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Posts tagged as “Black Arts Movement”

GBN’s Daily Drop: Quote from Contemporary Artist Betye Saar, 95, on Art, Beauty and Activism (LISTEN)

GBN’s Daily Drop: Quote from Contemporary Artist Betye Saar, 95, on Art, Beauty and Activism (LISTEN)

By goodblacknews on March 5, 2022

by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)

Today’s GBN Daily Drop podcast is based on the Saturday, March 5 entry in the “A Year of Good Black News” Page-A-Day®️ Calendar for 2022 that features a quote from contemporary artist and Black Arts Movement figure Betye Saar on her goals as an artist and activist:

You can follow or subscribe to the Good Black News Daily Drop Podcast through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, rss.com or create your own RSS Feed. Or just check it out every day here on the main website (transcript below):

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

Hey, this is Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a daily drop of Good Black News for Saturday, March 5th, 2022, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.

It’s a quote from contemporary artist and member of the Black Arts Movement Betye Saar, best known for her assemblage style and her 1972 work titled The Liberation of Aunt Jemima. Here’s the quote:

“It is my goal as an artist to create works that expose injustice and reveal beauty. The rainbow is literally a spectrum of color while spiritually a symbol of hope and promise.”

To learn more about 95 year-old Southern California native Betye Saar and her work, check out the Museum of Modern Art aka MoMA website, the 2019 book Betye Saar: Black Girl’s Window edited by Christopher Cherix, the upcoming 2022 release Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight edited by Stephanie Seidel, and the CBS Good Morning feature on her from 2020.

Links to all of these sources and more are provided in today’s show notes and in the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.

This has been a daily drop of Good Black News, based on the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing.

Beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.

If you like these Daily Drops, please consider following us on Apple, Google Podcasts, RSS.com, Amazon, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can give a positive rating or review, share your favorite episodes on social media, or go old school and tell a friend.

For more Good Black News, you can check out goodblacknews.org or search and follow @goodblacknews anywhere on social.

Sources:

(paid links)

Poet and Activist Sonia Sanchez, 87, Wins the $250,000 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for 2021

Poet and Activist Sonia Sanchez, 87, Wins the $250,000 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for 2021

By goodblacknews on October 22, 2021

Esteemed poet, professor and activist Sonia Sanchez, 87, has been awarded the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize for being an artist who “has pushed the boundaries of an art form” and “contributed to social change.” The prize includes a cash award of $250,000.

Sanchez has been a leading figure of the 1960s Black Arts Movement, having written more than 20 books including Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, I’ve Been a Woman, A Sound Investment and Other Stories, Homegirls and Handgrenades, Under a Soprano Sky, Wounded in the House of a Friend (1995), Does Your House Have Lions? (1997), Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (1998), Shake Loose My Skin (1999), Morning Haiku (2010) and most recently, Collected Poems (2021).Her subjects range from Black culture, feminism, civil rights, philosophy and peace, and Sanchez, according to the New York Times, “is known for melding musical formats like the blues with traditional poetic forms like the haiku and tanka, using American Black speech patterns and experimenting with punctuation and spelling.”“When we come out of the pandemic, it’s so important that we don’t insist that we go back to the way things were,” Sanchez said to the New York Times. “We’ve got to strive for beauty, which is something I’ve tried to do in my work.”

Other notable recipients of the Gish Prize include artists such as Ava DuVernay, Spike Lee, Suzan-Lori Parks, Walter Hood and Chinua Achebe.

Among dozens of distinguished honors that Sanchez has received throughout her life Sanchez has also received the 1985 American Book Award for Homegirls and Handgrenades, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities for 1988, the Langston Hughes Poetry Award for 1999, the Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Robert Frost Medal and the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the Academy of American Poets’ inaugural Leadership Award.

CULTURE: Poet and Activist Nikki Giovanni featured on "On Being with Krista Tippett" Podcast

By goodblacknews on August 26, 2017

Nikki Giovanni (Image by Furious Flower Poetry Center / Flickr)

via onbeing.org
Nikki Giovanni was a revolutionary poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She had a famous dialogue with James Baldwin in Paris in 1971. As a professor at Virginia Tech, she brought beauty and courage by the way of poetry after the shooting there.
Today, she is a self-proclaimed space freak and a delighted elder — an adored voice to hip-hop artists and the new forms of social change this generation is creating.
Check out Ms. Giovanni’s On Being Podcast from August 24, 2017 by clicking below:
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Source: Nikki Giovanni — Soul Food, Sex, and Space | On Being

