At age 99, Richard Mayhew still painting ‘Inner Terrains’


Posted on September 8, 2023 by Sonoma Valley Sun

“I paint more from the inside out,” says artist Richard Mayhew, who expresses “a sensitivity to nature while living the experience of the painting.” 

Mayhew, now 99, works with vibrant colors, including shades of red and burnt earth pigments that suggest, the artist has said, “blood in the soil.” His works are abstract, explosive, surreal. 

The invented landscapes, said a recent New York Times feature, are “in an increasingly unnatural, sometimes acid palette that can sting and soothe the eye in equal measure.”

The solo exhibition Richard Mayhew: Inner Terrain opens September 16 at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. 

In 1963, Mayhew had already embarked on a continuous search for an imaginative mindset when he joined Spiral, an influential group of Black artists in New York City.

Mayhew’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He has also been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

His teaching career includes stints at the Brooklyn Museum, Sonoma State University, and Pennsylvania State University, where he retired as professor emeritus in 1991.

As he approaches his centennial birthday, he remains an active painter developing an inventive mind and continuing to improvise his techniques. His works comprise a dedicated room at the San Francisco Museum of Art, and a Manhattan galley show just closed in June.

The Sonoma show is curated by Mayhew himself, along with Shelby Graham and the artist Kajahl. The three will speak at a special event on Sunday, September 24. 

“I met Richard Mayhew when I was beginning my artistic journey, and his mentorship and guidance were instrumental,” says Kajahl, who also lives in Santa Cruz. “He suggested that I study abroad and that I move to New York City, both of which opened up my artistic opportunities. Richard also challenged me to push the boundaries of traditional art forms, and to do so by exploring and trusting my creative inner sensibility.”

An Exhibition Reception will be held on Saturday September 23, 5-7pm.

The Sonoma Valley Museum of Art is located at 551 Broadway. Open Wednesday through Sunday, 11am-5pm. General admission is $10, free for SVMA members and 18 and under. Svma.org. Wednesday is always free.

Photo of Richard Mayhew by Shelby Graham



RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment

Why Artist Ja’Tovia Gary Came Back to Dallas

Image

It was a breezy evening in Paris the first time I met the filmmaker and multimedia artist Ja’Tovia Gary in May 2022. We were at galerie frank elbaz in the fashionable and historic Le Marais neighborhood. The gallery was holding an opening for “partus/chorus,” a three-woman exhibition she had curated that also featured Eniola Dawodu and Doreen Lynette Garner. 

Gary’s as you yield her your body and soul (extract) was the central work of the show: a hollow pyramid cocooned in plucked cotton (which she had sourced from a farm in North Carolina), inside of which were handwoven cushions for visitors. Inside, too, were dried wildflowers and more tufted cotton. Projected onto the outside was a video collage titled Mitochondrial Montage—flickering family photographs and video clips layered and intercut with hand-animations and archival footage—that made the white room glow pink and ruby. The gist was hard-hitting, but the effect was hypnotic. I felt like I had entered a trance. 

Even in the elegant chaos of an art opening, Gary was hard to miss, with her head strikingly shaved, wearing a blue-and-white toile dress and green Camper sandals with straps like fat snakes. I introduced myself and stammered something about our shared Dallas connection and wanting to write about her before she was whisked away to an after-show dinner for senior gallery staff and special guests at a bohemian-chic Thai spot nearby. “Reach out!” she called as we went our separate ways. 

Elbaz would later place Gary’s pyramid with the august Fondation Louis Vuitton. He would like to get another exhibition on the books. But she’s busy. She stays busy. 

In February, Gary mounted a solo show at the ultra blue-chip Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and completed work for her current solo exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, “I KNOW IT WAS THE BLOOD,” that opened in April and will run through November 5. Later this fall, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will display her most well-known installation, The Giverny Suite (2019), a piece acquired from a previous Paula Cooper show. 

And then there is the feature-length film she has labored over for almost 10 years. The dozens of hours of footage collected over more than a decade began, as she says, as “an exploration into my mother and our relationship.” But it eventually became a memoir of multigenerational trauma and a personal salve, a journey of revelation and (hopefully) repair. A film she moved back home to Dallas from Brooklyn in 2019 to—finally—complete. Yes, there is also that. 

In Paris, I got a brief glimpse of what Gary’s life is like; the opening was not the first time she’s been whisked away. To see the world in which she moves—intellectually and artistically—is to brush elbows with filmmaker Arthur Jafa and the sculptor Simone Leigh, who represented the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Leigh was behind Loophole of Retreat, a several-day gathering of Black female artists, writers, and academics on the little island of San Giorgio Maggiore last October during the Biennale. 

“It was kind of dreamy,” Gary says. “It felt surreal.” To convene in a garden drinking Aperol spritzes after a short boat ride “and then you see [the iconic Black feminist artist and writer] Lorraine O’Grady kind of move through the space, and it’s like, what’s going on?” And what’s going on when respected scholar and writer Saidiya Hartman is in the second row of a lecture space, a hero looking back at Gary as she speaks? These women had helped her lay the foundation for her work. She felt nourished by the collective, the intellectual sisterhood. 

But Gary has always been in artistic circles that fizzed. The first was at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts

Image

Gary transferred into Booker T. as a junior from Cedar Hill High School in 1999 in order to pursue theater. “She was as she is now,” says Vickie Washington, her acting for TV and film teacher. Meaning: a bright light. “She has a presence. We talk about that a lot with acting. She is an actress who can engage literally all the way to the back of the house.” Upon meeting her you notice that the timbre of her voice and the quality of her laugh are rich and layered and so complex you want to keep hearing them. 

“She’s fiercely intelligent,” Washington says. “She’s fiercely creative. Boldly creative. Bravely creative.” She remembers coaching Gary for the role of Cassandra in a monologue from Euripides’ The Trojan Women. The adjunct instructor taught a theatrical styles class, and Gary was adept at all of them—Greek, Elizabethan, Jacobian—but she excelled at the taut drama of Greek. Overall, she adhered to the notion of “valuing the craft, learning the craft, practicing the craft, sharing the craft” and had—and has—what Washington calls “a star quality.” 

Washington remembers her, too, as being part of a cohort that vibrated with a rising Black activism. “There’s a circle of them that graduated at the same time who had a deep and abiding love, respect, and faith in our history and our heritage as African-ancestried people and understanding of the tenets of Sankofa: go back and fetch it so that you can use it to move forward.” 

The DMA exhibition includes In my mother’s house there are many, many …, a 12-foot armillary sphere with rotating steel rings.

Harold Steward, a year ahead of Gary and a friend since they met in 2000, remembers her arrival. “The thing about her coming, it was kind of miraculous,” he says. The school projected only 10 new openings at each grade level after ninth, with perhaps only one or two spots for each concentration. A desegregation order further restricted the placements. Coming in a junior was almost impossible.

