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Teach about Black Artists Feature: Chris Ofili

 

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Chris Ofili was born in Manchester in 1968. He studied at Tameside College and then at the Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. He was very successful at a young age. At just 30 he became the first Black artist to win the prestigious Turner Prize. In 2003, he also represented Britain at the Venice Biennale, an important international art show.

Ofili lived and worked in London for many years but now divides his time between the Caribbean, London and New York.

In 2017 he was awarded a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for his services to art.

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Chris Ofili Popcorn Shells 1995© Chris Ofili, courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Early on in his career Ofili drew attention because he used a very unusual material in his paintings: elephant dung!

When he was 23 he won a scholarship which allowed him to visit Zimbabwe in Africa. During his time there he was amazed by ancient cave paintings made from hundreds of dots. He was also intrigued by the small round elephant droppings he saw on the ground. He even managed to bring some elephant dung back with him!

The artworks he made after visiting Zimbabwe show the influence of the dotty cave paintings and the curious dung. Sometimes he stuck small balls of dung to the surface of his paintings, and often used them as little feet for his artworks to stand on. Not everyone thought that art should contain a material like this, and some people were really angry about it. What do you think?

By using a material like dung, which is usually considered worthless, Ofili makes people think about the value they attach to things.

SOURCE

 

Untitled 1996

Ofili was also heavily inspired by music, particularly hip hop and also jazz. He saw these types of music as celebrations of Black culture, saying: 'I wanted to paint things that would feel like that music'.

Ofili would sometimes cut out images of Black music stars from magazines and use them in his paintings. By doing this he was celebrating their talent and acknowledging that his artwork was linked to theirs.

 

Untitled (1998)  

This is an artwork made up of 30 portraits of Black women. Ofili chose to present them as characters who are subtly different. He wanted to highlight the diversity of Black identities.

The miniature paintings celebrate the women's Afro hairstyles and colourful clothes. 

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Teach about Black Artists Series: Tyree Guyton History lesson and Art project

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Tyree Guyton is an American Neo-Expressionist artist who is a proponent of Graffiti art and Urban Environmental art. He has waged a personal war on urban blight on Detroit's East Side, transforming his childhood neighborhood into a living indoor/outdoor art museum. Through his art, Tyree has drawn attention to the plight of Detroit’s forgotten neighborhoods and spurred discussion and action.

“When you come to the Heidelberg Project, I want you to think—really think! My art is a medicine for the community. You can’t heal the land until you heal the minds of the people,” says Tyree.  This iconic colorfully painted polka dotted neighborhood, which symbolizes our society’s diversity, has played a vital role in transforming the visual indignities of poverty and have placed an international spotlight in this particular community.  

 

Recognized as one of the most powerful art environments in the world, the HP anchors work in: Reinvention and Revitalization of Urban Spaces, Politics of Creativity, Urban Renewal and Education, Urban Ecology and Environmental Justice through Public Art.  As the Heidelberg Project celebrates its 30th anniversary, Tyree’s hope is that the community will assume a larger role in the continued evolution of the Heidelberg Project.

Guyton, now 60, was raised on Heidelberg Street, relying on secondhand clothes and shoes because his family was poor. He watched his stable neighborhood deteriorate into blight, violence, prostitution and abandonment. When he was 8, his grandfather, Sam Mackey, who was a housepainter, gave Tyree a paintbrush.  

“I felt as if I was holding a magic wand,” Guyton told People in 1988.

But before Guyton could work his magic, he served two years in the Army and returned home to an auto job and a stint as a Detroit firefighter. In 1986, when Guyton was 32, he decided he’d had enough with crime and blight and began decorating crack houses, trees and empty lots with toys, hubcaps, shoes, tires, vacuum cleaners, mannequins, old bikes and TVs.

With his former wife Karen Guyton and 90-year-old Grandpa Sam, Tyree began hanging discarded objects on abandoned houses. Grandpa Sam often painted polka dots because they resembled one of his favorite snacks – jelly beans. For Guyton, the diversity of jelly beans represented racial harmony and became a common theme of the Heidelberg.

Guyton also began to hang shoes from trees and houses after his grandfather recounted stories about lynchings in the south when “all that could be seen were the soles of shoes” of the victim, according to “Imagery of Lynchings” by Dora Apel.

 

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Grandpa Sam was later buried in a casket covered with polka dots. Guyton’s mother, Betty Guyton, now lives in a house covered in polka dots in the heart of the Heidelberg Project.

SOURCE: CLICK HERE

 

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Teach about Black Artists: Faith Ringgold Art Project and History lesson

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Faith Ringgold, née Faith Jones, (born October 8, 1930, New York, New York, U.S.), American artist and author who became famous for innovative quilted narrations that communicate her political beliefs.

