Not Self Portraits features artwork by Massachusetts-based artist Laylah Ali. The exhibit includes artwork by Ali as a well artwork created in collaboration with MLK Jr. School students in Ms. Johnson (5th grade) and Ms. McCarthy's (4th grade) classes. The MLK Jr. School students participated in a workshop led by Ali and assisted by Portland State University students to create the portraits. This catalog was created as an accompaniment to the exhibition of that work at King School Museum of Contemporary Art (KSMoCA).
This catalog accompanies the exhibition Laylah Ali: The Greenheads Series, organized by Deborah Rothschild with Miriam Stanton for the Williams College Museum of Art. Presented at: Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, August 18-November 25, 2012, Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, March 2-June 30, 2013, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, September 7-December 22, 2013.
For the past decade, Laylah Ali has been interrogating the visual language of contemporary society through paintings and drawings inhabited by her subversive characters. The Note drawings presented in this catalogue reference Ali's earlier work, yet mark a departure to some degree. While language has always been at the heart of Ali's practice--in its limitations and misinterpretations--she has, in this series of drawings, incorporated actual text into her work. Where her figures were once ambiguous in gender and race, and even questionably human, they now have identifiable attributes of racial and sexual identity portrayed vividly by characters dressed in masks, wigs and a variety of headdresses and costumes. Handwritten directly under and over her figures are random thoughts, snatches of overheard conversation and odd sound bites that question conventional visual markers and allude to racial and political struggles.
Published to accompany the Hayward Gallery Touring Exhibition, held at New Art Gallery, Wallsall, 4 May - 1 July 2007, Nottingham Castle, 14 July - 16 September 2007, Leeds City Art Gallery, 21 September - 11 November 2007, Aberystwyth Art Gallery, 17 November 2007 - 13 January 2008 and Tullie House, Carlisle, 19 January - 16 March 2008.
With Painting Between The Lines, the CCA Wattis Institute continues its investigation into the relationship between literature and art by commissioning 14 contemporary artists to create paintings based on descriptions of paintings in historical and contemporary novels.
Creating Their Own Image marks the first comprehensive history of African-American women artists, from slavery to the present day. Using an analysis of stereotypes of Africans and African-Americans in western art and culture as a springboard, Lisa E. Farrington here richly details hundreds ofimportant works--many of which deliberately challenge these same identity myths, of the carnal Jezebel, the asexual Mammy, the imperious Matriarch--in crafting a portrait of artistic creativity unprecedented in its scope and ambition. In these lavishly illustrated pages, some of which feature imagesnever before published, we learn of the efforts of Elizabeth Keckley, fashion designer to Mary Todd Lincoln; the acclaimed sculptor Edmonia Lewis, internationally renowned for her neoclassical works in marble; and the artist Nancy Elizabeth Prophet and her innovative teaching techniques. We meetLaura Wheeler Waring who portrayed women of color as members of a socially elite class in stark contrast to the prevalent images of compliant maids, impoverished malcontents, and exotics "others" that proliferated in the inter-war period. We read of the painter Barbara Jones-Hogu's collaboration onthe famed Wall of Respect, even as we view a rare photograph of Hogu in the process of painting the mural. Farrington expertly guides us through the fertile period of the Harlem Renaissance and the "New Negro Movement," which produced an entirely new crop of artists who consciously imbued their workwith a social and political agenda, and through the tumultuous, explosive years of the civil rights movement. Drawing on revealing interviews with numerous contemporary artists, such as Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, Nanette Carter, Camille Billops, Xenobia Bailey, and many others, the second half ofCreating Their Own Image probes more recent stylistic developments, such as abstraction, conceptualism, and post-modernism, never losing sight of the struggles and challenges that have consistently influenced this body of work. Weaving together an expansive collection of artists, styles, andperiods, Farrington argues that for centuries African-American women artists have created an alternative vision of how women of color can, are, and might be represented in American culture. From utilitarian objects such as quilts and baskets to a wide array of fine arts, Creating Their Own Imageserves up compelling evidence of the fundamental human need to convey one's life, one's emotions, one's experiences, on a canvas of one's own making.
Over the last decade equal rights for same-sex couples has proven to be one of this country's most pressing political and civil rights issues. The Air We Breathe--its title drawn from a Langston Hughes poem--brings together 27 visual artists and seven poets who offer eloquent and challenging contributions to the cause of marriage equality for same-sex couples. Works on paper by Laylah Ali, D-L Alvarez, Simon Fujiwara, Robert Gober, Raymond Pettibon, Amy Sillman, Allison Smith and 20 other equally compelling contemporary artists are interspersed with new poetry by John Ashbery, Kevin Killian, Ariana Reines, Anne Waldman and others. With essays by three further prominent, outspoken writers--Eileen Myles, Martha Nussbaum and Frank Rich--the book and the exhibition it accompanies will help generate awareness and encourage dialogue about discrimination many citizens encounter on a daily basis because, as Hughes wrote, "equality is in the air we breathe."
The Arab world's greatest folk stories re-imagined by the acclaimed Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh, published to coincide with the world tour of a magnificent musical and theatrical production directed by Tim Supple
"In 2016, Clockshop commissioned four writers and eight artists to conduct research in Butler's archive at the Huntington Library , and to create new work based on their findings"--Page [4] of cover.