But once in, she quickly befriended a small band of students that would coalesce into an ensemble they called State of Emergency. Comprised of one other junior and three seniors, the collective would find each other in different parts of the school by hollering the group’s name (“I said, ‘State … of Emerrrrrrrgency!’”), which was a refrain from a poem they would perform together. It was, Steward says, “the way we called each other into being.”

Booker T. did not offer ensemble-based theatrical composition. “Nobody asked us to do this; we set our own parameters and found our own audiences,” Steward says of how State of Emergency organically “invented” devised theatre. Even with no manager booking gigs, they found themselves invited to perform at Paul Quinn College for the ambassador of Uganda over a weekend. 

They were writing from a place of urgency. “This was early 2000s, so Neo-soul was on the rise,” Steward says. “We were idolizing Erykah Badu and the aesthetics of the Black liberation movement, the Black arts movement, and Blackness and the birth of cool and ownership of self and one’s African self.”

Gary, he remembers, came in with a “level of clarity” about “her presence in this world as a Black woman. She seemed to be quite clear,” he says, about wanting to understand theater and also her movements within a broader society. At 15 and 16, she was already reading Ntozake Shange (the playwright and poet best known for 1975’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf) and encountering Black feminist subjectivity. 

“We were super militant young kids, learning about poetry, writing, literature, and how it could be used as a political breakthrough,” Gary tells me later. “We were cutting off our permed hair and wearing natural. [Badu] had this ‘pro’- rhetoric: this pro-Black, happy-to-be-Black accepting of yourself. So clinging to this heritage and aesthetic and way of being that felt firmly rooted in a Black acceptance, a Black love.” 

There were tensions elsewhere. Gary was negotiating a relationship with her mother, Jocelyn Dunn, that she characterizes as “tumultuous.” At times, the rapport between the two strong personalities resembled tinder and flint. 

If she could remember all those lines on stage, her mother pointed out, she could learn a Bible verse a day. When she was young, Gary and her brother attended Full Gospel Holy Temple, where the family had worshiped for several generations. “Ja’Tovia would come to school with Bible verses,” Steward says. 

Additionally, “My mom wanted us to go to a certain type of school,” Gary says, and so the family—she and her brother, mother, and stepfather—moved from Oak Cliff to a house in Cedar Hill in the ’90s. 

“It was a cute little three-bedroom moment,” Gary says, that sent her to school with White classmates, navigating dualities—“precarious terrain”—at home and school.

Perhaps for this and other reasons, theater came naturally. Performance, which she excelled at even in middle school, was a way to be fugitive and nimble. She had always been “a weird child” and creative, she tells me. She was always the one saying the thing that shouldn’t be said. But regardless, Washington says, “Her gift is kind of like rushing water: it’s going to find its way. She’s not going to be stopped.”

Image

Moving to New York for college, Gary initially wrestled with disillusionment. The unhappy period brought obstacles, both race-based and aesthetic. She was unused to being radically limited in the roles she landed in theatrical arts. In high school at Booker T., a colorblind, progressive casting regime reigned: “My husband was Asian, my child was White,” she says. “It was like a little dream, a utopian space, where we were all upheld and earned the part based on merit.”

This was obviously not so in New York, where both at Marymount Manhattan College and in auditions, she was shuffled into race-based slots. You’re in the real world now, babe, she thought. 

The move to filmmaking would ultimately be, in part, about reclaiming power, being the one behind the camera. In the meantime, the next several years flip by like a slideshow of Technicolor frames. Having decided to unenroll from Marymount, Gary traveled to the Caribbean and elsewhere, including South Africa, where a boyfriend was studying abroad; waited tables in SoHo while auditioning; and studied abroad herself in Accra, Ghana, after enrolling in a few classes at Borough of Manhattan Community College. 

Ultimately, she knew her ambitions would only be served by returning to school, and so she chose Brooklyn College. Instead of theater, here she pursued both documentary film production and Africana studies, an all-encompassing, interdisciplinary major that combined feminist theory, literature, history, political science, cultural production, and media. Now fitted with an even more acute critical lens, “I’m learning about representations of Blackness in the early 20th century and how these archetypes came to be and how they persist,” she says. At the same time, as she auditioned for voiceover and television parts on the side, leading the life of a working Black actress, “I’m being told to zhuzh it up a little bit, make it a little more urban, make it a little more hood. So, intense meta-moment.” 

Meanwhile, she landed postproduction and archival footage work for the filmmaker Shola Lynch, who was directing the extraordinarily dense, riveting feature documentary Free Angela and All Political Prisoners, and for Spike Lee, who was directing Bad 25, a documentary about the making of Michael Jackson’s Bad album that had Gary triaging footage of the megastar from his childhood to 1987. She spent time finding, organizing, identifying, and indexing archival footage, doing the “grunt work.” The Angela Davis documentary in particular was “a dream come true.” She delved into courtroom documents, audio and visual sources, and prison letters between Davis and George Jackson and other luminaries who were part of the Black Power period. “So it was a political education crash course as well as a film production module,” she says. “It was wild. Wild.” 

By the time Gary enrolled in an M.F.A. program in social documentary filmmaking at the famous School of Visual Arts in Chelsea, her skill set and knowledge base were formidable. But she remembers the school pushing her toward direct cinema, the observational, journalistic, fly-on-the-wall style of documentary. 

“They were like, ‘This is what’s in right now. We want you to have jobs,’ ” she says. “I couldn’t care less about a job. I had already worked for Spike Lee. I knew I wanted to be the Spike Lee. I wanted to be the Shola Lynch.” 

JaTovia Gary art

Like her films, Gary’s DMA exhibition pulls from the personal and political.
Courtesy DMA

If Gary was iconoclastic, she found a fellow outsider and rebel in directing professor Michel Negroponte. In his courses, she says she was “gravitating toward the nontraditional work.” 

He showed work by the great American documentary filmmakers of the ’60s but also the “weird stuff” within nonfiction. Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963), in which the translucent wings of moths glued to the filmstock filter light. Jay Rosenblatt’s Phantom Limb (2005), wherein he spliced his family’s Super 8 home movies together with archival footage in a poignant autobiography. 

Gary would also add to Negroponte’s syllabus her own roster that was non-male and non-White: Cauleen Smith, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Julie Dash, Kathleen Collins. Steve Cossman at the film nonprofit Mono No Aware in Brooklyn showed her Len Lye’s A Colour Box (1935), a three-minute riot of color shot on 35mm film that Lye had scratched, painted, and punched holes in. She found Paul Sharits’ “flicker” films of the 1960s, aggressive, avant-garde, rapid-cut sensory bombardments, with shots scarcely longer than two frames each. A lightbulb flashed in Gary’s head. 

She was learning film could be nonlinear, abstract, the kind of experimental storytelling that was closer to poetry. The filmmakers she was gravitating toward dismissed, sometimes brutally, the idea that one should shoot and roll film forward at 24 frames per second.  