Jones grew up in New York City’s Harlem district, and while still in high school she decided to be an artist. She attended City College of New York, where she received a degree in fine arts and education (1955) and an M.A. in fine arts (1959). In the mid-1950s Jones started teaching art in New York public schools, a job she held until the 1970s. After Jones married her second husband, Burdette Ringgold, in 1962, she began using his name professionally.

By the 1960s Ringgold’s work had matured, reflecting her burgeoning political consciousness, study of African arts and history, and appreciation for the freedom of form used by her young students. She began a body of paintings in 1963 called the American People series, which portrays the civil rights movement from a female perspective.  

SOURCE: CLICK HERE

 

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Faith Ringgold made her first quilt, Echoes of Harlem, with her mother, Madame Willi Posey, in 1980. She was inspired to pursue quiltmaking as a vehicle for her art after hearing her mother’s stories of their ancestors, who were slaves trained to make quilts on their plantation. By 1990, the year of her residency at FWM, Ringgold had completed a second quilt, Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?, her first story quilt incorporating both text and image. Her FWM quilt, Tar Beach 2, tells the story of a young African American girl who grows up in Harlem, spending her time outdoors on the rooftops of her urban landscape. The narrative is told through text and image, which are printed with dyes on silk duppioni. Ringgold chose a variety of decorative fabrics to border the quilts, making each quilt in the edition of 24 unique.

In 1991, Ringgold published Tar Beach as a children’s book (Crown Publishers). It has won over twenty awards, including the Caldecott Honor and the Coretta Scott King award for best illustrated children’s book in 1991. Ringgold has since gone on to write other children’s books, including Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky (Crown Publishers, 1992) and Dinner at Aunt Connie’s (Hyperion Books, 1993).

 

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Best known for her story quilts, Faith Ringgold is also a painter, mixed-media sculptor, performance artist, activist, author, and teacher. She was born in 1930 in Harlem, New York, growing up at the start of the Great Depression and in the waning years of the Harlem Renaissance. She was surrounded by creative people and spent much of her youth cultivating her own creativity, earning her B.S. and M.A. degrees in art from City College of New York. After traveling through Europe in the early 1960s, she returned to New York, where she began her first series of political paintings, The American People, and became a major player in artistic events and political protests of the era. Since then, she has been a champion of equality and freedom of speech, helping especially to create opportunities in the art world for women artists and artists of color. This exhibition brings together more than 40 examples of Ringgold’s varied production spanning four decades. It includes story quilts, tankas (inspired by Tibetan textile paintings called thangkas), prints, oil paintings, drawings, masks, soft sculptures, and original illustrations from the artist’s award-winning book Tar Beach.  

SOURCE: CLICK HERE

 

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Teach about Black Artists Series: Jean-Michel Basquiat History Lesson and Art Project

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Early Life

Although Basquiat has long been considered a street artist, he didn’t grow up on the gritty streets of the inner city but in a middle-class home. The Brooklyn, New York, native was born on Dec. 22, 1960, to Puerto Rican mother Matilde Andrades Basquiat and Haitian-American father Gérard Basquiat, an accountant. Thanks to his parents’ multicultural heritage, Basquiat reportedly spoke French, Spanish, and English. One of four children born to the couple, Basquiat grew up in a three-story brownstone in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Northwest Brooklyn. His brother Max died shortly before Basquiat’s birth, making him the eldest sibling to sisters Lisane and Jeanine Basquiat, born in 1964 and 1967, respectively.

At age 7, Basquiat experienced a life-changing event when he was hit by a car while playing in the street and lost his spleen as a result. As he recovered during a month-long hospital stay, the little boy became fascinated by the famous textbook "Gray’s Anatomy" given to him by his mother. The book has been credited as an influence in the formation of his experimental rock band Gray, in 1979. It also shaped him as an artist. Both of his parents served as influences as well. Matilde took young Basquiat to art exhibits and also helped him become a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum. Basquiat’s father brought home paper from this accounting firm that the fledgling artist used for his drawings. 

SOURCE: CLICK HERE

 

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Having to rely solely on his own wits and resources spurred Basquiat to earn a living and make a name for himself as an artist. The teenager panhandled and sold postcards and T-shirts to support himself. During this time, however, he also began to gain attention as a graffiti artist. Using the name SAMO, short for "Same Old Sh*t," Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz painted graffiti on Manhattan buildings that contained anti-establishment messages. 

Before long, the alternative press took notice of the pair, which led to a heightened awareness of their artistic social commentary. An eventual disagreement led Basquiat and Diaz to part ways. Their last joint graffiti message, “SAMO is dead,” was found scrawled on countless New York building facades. SAMO's demise was given a send-off ceremony by fellow street artist-turned-media-phenom Keith Haring at his Club 57.

