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Star for Noon

Green Tea

Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic @ The Brooklyn Museum

Painting is about the world we live in.  Black people live in the world.  My choice is to include them. This is my way of saying yes to us. - Kehinde Wiley

Go see Kehinde Wiley's work at The Brooklyn Museum before May 24th.

Return of the Prodigal 6th Grader

Children will frustrate and insult you one moment, and then surprise and delight you the next.  The very student who worked herself up into a frenzy a few days ago over the dearth of white people in the 6th grade curriculum, created this amazing Romare Bearden inspired collage as the visual aid for her Black History Month Project. One of her peers tried to initiate a bidding war with me over it because he was that confident that she was going to be a rich and famous artist one day.  I agree!

by Eva S.

When I explained that Bearden was black because of the 'one drop rule' one of the 6th graders said "But, Ms. Cardwell, where's his drop?"

Return on the Prodigal Son, by Romare Beardan

Eye Candy: Jet Beauties of the Week

If you are a black person who grew up in America in the 70's and 80's, chances are that  JET and Ebony magazines were part of your childhood.  I remember visiting my grandparent's house in Maryland where I would sit in the sunny front room reading issue after issue of JET.  They had a chair that was upholstered in red and gold fabric, and it swiveled when you sat in it.  There were issues of JET on the glass coffee table, and I can recall spending hours reading while my brother played outside. These are some of my most vivid childhood memories.

  Something is different about Kenya Moore . . . Photo: Jet Archives

My favorite section of the magazine was "The Week's Best Photos," which featured photos of black celebrities and politicians.  I can remember being tickled when JET published pictures of stars in interracial relationships with the caption"so-and-so and his white wife," like we couldn't see that from the pictures! The advertisements for Ambi Fade Cream, Carefree Curl, booze, and Newport cigarettes showed black people coupled up and being fabulous. (Obviously, at this point in my childhood I had no understanding of the concept of irony. )

Where is this scotch when I need it? Photo: Pinterest

This year when Jet abruptly stopped publishing a print edition (in the middle of my father's subscription) I felt a bit sad, like another piece of my childhood was taken away.  I was excited to visit Speaking of People: Ebony, JET, and Contemportary Art at The Studio Museum in Harlem and share this part of my history with Chloe. The exhibit is a collection of works by more than a dozen artists who were inspired by these two black-owned publications.

Jeremy Okai Davis, Makes the Man

In the midst of all of the negative images of black women in popular culture it was thrilling to walk into a room wall papered with JET Beauties of the Week.  It was interesting to to look at the range of skin color, hairstyles, and body types of the women chosen to appear in the magazine.  Although, the Beauties of the Week all posed in swimsuits, it was refreshing to female bodies without digital or surgical "enhancement".

The women were all relatively thin,  but they were shaply in a way that was not grotesque. I can imagine that these images of black women were less psychologically damaging than the ones that exist today in pop culture because they did not represent anything that couldn't be achieved with diet and exercise.

I also enjoyed viewing Theaster Gates's piece On Black Foundations.  Before there was MAC or Nars, there was Fashion Fair. I can recall seeing pink tubes of ruby and burgundy lipstick on my grandmother and aunt's vanities.  In fact, I think that Mikita's first lipstick was a Fashion Fair shade called "Brown Sugar."  There was part of the installation in which a bald headed brown skinned woman repeated "I am beautiful" in various intonations. Chloe was transfixed.

Theaster Gates On Black Foundations

I brought Chloe to the museum to share JET and Ebony with her, but the exhibit that had the most impact on both of us was The Jerome Project by Titus Kaphar.

Titus Kaphar

In 2011, Kaphar was looking on the internet for his father's prison records.  He found dozens of men who shared his father's name, and he used photographs of these men as the inspiration for a collection of  portraits (it is kind of like a visual arts version of The Other Wes Moore).  The paintings of these men were covered in gold leaf and dipped in tar, and they are at once royal and tragic. It is interesting to think about the tar significance of the tar in light of the story of Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby.

Photo: songofthesouth.net

Originally Kaphar used the tar to symbolize the amount of time that each man had been under the supervision of the criminal justice system, but it evolved into a means of obscuring the men's faces to preserve their privacy.  The exhibit is a striking and thought provoking commentary on race and the judicial system in America.

Food Art: Elizabeth Columba

I'm obsessed with the work of French artist Elizabeth Colomba.

Circe

Mary in the Hall

Breakfast

Still Life

For more on Elizabeth Colomba visit her website:

http://elizabethcolomba.net/Home.html

If You Haven't Had a Drink on the Roof of the Met You're Missing Out

The view from the rooftop garden at the MET

Chloe spent a wonderful four weeks attending camp at Harlem School of the Arts, but with a month of Summer left before school starts we are having fun playing tourists in our city.  The highlight of this week was definitely visiting the rooftop installation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  We skipped paying the recommended donation of twenty-five dollars, and instead paid the student rate of $12.00.  Of course Chloe called me out at the cash-register loudly asking, "Mommy, you're a student?? How are you a student?? I thought that I was a student!!" I calmly explained that I was a student of life, pasted a smile on my face, and kept right on moving.

Our first stop was the Ancient Egyptian Collection; Chloe was excited but claimed that she knew all that she needed to know about Egypt because she had seen Katy Perry's "Dark Horse" music video.  Who taught this 6 year old child how to use Google??  (As an aside, Chloe insisted on going to the pool this week.  I told her that her father would have to take her, so she called and asked him.  He told her that he didn't know if he could go because he didn't have water shoes to wear in the pool.  This child went to her grandmother's laptop and typed  "where do they sell swim shoos?" into Google and found a store that was selling them.  Needless to say, she got herself to the pool that day).

This poor child has to take so many pictures!

After visiting The Temple of Dendur we took a crowded elevator up to the fifth floor and exited into another, equally fabulous world.  The first thing that I noticed was that the ground of the entire space was covered in squishy artificial grass (that and the line for cocktails was long).   It was as if the rooftop had transformed itself into a garden, but wanted to make it clear that it was not a park.  Note to parents: don't let your kids run around screaming at The Met, even if you are on the roof.

The Rooftop Commission entitled "Hedge Two-Way Mirror Walkabout" is much more beautiful and impressive than it looks online.  The glass structure reflects the images of the skyline and the diverse group of people visiting it.  Visitors can see their image reflecting back at them, as well as the images of those on the other side of the glass.  See below:

As I watched people take selfies I thought about how the exhibit can be seen as a reflection on our camera phone culture.  The selfie is an effort to control your own image: you are taking a picture of yourself while watching yourself take a picture of yourself.  With a selfie, you don't have to worry about amateur photographers who don't know better than holding your iPhone at chest level, or snapping the picture before the image has focused leaving you a blurry mess. Interestingly, photographs taken in parts of the exhibit yield distorted, but interesting images.  Unfortunately, I didn't get far enough in my thought process to uncover the larger significance of this fact.  I was too busy drinking my overpriced (but yummy) lemonade/tequila cocktail and enjoying the view.  The exhibit runs through November 2; visit before this beautiful weather ends!

Obviously, not a selfie but we got lucky with this photographer!