Gary took all of this in—her experiences with Lynch and Lee and Negroponte and others; her own exploration and study; her own self—and emerged as a one-of-one. 

“Starting in the documentary world and ending up with Paula Cooper—that’s pretty special,” Negroponte says, chuckling. “I’ve taught in many programs, and, no, that’s not the world that most people end up in.” 

Image

When I visit Gary’s loft near downtown, she has been burning frankincense. “I do want to ask that you not photograph any of the altars,” she says after welcoming me, and her tone is clear but light. “I’m very woo-woo-woo.” Then: “You haven’t picked up on that?” She laughs. 

But, of course, I have. When we first spoke over Zoom last November, she paused at one point in our conversation and disappeared beneath the table, reemerging with something in her hand. “I dropped something I need to hold onto,” she said. It was a small black stone. 

I take in the altars in various parts of the loft. They’re dedicated to the West African orishas Yemonja and Elegba, the Yoruba warrior protector spirits, as well as Gary’s ancestors. Like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, she engages in ancestral veneration and spiritual work, she says, naming inspirations and compatriots. 

“My spiritual head is Yemonja,” she says. “She presides over the ocean, and it’s said she has as many children as fish in the sea. She is associated with fertility, fecundity, wealth, creativity. Think of the vastness of water. Think of the essential nature and necessity of water. That is Yemonja. All the things associated with the beauty of motherhood and the protection of children and women. This is Yemonja.”

She continues, “It requires labor,” referring to the indigenous spiritual practice. “It’s making space in your life. You need to honor them, making literal space, like altars. You include them in your life, and you’re in conversation with them. They guide you.” As a result, she feels secure, that she is not “putting ridiculousness out into the world.” But also, “That’s why I feel like what I’m doing is something they want me to do, is something they’re encouraging, is something they’re opening the road for, guiding.” (She had told me over Zoom, “It really does feel like I’m in here with a bunch of ghosts. Because I am, low-key.”)  

Leading me to her worktable, which faces the Trinity River, she points out the light pad she uses for direct animation onto 16mm film stock and guides me through her technique. She pulls out film strips with orange petals pressed onto the surface; cotton swabs and old toothbrushes she uses to spatter paint; India ink and X-Acto knives that turn transparent strips into constellations of dots or etch lines around figures or objects, frame by frame. 

“It allows the film to feel like it’s alive,” she says. 

Perhaps the best example of her style—and certainly the most well-known—is 2019’s The Giverny Document, which The New Yorker deemed “rhapsodic.” The Giverny Document is a 42-minute single-channel film collected from many sources: there is footage of Claude Monet’s orchard at Giverny, where Gary completed a residency, and shots of her interviewing Black female passers-by in Harlem, asking if they feel safe in their bodies, on the street, in the world. There is Nina Simone transforming Morris Albert’s “Feelings” at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 1976. And there are clips from the in situ video filmed by Diamond Reynolds of her boyfriend Philando Castile, killed by a Minneapolis police officer in 2016. Gary says the film, which has won numerous awards, is a comment on “bodily autonomy, Black women’s bodies as spaces of commodified production, the period of enlightenment and industrialization and colonialism all coming together.” 

This twining of strands she connects to Black expressions of religious and musical tradition. A conversation about her practice reveals the ways it overlaps with jazz, blues, gospel, hip-hop. “I come from a bunch of Black preachers on both sides, like Black Southern Pentecostals,” she says. “So music and storytelling permeate the entire experience.”

You can see how she interpolates and extrapolates—like a jazz singer riffing or a DJ flipping a sample—in An Ecstatic Experience, the six-minute film she premiered on the festival circuit in 2015. Jittery and profound, it’s based around a scene from a 1965 television show, interspersed with other footage. Hand-etched lines encircle the actor Ruby Dee’s face in a halo and morph with every frame, the lines seeming to crackle with electricity. No film theory is necessary: you are turned inside out, utterly undone. It’s a solemn testament to resistance and liberation.

An Ecstatic Experience was the first film of hers to garner notice by gallerists. Frank Elbaz had been seeking just such an artist for his gallery, bridging the worlds of art and cinema, and marveled at the way Gary manipulated film. She wasn’t an artist who made video work but a filmmaker who treated film, potently, as pictorial art. “She brings it back to drawing,” he says. 

In 2018, at Art Basel Miami, Elbaz showed An Ecstatic Experience to Steven Henry, director of Paula Cooper’s gallery in Chelsea, introducing her as an artist to watch. Even on a small monitor amid the melee, “It truly stood out in the cacophony of visual material,” Henry says. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is extraordinary.’ The way she approaches film as a kind of filmic collage felt very fresh. She’s always pushing.” 

Once back in New York, Henry urged Cooper herself to visit neighboring gallery David Zwirner, where An Ecstatic Experience was being shown as part of a group exhibition on James Baldwin, curated by the Pulitzer-winning writer and critic Hilton Als. The stars were aligning. 

As a result, in both 2019 and 2020, Gary had solo exhibitions with Elbaz and Cooper, where she showed The Giverny Document as The Giverny Suite, a three-channel installation to which, in a return to her theater-kid brio, she added a 19th-century French settee—and, in the Cooper show, altars in the corners. “I’m resisting categorization,” she says. “I’m attempting to put forward my own style, something that is new, a new language.” 

Versions of Suite have been acquired by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the National Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Block Museum at Northwestern University. (The three-channel installations with their accompanying sculptural elements, the settee and altars, can circulate in different ways from the films.) She is determined to continue to “occupy space in an installation context, because the work takes on new life,” she says. 

“Movement and touch and light come into play in ways that the film experience does not afford us.”

Image

The memoir, though, is different from all of this. The Evidence of Things Not Seen—a title she drew from Hebrews, but that has broad resonance—is long, and its crafting has been arduous. The film has had her delving into memory—her own and others’—and deep wounds, and she’s in it more than any of her other work. “Intense shit,” Gary says.

The project began as the short film Deconstructing Your Mother, created while she was an undergraduate in 2011. By 2014, she was awarded a Sundance grant (the first of many), which is when she says it really began. But by 2017, the layers of what she now realized was an autobiography had become so emotionally charged that she could scarcely bear to pull up the files on her hard drive and listen to what was being said by herself, her parents. 

What happened in between: she received Super 8 footage of family gatherings shot by her great aunt, who fetched the reels from her garage. She’d widened the scope, poked and elicited confessions and confrontations. In building her kaleidoscopic patchwork, with its far more subtle nuances of collaboration and authorship, point of view and ethics, her own footage from earlier years became archival material, incorporated. She had staged therapy sessions to record herself speaking of the patterns she was unveiling, the slippages of memory. 

Other details surfaced from her brother, her father, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, her teenage boyfriends. The film morphed on her, flipped the camera around: her disembodied voice became flesh and blood, discussing, as she says, “the blood that runs through [our] veins.” She dug up generational strata: power dynamics and “long lines of divorce or abuse or addiction and alcoholism.” It is “this very deep investigation and excavation of my most intimate relationships, my family history, and myself.”  

