A beginners' guide to the fundamentals of the Dru meditation technique, a method for soothing the mind and relaxing the emotions. The programme includes six short guided meditations designed to instill a sense of profound stillness, quieten and calm a stressed mind and reconnect with the important aspects of life. Each nine-minute meditations is based on one of the elements: Earth, Water, Light, Air and Sky.
Begun in 2014, Njideka Akunyili Crosby's ongoing series, The Beautyful Ones is comprised of portraits of Nigerian children, including members of the artist's family, derived from personal photographs and, more recently, from images taken during her frequent visits to Nigeria, where Akunyili Crosby lived until the age of sixteen.Its title is taken from the 1968 novel by the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, a book whose influence endured during the artist's adolescence in the 1990s and is still felt today. In it, the author laments the lost idealism of a generation in the 1960s for a better Africa, post-independence.In, The Beautyful Ones the artist reinstates this optimism in her own and subsequent generations while offering a powerful perspective on the complexities of a contemporary diasporic experience.Crosby is one of the most distinctive voices of her generation, and this book, only the second publication on the Los-Angeles based artist. It features extensive illustrations of works in the series and an essay by Siddhartha Mitter, who, reflecting on the work's complex history, weaves together the social, cultural, personal and political strands of its making.Published on the occasion of the exhibition, Njideka Akunyili Crosby: The Beautyful Ones at Victoria Miro, Venice (8 May - 13 July 2019).
I was born in Virginia, in 1832, near Charlottesville, in the beautiful valley of the Rivanna river. My father was a white man and my mother a negress, the slave of one John Martin. I was a mere child, probably not more than six years of age, as I remember, when my mother, two brothers and myself were sold to Dr. Louis, a practicing physician in the village of Scottsville. We remained with him about five years, when he died, and, in the settlement of his estate, I was sold to one Washington Fitzpatrick, a merchant of the village. He kept me a short time when he took me to Richmond, by way of canal-boat, expecting to sell me; but as the market was dull, he brought me back and kept me some three months longer, when he told me he had hired me out to work on a canal-boat running to Richmond, and to go to my mother and get my clothes ready to start on the trip. I went to her as directed, and, when she had made ready my bundle, she bade me good-by with tears in her eyes, saying: "My son, be a good boy; be polite to every one, and always behave yourself properly."
A member of the African elite groping his way out of the background of slavery and colonialism, Baako sees his education as preparation for the lifework of a socially innovative artist. His family, more pragmatic, expects an elite resume to convert into power and wealth in the real world here and now. Unable to harmonize contervailing needs with wider social aspirations, both family and individual drift toward confrontation and inexorable loss. -- From back cover.
As one of Nigeria's top writers, the author is concerned with the condition of his country. In this novel he tells, with humour, a human story set in the tragedy of the Biafran war. Fatima is fleeing the enemy planes with her young son, and through her unfolding drama, the reader sees what the war was really like through Biafran eyes.
