42-Year-Old Venus Williams’ Ravishing Louis Vitton Attire Lights up $6,000,000 Fund-Raiser Event as Her Attempts to Preserve Renowned Artist’s Legacy Becomes Huge Success

Venus Williams has already established her legacy in tennis and now she has executed to perfection her plans to successfully preserve the legacy of the renowned music artist, Nina Simone. The tennis legend joined hands with renowned artist Adam Pendleton to collect funds for the renovation of the childhood home of the musical legend, Nina Simone. Acing a confident fashionable look, she outdid her target of accumulating $5 million for the desired project.

A tennis star on the court and a fashionista off of it, Venus Williams looked dapper as she made sure that the auction was a successful event.

Venus Williams aces the Nina Simone preservation project with a stunning look 

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The seven-time Grand Slam champion avidly promoted the launch of the online exhibition. The aim was to collect funds for the Nina Simone project. During the launch, she presented her best self in front of the bidders.

For that, she chose a classic black Louis Vuitton dress with black heels. She flaunted the same on her Instagram story too. Looking stunning as ever, she promoted the exhibition including the beautiful art of various artists. One of them was her idol, Rashid Johnson, who works on post-conceptual black art. Moreover, she also hailed all the artists for boosting her love for art. She stated, “I was just thrilled. I love art it’s my happy place. I could not have been happier than to meet such visionaries!”

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Nina Simone, the late American singer came into the limelight once again when Venus Williams joined an endeavor to preserve her childhood home. The aim was to collect $5 million. However, the ace never fails to disappoint. She ended up amounting fund of almost $6 million.

On the other hand, despite her ardent efforts to make equal pay a reality, she did not take any credit for it. She attributed all of it to her admiration and idolization of legends like Nina Simone.

Williams attributed her contribution to the tennis realm to Nina Simone

Venus Williams is the player who made it a reality to make WTA and ATP players get paid equally at Wimbledon in 2007. And now tennis leads by example.

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via Getty

Venus Williams of the United States celebrates defeating Laura Siegemund of Germany during her third round Women’s Singles match on Day Six of the 2016 US Open at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center on September 3, 2016 in the Flushing neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York City. (Photo by Alex Goodlett/Getty Images)

However, this is something she did not take any credit for. While talking about her admiration for Nina Simone, she credited her inspiration, Simeone, for her initiative to bring equality in the sport. She looks up to her as a role model who broke multiple barriers. Simone’s legacy motivated her to do that in her tennis career as well.

WATCH THIS STORY: Who Is More Successful- Serena or Venus Williams?

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Interestingly, Venus Williams won her first Wimbledon after she made equal pay a reality in 2007.

What do you think of Venus William’s effort to preserve Nina Simeone’s legacy? Let us know in the comments below.

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racism lays foundation for Black Americans' health disparities From birth to death, Black Americans … exploring how the legacy of racism in America has laid the … RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News

How Hip-Hop Gave Me a Second Chance at Life

HIP-HOP WAS BORN in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. To celebrate the music’s 50th anniversary“Rolling Stone” will be publishing a series of features, historical pieces, op-eds, and lists throughout this year.

I try to be deliberate about describing it as a “car crash” and resist writing “accident,” because I’m not so sure. I didn’t think I was suicidal, at least not while sober.

I was in Detroit preparing for an academic conference the first time I watched the video for Ab-Soul’s “Do Better.” For my panel on Black Study & Public Pedagogy, I planned to talk about being dope. Specifically, my talk was about Black people as a drug to which America is addicted. This addiction shows itself in many ways. It has constructed categories of legal and illegal depending on who is using, like other drugs. For some, it’s described as abuse, and for others, it’s transactional, or perhaps necessary for some prescribed reason or another. The video was only somewhat related to my presentation, but I had no way to know other than to watch it. It’s all black and white. It begins with the rapper speaking while seated in a chair, wearing his trademark dark sunglasses. Before the music begins, he speaks, “The know-it-all that’s always wrong, but I be claiming I’m advanced. / This my second second chance.”  

The music cues distressing scenes. Ab-Soul is falling, and we eventually see that he has jumped from the top of a building. A little more than halfway through the video, there’s a moment when he’s brought back to life, caught on the brink of leaping from that precipice by the embrace of the hands and arms of people who are apparently close enough to prevent his jump from the ledge. I cried and cried after watching those hands pull him back from the brink of death. Every time I’ve watched it since then, tears still well up in my eyes. After talking to the Detroit audience about being dope, I recommended they all watch the video if or when they had the capacity to do so.