Gary got to a place two years ago where she decided, This is gonna take as long as it’s gonna take. “I was trying to rush and push through because I had won these grants and there was a lot of momentum,” she says. “And this is not that type of project. And once I realized that, things became more tenable for me.”

And so, late last year, even when the FOMO of being far from Brooklyn’s blur of openings tempted her, she stayed in Dallas. This piece, which she hopes will find broader distribution and be “in everybody’s living room,” this piece which will be her at her longest and most vulnerable had to unfold as life unfolds. That’s why she does Pilates four times a week and consciously takes care of her body. It’s why she takes breaks. Why she’s decided it’s OK to slow down. To take 10 years.

But now it is starting to peek out, at least a little. “I KNOW IT WAS THE BLOOD,” Gary’s current solo show at the DMA, offers the only teaser of the memoir feature there is. Screens show excerpts of interviews, the raw material for Evidence. One image, which opens the show, is of Gary’s mother pregnant with her brother Jamael. 

The commissioned work at the heart of the exhibition is a 12-foot armillary sphere with rotating steel rings, covered in cotton, which brushes the limit of what can be displayed in the museum’s spaces (outside the 45-foot-high barrel vault). The piece, titled In my mother’s house there are many, many …, is now in the DMA’s permanent collection. Accompanying the commission are works that relate to the feature film in their evocation of her family’s multigenerational story. A painting incorporates a phototransfer of her father or, in Mama’s Babies, of her, her mother and brother at the State Fair. The paintings’ frames are deconstructed and decked with neon. (This is the first time she has exhibited her painting in earnest, she says.) 

“It’s tested the ways we usually work,” says Katherine Brodbeck, Hoffman Family senior curator of contemporary art at the DMA. We sat over coffee a little more than one month before the exhibition opened. Just a week earlier, the DMA had to send the exhibition brochure to the printer missing details such as the exact duration of a film clip. But that’s precisely what’s exhilarating about working with a contemporary artist, when the work at the center is still in motion. When the artist at the center is still in motion.

To Gary, the DMA show and the memoir feature itself are just part of her many reinventions, her mercurial changes, which are happening in real time, expanding the work. And there are more to come. She would love to write a romantic screenplay, move into other markets, be “seen in everybody’s living room.”

For now, we are in hers.

“This is where I edit,” she tells me when she lets me enter a space I had missed when I first entered her studio loft. “Computer. All the hard drives. Digital material. Various notebooks. More woo-woo-woo.” She gestures around. “My great-grandmother looking on, Laura Anne,” she says, pointing to a photograph on the wall. “Like, ‘Girl, what you doin’? You better do it right.’ ”

In our conversation leading up to my visit, I had been nervous. Who was I to enter her private world?

But at her loft, I am treated to something of a personal installation experience. Together, we watch her latest film, Quiet As It’s Kept, which was the centerpiece of the show in February and March at Paula Cooper. It is what she calls her “contemporary cinematic response” to Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye

She sits on a stool; I sit at her desk. I am only missing the crowd in the gallery, missing only the shimmering silver corset she wore to the opening, her hair cropped and bleached a moon-like white. About 15 minutes before, she had been showing me vintage 16mm commercial reels she buys on eBay, at estate sales, or in libraries. Like an haute couture seamstress misthreading a sewing machine she hasn’t used in a while, she shredded the strip’s leader on her vintage Eiki projector. In the ’70s commercial for Reveal see-through roasting wrap, a Black housewife smiles. She awaits Gary’s animations. 

Now this. Neon blue. Orange marigolds. Archival footage of Shirley Temple. Toni Morrison and Lukumi priest and scholar Dr. Kokahvah Zauditu-Selassie (whom she calls Mama Koko) as talking heads. A wash of animations dense with symbolism, the blue eye of Morrison’s novel like a protective amulet. 

After the first two minutes, I wanted to lie down and simply think. To make film in this way is an act of devotion.     


This story originally appeared in the September issue of D Magazine with the headline, “The Prodigal Daughter.” Write to [email protected].

Author

Eve Hill-Agnus

Eve Hill-Agnus


View Profile


Eve Hill-Agnus was D Magazine’s dining critic from 2014-2021. She has roots in France and California and during her time at D wrote…

RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment

How Mickalene Thomas, Bernard Lumpkin, and Carmine Boccuzzi Are Changing Art School for the Better

lumpkin-bernard-mickalene-thomas-carmine-boccuzzi
Bernard Lumpkin, Mickalene Thomas, and Carmine Boccuzzi at the couple’s home, with a piece from Thomas’s MFA thesis, Mary J. Me, 2002, on the wall.

Art school is a rite of passage for many promising talents, but the experience can often feel more like a dry run of the competitive art-world gauntlet than a safe haven for self-discovery and creative evolution. This year, three Yale alumni—attorney Carmine Boccuzzi, arts patron Bernard Lumpkin, and artist Mickalene Thomas—have committed to fostering the latter experience at their alma mater.

Boccuzzi and Lumpkin first encountered Thomas as collectors of her work, which was later featured in the traveling exhibition “Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art.” It wasn’t long before the trio recognized their shared dedication to nurturing the careers of emerging artists—especially those who are often overlooked by prevailing art world institutions.

This July, Boccuzzi, Lumpkin, and Thomas established the Mickalene Thomas Scholarship at the Yale School of Art. The monetary award, a culmination of their shared vision, also offers one student per year the opportunity to benefit from Thomas’s guidance and mentorship.

The announcement of the artist’s eponymous scholarship is tied to this month’s opening of “Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space,” an exhibition co-curated by Thomas at the university’s art gallery. The show, which runs through the end of the year, juxtaposes pre-emancipation-era portraits of Black Americans with works by contemporary artists. To mark the occasion, the trio reunited for a conversation about building a legacy that honors the past as much as the future.

Bernard Lumpkin: Mickalene, you and I are part of an amazing community of artists, curators, educators, writers, patrons, and collectors who champion artists of African descent. We share a mission to elevate these voices in the contemporary art world, each using our own platforms and strengths. You have used your success to provide opportunities for others, which resonates with me as a patron and collector. I aim to use the visibility I have—through my support of institutions like the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Yale School of Art—to inspire others to extend their support beyond merely acquiring work.

mickalene-thomas-artist

Carmine Boccuzzi: Bernard has shown me what can happen when you act as an art patron, support younger artists, and learn about how the world of today is tied into past historical moments and people. It’s enriching to be around people who care about art and art history, like when we went to see Mickalene speak at MoMA about the Matisse painting The Red Studio [1911]. You have both helped me think about building community and being in dialogue with other collectors.