R.I.P. Poet and Activist Amiri Baraka

By goodblacknews on January 9, 2014
Portrait of American writer Amiri Baraka, USA, 17th March 2013. (Photo by Mick Gold/Redferns)
Portrait of American writer Amiri Baraka, USA, 17th March 2013. (Photo by Mick Gold/Redferns)

Amiri Baraka, the militant man of letters and tireless agitator whose blues-based, fist-shaking poems, plays and criticism made him a provocative and groundbreaking force in American culture, has died. He was 79.  His booking agent, Celeste Bateman, told The Associated Press that Baraka, who had been hospitalized since last month, died Thursday at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.
Perhaps no writer of the 1960s and ’70s was more radical or polarizing than Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones), and no one did more to extend the political debates of the civil rights era to the world of the arts. He inspired at least one generation of poets, playwrights and musicians, and his immersion in spoken word traditions and raw street language anticipated rap, hip-hop and slam poetry. The FBI feared him to the point of flattery, identifying Baraka as “the person who will probably emerge as the leader of the Pan-African movement in the United States.”
Baraka transformed from the rare black to join the Beat caravan of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac to leader of the Black Arts Movement, an ally of the Black Power movement that rejected the liberal optimism of the early ’60s and intensified a divide over how and whether the black artist should take on social issues. Scorning art for art’s sake and the pursuit of black-white unity, Barak was part of a philosophy that called for the teaching of black art and history and producing works that bluntly called for revolution.
“We want ‘poems that kill,’” Baraka wrote in his landmark “Black Art,” a manifesto published in 1965, the year he helped found the Black Arts Movement. “Assassin poems. Poems that shoot guns/Poems that wrestle cops into alleys/and take their weapons leaving them dead/with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.”

Amazing Black Artists to Watch in 2014

By goodblacknews on January 5, 2014

No, not every deserving artist gets their first taste of attention through one of the art world’s largest platforms such as the legendary Art Basel show, or the Frieze Art Fair. In particular, African-American artists and other artists of color are still working towards greater visibility in the highest spheres of the rarified art community. Thus, there can never be too many lists bringing attention to the abundance of talented creators on the cusp of discovery who are ready to emerge.
Here are the fresh faces and more established visionaries still gaining ground that you need to know in 2014. The African diasporan artists compiled in the photo gallery above carry forth the traditions set in motion by visual artists from significant eras such as the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement, yet speak with new images and forms that lead us into the future.
With their various approaches to creativity, visual communication, and craft, these artists each examine critical issues of the past, present and future that reflect our shared experiences across the intersecting lines of race, class, gender, sexuality and politics. Through their works, the experiences of those of the African diaspora — and beyond — are critiqued, celebrated and preserved.
Visibility is essential to supporting the continued success of these artists, and ensuring that black artists — who are increasingly gaining recognition — continue to render our images in refined and thoughtful forms from the art world’s center stage. Regardless of whether these artists ever appear at Art Basel, or already have, please keep your eyes to the wall (and in some cases the floor, ceiling, and sidewalks), because you will want to follow these folks, who are the latest provocateurs, innovators and dreamers.
These selections are not ranked in any order to acknowledge equally the importance of each artist’s style — with the awareness that there are likely more great visual “voices” out there who deserve recognition.  Click here to see more inspiring art.
article by Souleo via thegrio.com

Black Arts Movement Works Acquired by Brooklyn Museum

By goodblacknews on January 18, 2013
UrbanWallSuitJae Jarrell’s “Urban Wall Suit,” from 1969, recently bought by the Brooklyn Museum.

As the curator of American art at the Brooklyn Museum began work on an exhibition to coincide with next year’s anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, she happened on a trove of works from the Black Arts Movement, the cultural arm of the black power movement of the 1960s and ’70s, the New York Times reported.

Noticing that the collection bridged two generations of works already among the museum’s holdings — by earlier African-American artists like John Biggers, Sargent Johnson and Lois Mailou Jones, and by their contemporary successors — the curator, Teresa A. Carbone, persuaded the museum to acquire it.

“Even at a time when people are more aware of the established canon of black artists,” Ms. Carbone said, “these artists are only now gaining the recognition they deserve.”

The collection — 44 works by 26 artists — was assembled by David Lusenhop, a former Chicago dealer now living in Detroit, and his colleague Melissa Azzi. About a dozen years ago the two began buying pieces they felt were prime examples of the Black Arts Movement.