“Do Better” is the first single from Ab-Soul’s 2022 album Herbert, and it’s about, well, doing better. It’s a welcome topic for me, and I’m sure many others will relate to the desire to realign and refocus our energies after all the turmoil we have collectively and individually endured over the past few years.  

I don’t only recommend music during academic presentations. My friends know there’s a rap lyric for every occasion, and I’m always at the ready with a quote or a link to share. It’s my profession now. But before that, it was my passion. In the 50 years of hip-hop – from its purported origins in the Bronx, through my Midwest hometown of Decatur, IL, to the West Coast, and back – there have been songs for all occasions. Some rap songs describe the love we have for our mothers or the neighborhoods we grew up in, the lives we left behind, or – as is often the case – our desires to live the kinds of lives we hear rappers describe. 

As a fan of rap, it hasn’t always just been what a rapper is saying that invited me to bob my head or tethered a song to a moment or a memory. It’s as much about feeling as it is about forethought. The combination of both of these appeals anchored my appreciation of the art form to my academic curiosity. Like lots of my friends, I decided I would be a rapper. In the process of trying to make my rap dream work, I delved as deeply into the archive of hip-hop stories of the past half-century as my doctoral program would allow. Hip-hop had become the way I navigated the world around me, professionally and privately. 

In 2017, I released a rap album titled Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions as my Ph.D. dissertation at Clemson University. The album, like my academic presentation in Detroit, is about America’s dependency on Black bodies and Black art, and the country’s attempts, through history and in the present, to regulate Black life. It details how the U.S. treats Black people as products to be sold and traded. Hip-hop helps highlight some of the ways Blackness is arbitrarily legalized and outlawed, our presence, our bodies, and our actions elicit suspicion and surveillance, while, at the same time, reproductions of our bodies and actions are consumed and welcomed in places, like academia, where our presence is restricted, if it’s allowed at all. Licit or illicit, Black folks are dope. Owning My Masters, to my mind, is an uncut dose.

Considering hip-hop’s history of naming societal problems as a way to confront them, I wrote the album to use rap and hip-hop methodologies to highlight America’s past and present, with hopes that in the next 50 years of hip-hop, a rap album dissertation would be considered as traditional as the kinds of written documents most people submit today. It was also a way to show how profoundly hip-hop has shaped my life in ways that aren’t academic.

When I reflect on my life, I often think of the Jay-Z lines from “Murder to Excellence”: “And they say by twenty-one I was supposed to die / So I’m out here celebrating my post-demise.” I appreciate that so many people who listen to rap music might hear the same song and take away different things. It’s almost like no two people ever really experience the same song the same way. We listen and filter what we hear through our own circumstances. 

Jay-Z rapping about surviving everyday American violence might conjure hundreds of different interpretations depending on the experiences people bring into the listening. In “Murder to Excellence,” he’s reflecting on his relatively short life expectancy as a Black man in a violent world, and relishing outliving those expectations. When I think of his lyrics, it’s almost always more personal and separate from that context. I’m usually thinking about the near-death experience that changed my life.

In the video for “Do Better,” it seems Ab-Soul is sharing a near-death experience that changed his life. He jumped off a freeway overpass in his hometown Carson, CA. In an interview with Charlamagne tha God, he talks about the addiction that led to his jump. He says that he’s never attempted suicide while not under the influence. There’s a history of hip-hop songs that deal with substance abuse and mental health that goes as far back as the first commercial recordings. 

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The well-known refrain of the 1982 song, “The Message,” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, is illustrative, “It’s like a jungle sometimes / it makes me wonder how I keep from going under.” The 1991 Geto Boys song “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” plumbs the depths of paranoia and depression described by group members Scarface, Willie D, and Bushwick Bill. MC Lyte’s “Poor Georgie,” a rap yarn about a womanizing young alcoholic who dies tragically, was released in 1991, as well. And there’s Biggie’s “Suicidal Thoughts” from 1994. Tupac opens and closes his 1995 song, “Lord Knows” with, “I smoke a blunt to get the pain out / and if I wasn’t high I’d probably try to blow my brains out.” In 1996, A Tribe Called Quest and Faith Evans released “Stressed Out.”