Mickalene Thomas: It begins with like-minded people wanting to address a void. As Toni Morrison says, if you don’t have that place, create it yourself. Making space is vital to my practice, because creating art simply isn’t enough. I want to see others in my community grow, too. I never felt comfortable being the only one at the table. I want dialogue with peers—like Derrick Adams, Wangechi Mutu, Kehinde Wiley, and Clifford Owens—who also navigate these spaces and support one another. When I reached a point of influencing institutions, I realized I could use my platform to educate artists about community. No one wants to stand alone.

This instinct to make space is something we share. I first encountered you both through the Studio Museum in Harlem, and I was inspired by your efforts. Your support was never ostentatious—it was stealthy and genuine. You were always welcoming a diverse range of artists to your homes and championing our work, regardless of our career stage.

Lumpkin: For you, art is not just a practice—it’s a way of advocating for change. You’ve engaged institutions like Yale to accomplish your wider vision of what an artist can do: this idea of the artist as citizen, advocate, activist. You’ve set an amazing example for a new generation of artists.

When Yale approached us, we were already supporting the School of Art program through scholarships and service on its task force. I had advised Yale on another project that Mickalene did there, a mural in one of the new residential colleges in honor of Pauli Murray.

Boccuzzi: The mural that Mickalene did at Pauli Murray College was so meaningful to me, because Bernard and I met as students at Yale. Murray got her higher law degree at Yale Law School, and I went to Yale Law School, too. Seeing what Mickalene did, which is so gorgeous and stunning, was a revelatory moment.

lumpkin-bernard-mickalene-thomas-carmine-boccuzzi

Thomas: It’s interesting how life comes full circle. I had discovered Pauli Murray prior to being invited to create this mural, because I was researching African American women activists who were dealing with gender equality. She seemed like this nonbinary force, an activist and scholar who worked through the Civil Rights Movement. The fact that she became the first African American person to have a college in her name at an Ivy League school seemed like a great opportunity to celebrate her. She was a shapeshifter far ahead of her time—she was even an Episcopal priest. I consider her a distant mentor, influencing how I envision my own legacy.

Lumpkin: That’s also reflected in the exhibition you’re curating at the Yale University Art Gallery this fall: “Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space.” Yale knew of our special relationship with you. The opportunity to join forces and support emerging artists, the university’s art program, and the mission of elevating artists of African descent felt unmissable to us. I hope it sets an example for other patrons and collectors to impact future generations of artists by supporting their education.

Thomas: There are many things I imagined accomplishing in my life, but a scholarship was not on my list. When I received the phone call, I was speechless. It’s beyond the idea of a legacy. It validates my thoughts, actions, and beliefs. I know the struggles I had in school, so I hope other patrons follow your lead, because students need space to create without stress and compromise.

The scholarship is a concentrated engagement with one student over their tenure at Yale. I’ve extended my mentor services to the recipient while they’re in school, and after school through my platform Pratt>FORWARD [a program at the Pratt School of Art]. The scholarship recipient will always have a home in me, and can rely on my team as advocates. Artists often find themselves in conflict because they lack this type of support to guide them.

mickalene-thomas-artist

Lumpkin: What did mentorship look like for you as a young artist?

Thomas: My mentor was Rahimah Lateef. She was a collector, friend, and supporter who introduced me to Carrie Mae Weems’s work. This became instrumental and transformative in my practice. Rahimah was also my first patron. When she needed to sell some work, she gave it to my gallery, Lehmann Maupin. Bernard and Carmine
ended up with this painting, Mary J. Me [2002], showing the serendipitous connections in my life.

Lumpkin: We’re in a moment with increased visibility for Black artists—there’s more support and infrastructure. Yet we’re aware that we’re building for the next generation without knowing whether the world will be as receptive. Regardless, we will always be creating space and opportunities. While I often lead the conversation, Carmine’s partnership is integral. The best things happen with teamwork, and Carmine, your support and advocacy is invaluable.

Thomas: You both have carved out space in monumental ways that enable artists like me to continue to achieve what we set out to do. Octavia Butler’s words come to mind: “All that you touch / You Change. / All that you Change / Changes you. / The only lasting truth / Is Change.” I know that the person who receives this scholarship will be incredible. They’ll take this opportunity and run with it, knowing they have a support system behind them. Meanwhile, Kymberly Pinder [dean of the Yale School of Art] is working towards making the MFA program free for all students. This will offer an unparalleled chance for students to focus on creativity, and the theoretical and conceptual process of becoming an artist.

Lumpkin: That’s absolutely true. Being at the Yale School of Art presents unique challenges and pressures from the commercial side of the art world. The goal of the scholarship—and the support provided by the Yale School of Art task force—is to extend the security and community of the school, allowing artists to continue creating work without the immediate pressures of the commercial art world. Mickalene understands these dynamics and can help students navigate the transition while preserving their artistic purpose. It’s crucial that this mentorship comes from someone who has experienced both the academic world and the demands of the professional art world.

RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment

YouTube Celebrates 50 Years of Hip Hop with Alesha Dixon, Ms Dynamite, Aitch, Mabel, MNEK & more

Last night, YouTube honoured the 50th anniversary of hip hop with their annual Legacy Party, held at London’s prestigious Royal Opera House.

The event was attended by a who’s who of British music royalty, including Aitch, Mabel, MNEK, Alesha Dixon, Ms Dynamite, Mahalia, Ray BLK, Ivorian Doll, Elz The Witch, Ms Banks, MIST.

Hosted by YouTube’s Global Head of Music Lyor Cohen, Tuma Basa (Director of Black Music & Culture) and Sheniece Charway (Artist Partnerships Manager, Black Music & Culture), the event served to highlight the vital work that YouTube has been doing to support hip hop, rap and other forms of British Black music and culture since its inception.

Throughout the evening, guests enjoyed cocktails provided by CÎROC VODKA & Don Julio 1942 Tequila.

Ms Dynamite gave an exclusive performance alongside DJ Semtex, Donch, Rachael Anson, Sola Sounds and Juls who took to the decks.

Receiving the inaugural Legacy Award was GRM Daily Founder and CEO Koby ‘Posty’ Hagan for his outstanding contributions to British Black music.

The event also marked the launch of #UnionBlack, a celebration of the undeniable impact and influence of Black British music and culture in the UK and beyond. Guests at The Legacy Party were treated to a special exhibition of rare footage, videos and photographs which told the stories of the Black pioneers, communities and moments that have contributed to shaping the fabric of British music and culture.

Established in 2020 and spearheaded by Sheniece Charway in the UK, The Legacy Series is a year-long calendar of events that celebrates Black culture and raises awareness around issues faced by Black artists through music and art.

The series has encompassed: Fashion x Music, a pop-up space at Westfield which sold clothes by UK Black-owned fashion brands, and a fashion show in which Black artists such as Tiana Major9 and Ms Banks were styled by Black designers; regular panels to discuss salient issues impacting Black execs and artists within the music industry, and dinners bringing together execs and artists from underrepresented genres in Black Music.

This year, Legacy and YouTube Music also hosted their first R&B night to show their support for the genre – bringing the likes of JayO, Jvck James & Tiana Major9 with Uche and DJ Ace performing to over 600 fans and industry professionals.

RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment

Sam Cooke’s musical spirit lives on in Bradd Marquis tribute show

em { display: contents !important; } label em { display: none !important; } .photo { width: 100%; max-width: 50rem } a.fr-file { color: #0274b7 !important; }

Bradd Marquis bears more than a resemblance to the late Sam Cooke.

Before he walked on to the Baum Walker stage at the Walton Arts Center last night, a video introduced the audience to Mr. Marquis, a soul singer who first heard Cooke’s golden voice through his grandparents.

Cooke and the late great Ray Charles are responsible for creating soul music, Marquis told the crowd through the video before he burst out on stage dancing and singing Cooke’s “Twisting the Night Away,” with his six-piece band and three singers who make up his backing band, The Magnificents.

While Marquis got the audience bobbing their heads and clapping their hands, last night’s crowd was pretty mellow, but that didn’t deter him from dancing or directing the audience to sing along. By the end of the night, the crowd warmed up, answering “all the time,” to his prompt: “All love.”

Last night’s concert was a celebration of Cooke’s music and life. The soul singer died under mysterious circumstances at 33 years old but left a considerable legacy in that short time. Starting with his career in gospel music, Cooke was born in Clarksdale, Miss., in 1931, Marquis told the audience. Since his father was unable to find work in the South, the family migrated to Chicago when Cooke was 3.

“At age 9, Sam knew he wasn’t going to work for anyone,” Marquis narrated before relating that Cooke found his way into a popular gospel group, the Soul Stirrers, in the early 1950s. Then Marquis and the band took the room to church with a rendition of the group’s “Touch the Hem of His Garment.”

Marquis then described Cooke’s transition from gospel to secular music, explaining that for his first two singles, Cooke recorded under his brother’s name, Dale Cooke, because he wasn’t sure that he’d be successful. At that time, Marquis explained, there was no crossing over genres. If you left gospel for secular, there was no going back.

He added the B-side to Cooke’s second single, which was the turning point in the singer’s career. “You Send Me” launched Sam Cooke into the spotlight. The tune is now considered one of the most important rock ‘n’ roll recordings of all time, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Other famous musicians have recorded the song too, including Aretha Franklin, whom Cooke knew from his days with the Soul Stirrers.

During the performance of “You Send Me” last night, the backup singers picked up verses from “Saving All My Love For You,” which is a Whitney Houston song, before transitioning back to “You Send Me.” From there they covered more of Cooke’s greatest hits, and Marquis called on the crowd to participate in a call and response a few times.

While it was faint, many audience members participated in singing “I love you, I love you, I love you,” while the other side delivered a single, sustained “I love you.” Hearing the crowd sing together was a lovely little treat during the tribute show.

As stated before, the crowd was mellow last night. Many of those gray-haired music lovers who were swaying in their chairs and bobbing their heads probably remember when some of those songs hit the radio as well as the footage from civil rights protests in the 1960s.

Marquis related that Cooke was one of the first Black artists to refuse to play the “Chitlin’ Circuit” in the South. Cooke was tired of not being able to “stay in the towns, drink from the water fountains,” he explained.

Later Cooke was one of the first Black performers on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Racists called in bomb threats when Cooke announced that he would play “American Bandstand.”

Marquis performed Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind,” explaining beforehand that Cooke considered it a civil rights song. Marquis and the band closed the evening with “A Change Is Gonna,” with Marquis pointing out that the change that Cooke sang about has come and is still growing.

RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment

‘Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero’ taking over TIFF

Listen to this article

‘Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero’ taking over TIFF

The Toronto International Film Festival is about to get an in-depth look at the world of Montero Hill, aka Lil Nas X, with the Grammy Award-winning rapper, singer and songwriter’s documentary, “Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero.” Shot over the course of his first tour, the cameras follow him in a diaristic portrait as he navigates the business, the music, the fans, his family, and his place in the history of queer Black artists. Directed by Carlos López Estrada (“Blindspotting,” “Raya and the Last Dragon”) and Zac Manuel (the Sundance Film Festival Jury Award Winner – Best Non-Fiction Film: “Time, Alone”). Since scoring the longest-running No. 1 single in Billboard Hot 100 history in 2019 with “Old Town Road,” Lil Nas X has come out as queer and lived it all out loud despite opposition from anti-LGBTQ forces in the culture and within the music industry. And with scores of other pop artists working the documentary angle during the course of their career trajectories, this film is going to be a welcome addition to the canon of queer artists telling their own stories in their own way. We’re not sure where this film will land after the festival — theaters or streaming or both — but keep your eyes and ears open.

Ariana DeBose has a lot going on

Welcome to your Ariana DeBose career achievement checklist. The Academy Award-winning queer powerhouse has, let’s say, some (OK, a lot of) projects in the pipeline. Last year we reported that she’d be taking on an unspecified role in the upcoming Marvel film, “Kraven the Hunter,” but now we know that she’s playing the priest Calypso, opposite Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven, and that the film is slated for a late summer 2024 theatrical bow. She’s also still involved in the Blumhouse horror “House of Spoils,” opposite queer former “Euphoria” star Barbie Ferreira (but still no drop date for that one). And while you’re waiting, she’ll voice the lead role of Princess Asha in the coming-soon Disney animated feature “Wish;” she co-stars in the Chris Pine-directed “Chinatown”-esque water heist mystery-comedy “Poolman” that’s about to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival; she’s in the sci-fi thriller “I.S.S.” from filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite, which just got picked up for distribution by the indie Bleeker Street; and finally she’s been cast opposite both Henry Cavill and Dua Lipa in the Matthew Vaughn-directed spy action thriller “Argylle.” Like we said, she’s busy.

‘Saltburn’ is promising a little class warfare

Emerald Fennell, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter and director of the incendiary drama “Promising Young Woman,” is back to turn your Thanksgiving upside down with “Saltburn.” It’s her second feature – where she’s once again handling writing and directing – and it’s the second time working with producer Margot Robbie (third if you count Fennell’s onscreen cameo as pregnant Midge in “Barbie”) on a mystery set at a very rich, very British “Downton Abbey”-style country home. Starring Academy Award-nominated Irish actor Barry Keoghan (heartbreaking in “The Banshees of Inisherin”) and “Euphoria” star Jacob Elordi (soon to be seen as Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s film “Priscilla”), the story involves Keoghan’s character becoming infatuated with Elordi, a charming young aristocrat, and subsequently winding up at his family’s immense estate, Saltburn. Co-starring Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant and Carey Mulligan, we’re told it’s about desire and intrigue and the inscrutable behavior of the extremely wealthy. Taking its bow in October at the British Film Institute Film Festival, it opens Nov. 24 in the U.S., just in time to see it with your own dysfunctional family.

