at Temple University.

This exhibition is organized by Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow Stamatina Gregory, and will be accompanied by a brochure publication.

SOURCE: ica

Provocative Visions: Race and Identity—Selections from the Permanent Collection-MET MUSEUM, NYC

"Provocative Visions" features thirteen works by seven contemporary African-American artists: Chakaia Booker, Willie Cole, Glenn Ligon, Whitfield Lovell, Alison Saar, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker. The exhibition examines the ways these artists challenge accepted perceptions and assumptions about race, gender, and identity, and interject their own cultural heritage and personal histories into their imagery. It presents them at mid-career with signature images. All of the pieces were acquired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art within a year or two of their creation, and most are being displayed for the first time in this installation.

The seven artists in this exhibition were born in the 1950s or 1960s and were directly affected by the Civil Rights Movement, Feminism, and the Sexual Revolution. When they emerged on the art scene in the 1970s and 1980s these issues were strongly in the forefront of their art. Although they have chosen subjects that are primarily figurative, their meanings go beyond traditional likeness. Rather the figures and faces in these sculptures, drawings, and prints are emblems of societal concerns and metaphors for human experience and collective memory.

Of particular note are the artists' innovative use of materials and techniques, including photography. Chakaia Booker�s tire sculpture is one of a number of pieces that utilizes found objects; others include Willie Cole�s bicycle and shoe constructions, and Whitfield Lovell�s wall tableau with metal implements. Multi-panel prints by Lorna Simpson are based on old photographs and printed on felt boards, while Glenn Ligon�s compositions feature written texts, almost exclusively. The female protagonists in Alison Saar�s and Kara Walker�s works comment on the role of women in society. Questions about the past and the present, particularly as they relate to African Americans, resonate in these exhilarating, but disturbing works.

www.metmuseum.org

The ART of K'Naan-"Dreamer

Somali-born poet, rapper and musican. Ladies and Gentleman, I present K'naan. For more information on this artist, go to:

www.myspace.com/knaanmusic