The entire corpus of DMX might qualify for this list. Along with Jean Grae’s “Keep Livin’” from 2003 where she discusses mental health over the beat to Scarface’s 2002 song, “On My Block.” And Earl Sweatshirt’ “Grief,” released in 2015 on an album titled I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside. The long list of rappers who have made music or otherwise attempted to publicly navigate issues with mental health, substance abuse, and/or suicidal ideation include Kid Kudi, CHIKA, Conway the Machine, Ye, 7xvethegenius, and Mac Miller, one of the many artists who’ve battled substance abuse. Miller was a friend of Ab-Soul, and one of the people he mourns on Herbert and “Do Better.”   

In his interview with Charlamagne, Ab-Soul’s description of his state of mind when he jumped from the overpass resonates with me. Though I would say I felt fine sober, under the influence, I had an excuse to give in to any impulse that came to mind. The song and video for “Do Better” resonate because I’ve been a firsthand witness to addiction and folks I love trying to jump off that figurative ledge. I’ve been there myself and jumped. I’m not an addiction expert. I’m a survivor. Fortunately, I’ve also been caught by the embrace of folks close to me. Tragic losses sometimes leave us with unfathomable guilt and grief. That there are arms and hands – people close enough – to be embraced by is the greatest of gifts. 

All those years ago, I rarely spent any of my free time sober, and the reasons for that were many, including, in part, what felt like incessant heaviness from depression and nonstop tragedy that made the heaviness thick and nearly immovable. 

The way Ab-Soul describes his “incident” is that it happened in a “cinematic” way. He describes blacking out, like blinks, and each time his eyes opened he was farther along his course until he’d jumped off the overpass and was laying on the street. He says he believes a car broke his fall. “No brain damage,” he says, but teeth and bones broken, one leg taking the brunt of the fall, apparently. 

I don’t remember my crash. I remember moments—drinking…laughing…texting…stopping at Walgreens…overwhelming sadness…driving…a yellow traffic light…the impact of my steering wheel on my face…the smell of grass…the sounds of crying…the taste of my blood…numbness…a cold gurney…darkness…silence…and then nothing. 

My face felt mangled. The raised scar beneath the curve of my bottom lip is poorly covered with facial hair. The healed tissue inside my mouth has become the focus of an anxious tic. I catch myself rubbing my tongue back and forth against it when I’m nervous, especially when I’m thinking about the crash. 

My recklessness could’ve caused so much more damage. It was a weekend on the busiest street in town. I can’t help but think of all the worst scenarios—death, of others, and my own. I imagine the seatbelt of the old Lincoln Town Car not pulling me back into my seat, being ejected from the windshield, or sitting just a few more inches to the right on the bench seat and being crushed by the engine. 

I think of my mother having to plan a funeral, write an obituary, and my siblings saying goodbye and wondering what could’ve been done differently. My dad took my youngest brother and sister to the scene of the crash before they went to the hospital that night. Sometime after, my younger brother told me he was angry with me. He wouldn’t speak to me because he thought I died. I think about that, too. 

Nearly as much as I think about those possible outcomes, I think about what I intended to do that evening. I wish I had clarity. It bothers me to not know. It’s difficult to accept the possible reasons. But somewhere amidst the justifying, denying, and poor intellectualizing, I know it was because I was tired. I decided at that moment to let go. I thought I was finished.

I was wrong. 

It wasn’t the first time I’d confronted the toxic combination of substance abuse mixed with ongoing mental health challenges that resulted in an attempt to make it all stop in the most permanent of ways. Unfortunately, the crash wasn’t the last time I felt tired and like I was finished. It is, however, the last time I acted on those thoughts in that way. I’ve written myself onto and off of that ledge so many times trying to make sense of it. I’ve sat in front of many therapists, first by court order, then voluntarily, through rehab and maintenance of sobriety, and ongoing. 

Fifteen years of sobriety have shown me that I may never know for sure what brought me to the ledge, but I do know that I don’t want to jump. When I hear Ab-Soul rapping, seemingly to himself, affirmations as the hook of the song, I hear my voice telling myself the same thing. And I’m encouraged that he’s listening. After the crash, I remember writing furiously, trying to catch all my thoughts and commit them to paper and then make music with them, or to be able to tell someone else that things can be different. Things can be better. 