Luke Macfarlane is going to kiss a man on The Hallmark Channel

Luke Macfarlane occupies a unique space in the entertainment world, one where his work in comedy projects like the Seth Rogen/Rose Byrne sitcom “Platonic” and the film “Bros” overlaps with his status as a go-to leading man in the world of Hallmark Channel romantic dramas for heterosexuals. And now the gay actor will get to take his “Bros” queer career cred and finally play a gay character in the Hallmark world. In “Notes of Autumn,” Macfarlane stars as the love interest of gay actor Peter Porte, himself a Hallmark regular who usually plays heterosexual. There are some straight people in the mix, too, of course, with Ashley Williams and Marcus Rosner (also members of the… should we call it the HCU at this point?) as the not-gay characters. It is also a 100% certainty that everyone will kiss their respective meant-to-be person at the end because there may now be LGBTQ+ representation on this greeting card planet but there is never going to be an unhappy ending. It all gets cozy and smoochy on Sept.16.

Romeo San Vicente cares enough to send a meaningful text.

Photo by KathClick

RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment

Long-awaited PVDFest returns to the city this weekend

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WLNE) — The long-awaited PVDFest returns to the city this weekend.

The free outdoor arts festival will look different this year with a new date and location, but the city of Providence is aiming to capture the local highlights with traditions like WaterFire.

“This is going to be a great opportunity for families, friends, and people from all over the region and across the country to come and take part to enjoy our arts here in city of Providence,” Mayor Brett Smiley said at a press conference on Thursday.

Providence Mayor Brett Smiley holds a press conference ahead of PVDFest weekend, Thursday, Sept. 7, 2023. (WLNE)

PVDFest will start at 5 p.m Friday.

People can expect tons of food and entertainment.

This year’s festival will have over 30 food vendors and over 200 artisan vendors. Over 500 artists are expected to perform across five stages.

A full WaterFire lighting is set for 7:05 p.m. Saturday.

There will be a new sculpture unveiling on Sunday afternoon in honor of Edward Mitchell Bannister, a well-known Black artist and Providence Art Club founding member.

RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment

Fall arts 2023: Biennials, festivals and group shows feature some of the region’s best artists

A veritable glut of art overtakes Portland and the surrounding area this fall. Overlapping biennials, intersecting festivals, and group shows feature some of the best artists practicing in the region, not to mention national and international artists who’ve been brought in to show alongside them. It’s a time to show some hometown pride. Here are 10 shows to start the party.

A photo shows a building at a concentration camp.

Yishai Jusidman’s painting “Dachau” (2014) is included in a show of his work at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education as part of Converge 45.Courtesy of Converge 45

“Social Forms: Art as Global Citizenship”

An extended opening weekend of the city-wide art festival produced by Converge 45 swooned over Portland for four days at the end of August. Many of the truly exceptional shows and associated events programmed for and around the festival continue through the fall. With very few exceptions, admission is free for all sites. As in previous years, a map created for the initiative provides a handy go-to guide of a good swath of the city’s art venues and organizations that will have a shelf life beyond the end of the festival.

Multiple locations with various closing dates, converge45.org.

An abstract lithograph.

“Guided by Our Stars (We Were Never Lost)” (2021), a lithograph created by Lehuauakea during their residency at Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts.Collection of the Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, CSP 21-114

Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts Biennial

Each year, this arts organization invites between three to six artists – many of whom don’t count printmaking as their primary medium – to collaborate with a master printer at their facility, which sits 10 miles outside of Pendleton on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Since 2006, the Hallie Ford Museum of Art has hosted a biennial to showcase work produced during these two-week residencies. This year’s show of just over 20 prints by a selection of artists who came through the program from 2020 to 2022 was organized by Rebecca Dobkins, the museum’s curator of Indigenous art. She includes haunting work by Emily Arthur; vivid prints by John Hitchcock; prints by Lehuauakea that recollect their Native Hawai’ian heritage; work by collage artist Cory Peeke of La Grande; sharp work that comments on consumerism and colonialism by Fox Spears; and work by Portland based artists Jeremy Okai Davis, Ralph Pugay, and Wendy Red Star.

Through Dec. 2, Hallie Ford Museum of Art, 700 State St., Salem, Oregon; willamette.edu/arts/hfma or 503-370-6855.

A modern painting.

Heather Lee Birdsong’s “A Doubtful Dream” (2021), gouache on hot pressed paper.Courtesy of Heather Lee Birdsong

Heather Lee Birdsong: “Imaginary Shelter”

The sharp angles, stylized curlicues and dusky jewel tones of artist Eyvind Earle’s drawings made 1959′s “Sleeping Beauty” my favorite Disney movie growing up. It was also a favorite of Heather Lee Birdsong. Her solo show of paintings and intaglio prints are from an ongoing series that evokes the same dreamy ambiguity. Planting architectural shapes and structures into landscapes, the work creates windows onto the natural world – sometimes the desert Southwest, where Birdsong was raised, sometimes the tangled nature of the Pacific Northwest where she has lived since 2005.

Through Oct. 1, Carnation Contemporary, 8731 N. Interstate Ave., No. 3; carnationcontemporary.com.

A photo of a hand clutching a padlock on an old wooden door.

Photographer Shedrich Williames’ “Untitled” (1972), gelatin silver print.Courtesy of Portland Art Museum

“Black Artists of Oregon”

We are lucky to have a practitioner of Intisar Abioto’s generosity working in Oregon. A 2018 Oregon Humanities fellowship started her research into the history of artists of African descent in Oregon. The inquiry has proved fruitful, begetting exhibitions and performances – Abioto has a background in dance – across the state in 2019. “Black Artists of Oregon,” an ambitious exhibition that has been years in the making, includes the work of nearly 70 artists and spans more than a century. Both a revindication and a celebration, the show draws attention to artists who lived and worked unremarked in the state, those who achieved prominence, and a vibrant cadre of contemporary practitioners who are making their mark now.

Sept. 9-March 17, 2024 (closure for construction Nov. 26-Jan. 17, 2024), Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave.; portlandartmuseum.org or 503-226-2811.

A mixed-media sculpture.

Detail of “Microscope,” a work by mixed-media artist Thea Kinner.Courtesy Alliance of Oregon College of Art & Craft Alumni

“The Close Read: OCAC Alumni 2023 Biennial”

While the Oregon College of Art & Craft (OCAC) closed in 2019, its impact continues to reverberate in the Portland art world through its alumni, faculty and an extended community of practicing artists and others involved in local arts organizations. Alumna Jennifer Viviano, the managing director of X Gallery Art & Storage, provides the venue for the second biennial showcasing work of both alumni and those closely affiliated with the school. Curated by Sam Hopple, who adroitly managed OCAC’s galleries from 2016-2019, the group show will feature the work of nearly 30 artists whose associations with the beloved institution span 25 years.

Oct. 7-29, X Gallery & Art Storage, 815 S.E. Grant St.; xgalleryart.com or 971-200-1984.