I think one of the reasons hip-hop – the music, the culture, and the people – have prevailed against all odds, and persist, still, is because of the insistence of its creators to make beautiful art out of some of the ugliest, most difficult, brokenness. This mythos that surrounds rappers is something I’ve witnessed as a fan, as an artist, and as a student of hip-hop. Along with the tales of love for the people and places we’ve loved, left, or maybe hoped to leave, the lives we’ve lived or wanted to live, rappers have consistently reworked trauma, navigated loss, introduced and reintroduced ourselves and our outward personas by percussively narrating pasts, presents, and futures between snares, samples, bass lines and kick drums. And audiences continue to tune in, maybe to listen intently to the words, to subtly sway to the rhythms, or to just bob along to the beat.

Though I didn’t go in-depth about Ab-Soul’s song and video when I was in Detroit talking about Black people being dope, I did discuss the legacies of hip-hop. I find it remarkable to be able to experience the milestone that is hip-hop’s 50th year. I find it remarkable that I’m still here. The Jay-Z lyrics remain an appropriate couplet to describe my life. 

Celebrating my post-demise – my second second chance, as Ab-Soul described it – has included lots of therapy, writing, making music, school, cross-country relocation, learning, teaching, and starting a new career. There’s still been guilt and grief and tragedy, but there has also been joy and laughter and the occasional necessary embrace. 

With Ab-Soul’s addition to the deep archive of rap music that I reference when I need to try to make sense of the world around me, his refrain more closely describes my approach to life after that metaphoric leap: “I gotta do better. I gotta do better. I gotta…”

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A.D. Carson is a rapper, performance artist, and educator from Decatur, Illinois. He received a Ph.D. in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design. His previous works include the albums iv: talking to ghosts and i used to love to dream — a winner of the 2021 Research Award for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities from the University of Virginia and a Category Winner (Best eProduct) of a Prose Award from the Association of American Publishers in 2021.

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Tate Britain rehang: a masterclass in how to refresh a museum

I

t’s a decade since Tate Britain rehung all its galleries. In a 126-year-old museum that houses a collection of 500 years of British art that is, of course, a relative drop in the ocean. But in terms of attitudes to art and its history, and how museums display it, I can’t imagine there has ever been a 10-year period that has witnessed a more seismic shift.

The historic canon is being exploded, meaning more women and artists of colour are gaining due prominence. And the sitters, landscapes and patrons behind the art are also being newly explored. It’s not enough anymore to look at paintings of the rich and powerful of the past without examining the context that supported them, or to see a country house and its estate and not ponder why and how they were built. Art always emerges from particular social and cultural conditions, to ignore that seems more absurd than ever.

So these are the driving principles of Tate Britain’s new displays. Officially, there are three themes: Britain and the World, Art and Society, History and the Present. They’ve long been at the core of the gallery’s programming. But never so wholly, or explicitly. It’s done with apposite thoroughness, with a broad overall chronology encompassing thematic rooms. It tells its stories in two ways: through excellent and illuminating texts, and through what the director of Tate Britain Alex Farquharson calls “stealthy interruptions” from artists.

So in a room looking at the 18th-century city, where you see the economic benefits to Britain of the slave trade, is Chair No.35, by Sonia E Barrett, an artist with Jamaican heritage. Smashed, and splayed like a broken body adrift on the sea, it’s a poignant and jarring response to the works nearby. In the same room, between Canaletto and Hogarth, Pablo Bronstein imagines a Molly House, where queer men would socialise and have sex, as if it were able to celebrate its purpose, bedecked with nods to historic gay men, homoerotic art and even emoji innuendos.

Texts about historic works enrich rather than distract from the paintings by informing us about who the sitters were, why they commissioned works, how they could afford them and, often, who they exploited on the way. The power of Gainsborough’s portrait of the Baillie family is in no way diminished by the knowledge that the finery Gainsborough so beautifully describes in this image of familial harmony was underpinned by James Baillie’s wealth from the Grenadan and British Guianan plantations he owned and passed on to his charming children.

Richard Smith, Gift Wrap, 1963

/ Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd

Visually, the collection is palpably revivified. That’s partly because 70 of the 800 works in the hang — historic works as well as contemporary — have been acquired in the past five years. But the curators have also looked deeper into the collection, finding long-held objects that haven’t seen the light of day for decades.

Yes, most of the most famous works — from Hogarth to Hockney — are here. The Clore Gallery still houses masses of JMW Turner’s paintings, and a John Constable room. There are fantastic displays dedicated to William Blake, Henry Moore and Richard Hamilton. But I was also surprised and delighted in pretty much every room, and I learnt a huge amount.