A photo of a model wearing a large dress

“Claire De Lune 2023 Editorial,” by Yun Qu of Videmus Omnia.Photo by Bochun Cheng

“CLOTH, Construct, CULTURE: fashion builds a story”

Over the month of October, the city revels in its deeply ingrained craft heritage for Portland TextileX Month, an annual citywide festival started four years ago to celebrate all things textile. Parallax Art Center approached fashion industry analyst and curator Rhonda P. Hill to develop an exhibition about fashion for this year’s festival. The gallery has a mission to raise social and environmental awareness. So, too, Hill and the 10 contemporary designers she chose to showcase. The 50 ensembles selected for the show address current global issues through their concepts, design and construction. Featured designers include Kyle Denman LA, Isabella Diorio, Korina Emmerich (Puyallup), Karen Glass, Alena Kalana, Ruree Lee, Maital Levitan, Maryanne E. Mokoko, Abiola Onabulé, and Yun Qu. Some focus on zero waste and sustainable couture, others recall their cultural heritage in the beautifully crafted, handmade pieces.

Oct. 24, 2023-Jan. 24, 2024, Parallax Art Center, 516 N.W. 14th Ave.; parallaxartcenter.org or 503-286-4959.

An abstract collage.

“Family Album #13” (2023), a collage by Joe Feddersen.Courtesy of Adams and Ollman

Joe Feddersen

The graphic qualities of Joe Feddersen’s early printmaking work inform his later work, such as his contemporary take on the traditional sally bags used by the tribes of the Columbia Plateau. He also works in ceramic, collage and glass, using the mediums to realize a visual vocabulary that’s a mashup of historical and contemporary symbols and references. His solo show at Adams and Ollman will include new small-scale collages and a new, large-scale glass charm piece, an installation of cascading bands of individual glass fish traps, bikes, trucks, stick figures, canoes, peace signs, airplanes, wayfinding arrows, transmission towers, animals and reptiles. The shadows cast by the abbreviated, linear shapes seem to write another layer of petroglyphs on the wall behind.

Oct. 27-Nov. 25, Adams and Ollman, 418 N.W. Eighth Ave., adamsandollman.com or 503-724-0684.

A lithograph showing strands of hair.

Lisa Jarrett’s lithograph, “Untitled” (2022) created during her residency at Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts.Courtesy of Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts

Lisa Jarrett: “It cut a sky”

Lisa Jarrett will be represented in multiple shows across Portland this fall, including “Black Artists of Oregon” at the Portland Art Museum and “Assembly,” the multi-venue group show convened for Converge 45. She gets a solo turn at Russo Lee Gallery in November. Among the new work she’ll show are pieces created during her three artist’s residencies over the past year: At Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts in Pendleton, she worked with a master printer to translate her vision – and her medium, which is generally her own hair or synthetic hair — into three groups of lithographs. At the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, she returned to an ongoing series, “Migration Studies,” to make large-scale, colorful “portraits” composed of objects sourced from beauty supply stores. At the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology on the Oregon coast, she commandeered a photocopier to scale her New Orleans work for collages that she likens to the quilts of the Underground Railroad, said to contain signs and symbols, encoded messages that guided people to safety.

Nov. 2-Dec. 2, Russo Lee Gallery, 805 N.W. 21st Ave.; russoleegallery.com or 503-226-2754.

A modern painting

Jenine Marsh’s mixed media piece “Wish Fulfillment (blue)” (2023) will be included in the winter group show at ILY2.Courtesy of ILY2

“I am a city of bones”

Launched in 2020, ILY2 (“I love you, too” abbreviated) became one of the newer galleries in the Pearl when it took over the former PDX Contemporary Art space on the Park Blocks this past spring. Updates to the space make it a cool kids’ hangout. Founder Allie Furlotti brings something of a rockstar vibe to the endeavor, which is anchored by the serious art world credentials of veteran gallerist and art advisor Jeanine Jablonski. The gallery wraps its first year in its new location with a group show that meditates on the idea of the body. The intriguing mix of local, national and international artists, who work in a range of media, includes Dylan Beckman, Mona Kowalska, Martin Soto Clement, Timothy Yanick Hunter, Jenine Marsh, and Portland-based artists Corinne Hamilton and Pace Taylor,

Nov. 12-Jan. 13, 2024, ILY2, 925 Flanders St.; ily2online.com.

A large image of a bed in an ornately painted room.

A 20-foot image mounted on the largest wall at One Grand Gallery will be framed by lights as part of an installation by Leslie Vigeant.Courtesy of One Grand Gallery

Leslie Vigeant: “Cloud X”

The walls of this gallery on a busy corner of East Burnside are often enlivened by unexpected work that runs the gamut of mediums. Curator Luiza Lukova programs the space, which she likened to a blank canvas. Artists are invited to transform it; they aren’t dissuaded from using the floor, walls, ceiling, “wherever.” Portland based artist Leslie Vigeant’s work should jell nicely with this setup. Her interrogative installations use collage, painting and light to create off kilter realities laced with social commentary. Her more recent exploration of textiles has resulted in tufted rugs that incorporate provocative words and phrases. Her solo show at the gallery, a site-specific installation, will commingle many of these elements, including a collage enlarged to be a 20-foot printed panel — for the gallery’s largest wall — framed in by lights.

Nov. 17, 2023-Jan. 2, 2024, One Grand Gallery, 1000 E. Burnside St.; ogpdx.com, @onegrandgallery.

Briana Miller, for The Oregonian/OregonLive

RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment

Naomi Campbell will pass down designer wardrobe to daughter

Naomi Campbell plans to pass down her designer wardrobe to her daughter.

Naomi Campbell at the PrettyLittleThing x Naomi Campbell launch in New York

Naomi Campbell at the PrettyLittleThing x Naomi Campbell launch in New York

The 53-year-old supermodel welcomed a girl, whose name she has not revealed, in May 2021, and her family was increased in June 2023 with the arrival of a baby boy, whose moniker she has also kept secret so far.

In her nearly 40-year career in the fashion industry Naomi has acquired countless designer gowns, dresses, handbags, shoes, jewellery, accessories and more and once her daughter is old enough she will inherit the one-of-a-kind wardrobe.

Speaking to POPSUGAR, Naomi said: “She’ll have a lot.”

She then cryptically added: “You’ll understand more come mid-October.”

Naomi has just teamed up with PrettyLittleThing to launch a 70-piece collection which she designed in collaboration with Edvin Thompson of Theophilio and Victor Anate of Vicnate which she launched at New York City’s famed Cipriani 25 Broadway this past week.

The catwalk queen deliberating chose to work with Victor and Edvin because she wanted to support to fellow black artists in the fashion industry.

She explained: “For me, it’s where I’m at in my life, sharing my platform with those who are so talented who don’t get the chance in getting the opportunities and having the light shine on them.

“The world is looking at our culture. The world has taken from our culture long enough. We need now to own all these things that have been taken from us.”

RankTribe™ Black Business Directory News – Arts & Entertainment