Women artists are present right from the start: Joan Carlile and Mary Beale in the Stuart period, Angelica Kaufmann in the 18th-century, Henrietta Rae and Dorothy Stanley in the Victorian era, Marlow Moss and Winifred Nicholson next to each other in a space dedicated to International Modernism, and onwards, growing steadily more prominent through the displays until there’s parity in the later 20th and 21st centuries. A solo space given to Annie Swynnerton, campaigner for women’s suffrage and pioneering member of the Royal Academy, would have been unthinkable not long ago. I would celebrate it if could abide her saccharine style.

Damien Hurst, Away from the flock, 1994

/ Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd

The modern and contemporary spaces are equally unexpected, shaking up standard histories of recent periods. In No Such Thing as Society, the 1980s room, Black Arts linchpins like Ingrid Pollard and Donald Rodney are rightfully as prominent as New British Sculpture artists like Antony Gormley and Tony Cragg. A mini-display of the Young British Artists of the 1990s shows how caricatured that period has already become; great pieces by Mona Hatoum, Sutapa Biswas and Chris Ofili deepen the sense of the art of this period’s political rigour.

The final rooms include marvellous paintings by Mohammed Sami, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Kudzanai-Violet Hwami, a superb sculpture by Veronica Ryan and a Zineb Sedira film. Perhaps reflecting the brilliant diversity of the contemporary British scene was the easiest of Farquharson and his team’s tasks. That they’ve reflected a greater richness across the rest of the collection, and tell its story so rigorously, is some achievement.

Tate Britain, now open; tate.org.uk

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New consortium hopes to preserve Richland’s Black history

COLUMBIA — Richland County is one of the historically richest in South Carolina, hosting the capital that’s been around since 1786 and boasting the second-most nationally registered historic sites in the state, behind Charleston.

Glenice Pearson sees a large part of the county’s story missing: its African American history.

“These sites are the ones that are most at risk at this time,” she said about Black history.

Pearson, who has been working in historic preservation in South Carolina for decades, announced the launch of a new organization designed to get the community involved with preserving its own history.

That untapped wealth is behind the name of the Rich Land Historic Preservation Consortium, which will focus on educating the public about  conservation and identifying historical Black sites for preservation. In a May 19 press conference launching the organization at Hyatt Park, some 30 consortium members and attendees spoke about the stories they thought were being overlooked.

“This go-between organization really was created to get more out of the people’s voices heard and aired, and then possibly get the people more involved in some of the work,” Pearson said.

Barry Elmore, the consortium’s president, has seen his family history fall to the wayside. His great grandfather George Elmore’s 1946 lawsuit won Black men the right to vote in South Carolina’s Democratic primary.

His civil rights activism opened the door for voting rights, but it cost his family their safety and livelihood. Racist attacks in the wake of the lawsuit forced Elmore’s family to move out of South Carolina and for him to lose his general store in Columbia’s Waverly neighborhood.

Barry would like to see his family history honored in the city. His great grandfather’s store was demolished in 2012, despite the city recognizing it with a historical marker.

“I just want to bring the legacy the light because he made a huge sacrifice,” Barry said. “It cost him his life.”

The consortium is collaborating with Black churches and cemeteries in Columbia that are more than 75 years old to get their history preserved.

Felicia Hopkins, a panelist at the press conference, is an organist at Chappelle Memorial AME Church, one of the oldest Black churches in Waverly.   

“I would like everybody to know how these churches educated our communities spiritually,” Hopkins said. “This is important for our community to know, how Richland County has a very rich, rich, rich history.”

Black history has been carving out space for itself in South Carolina. The University of South Carolina unveiled its first building named after a non-White person last month. The International African American History Museum in Charleston is scheduled to open its doors in June. 

Gaps still exist, causing important moments to fall through the cracks, Pearson said.

Ramon Jackson, a member of the consortium, recently joined the S.C. State Museum to coordinate its African American history programs. While working at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Jackson worked to get important sites on the national historic registry.

He witnessed a building that was part of the South Carolina Green Book, a guide for Black people to stay at safe locations during the Jim Crow Era, defaced of its historic markers by its owner and made ineligible for national funding or recognition.

“We need folks like you to speak out to tell folks how important these spaces are,” he said. “To police those who purchase these historic buildings and let them know the history of these spaces.”

Even when Black history is known, the public isn’t educated on it, Jackson said. The S.C. State Museum lacks African American artifacts and exhibits, but he aims to change that.

“We have not always been an institution that puts the story of African Americans in South Carolina front and center,” he said. “I’m here to tell you, as long as I am there, you have an ally, you have a voice.”

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