 

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Basquiat, during his career, was awfully prolific. He created around 1500 drawings and 600 paintings, making him imminently collectible. He was one of the earliest “street artists” and “neo-expressionists” to become popular, marking a radical shift within the art scene at the time. 

Those who love Basquiat speak to the eloquence and simplicity by which he displayed emotion, color palettes, and unrestrained use of line, shape, and composition. His admirers describe him as having “a highly individualistic, expressive view of the world.”  

 

Basquiat the man and Basquiat the painter are hard to untangle. He lived hard and died harder (from an unintentional heroin overdose), and had more of the rock-star persona than the art aesthete about him, a cool celebrity sparkle that didn’t always work in his favour. Some art connoisseurs find his work hard to take seriously; others, though, have an immediate, almost visceral response. To me, a non-art critic, his work is fantastic: it feels contemporary, with a chaotic, musical sensibility. It’s beautiful and hectic, young and old, graphic, arresting, packed with ambiguous codes; there’s a questioning of identity, especially race, and a sampling of life’s stimuli that takes in music, cartoons, commerce and institutions, as well as celebrities and art greats. 

SOURCE: CLICK HERE 

 

It’s not who you are that holds you back,

it’s who you think you’re not.

-Basquiat

 

 

 

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Teach about Black Artists Series: Romare Bearden history lesson and Art Project

 

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Romare Bearden was born on September 9, 1912 in Charlotte, N.C. 

At an early age, Bearden’s family moved to Harlem. His mother, Bessye Bearden was the New York editor for the Chicago Defender. Her work as a social activist allowed Bearden to be exposed to artists of the Harlem Renaissance at an early age.

Bearden studied art at New York University and as a student, he drew cartoons for the humor magazine, Medley. During this time, Bearden also freelanced with newspapers such as Baltimore Afro-American, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post, publishing political cartoons and drawings. Bearden graduated from New York University in 1935. 

Life as an Artist

Throuhgout Bearden’s career as an artist, he was heavily influenced by African-American life and culture as well as jazz music.

Following his graduation from New York University, Bearden was attending the Art Students League and working with expressionist George Grosz. It was during this time that Bearden became an abstract collage artist and painter.

Bearden’s early paintings often depicted African-American life in the South. His artistic style was influenced heavily by muralists such as Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco. 

By the 1960s, Bearden was innovative art works that incorporated acrylics, oils, tiles, and photographs. Bearden was heavily influenced by 20^th century artistic movements such as cubism, social realism and abstraction.

By the 1970s, Bearden continued to depict African-American life through the use of ceramic tilings, paintings and collage. For instance, in 1988, Bearden’s collage “Family,” inspired a larger artwork that was installed at the Joseph P. Addabbo Federal Building in New York City.

Bearden was also heavily influenced by the Caribbean in his work. The lithograph “Pepper Jelly Lady,” portrays a woman selling pepper jelly in front of a wealthy estate. 

Documenting African-American Artistry

In addition to his work as an artist, Bearden wrote several books on African-American visual artists. In 1972, Bearden coauthored “Six Black Masters of American Art” and “A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to Present” with Harry Henderson. In 1981, he wrote “The Painter’s Mind” with Carl Holty. 

 SOURCE: CLICK HERE

 

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Teach about Black Artists: Clementine Hunter Art Project and History Lesson

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Hunter lived and worked most of her life on the Melrose cotton plantation near Natchitoches, Louisiana. She did not start painting until the 1940s when she was already a grandmother. Her first painting, executed on a window shade using paints left behind by a plantation visitor, depicts a baptism in Cane River.

Hunter painted at night, after working all day in the plantation house. She used whatever surfaces she could find, drawing and painting on canvas, wood, gourds, paper, snuff boxes, wine bottles, iron pots, cutting boards, and plastic milk jugs.

Working from memory, Hunter recorded everyday life in and around the plantation, from work in the cotton fields to baptisms and funerals. She rendered her figures, usually Black, in expressionless profile and disregarded formal perspective and scale.

Though she first exhibited in 1949, Hunter did not garner public attention until the 1970s when both the Museum of American Folk Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibited her paintings.

Even with such success, Hunter chose to stay in Louisiana, working at Melrose Plantation until 1970 when she moved to a small trailer a few miles away on an unmarked road.

SOURCE: CLICK HERE

 

 

 

 

Clementine Hunter was Louisiana's most celebrated and beloved folk artist. She is also Louisiana's most famous female artist. Hunter a self-taught African-American artist from the Cane River region of Louisiana, lived and worked on Melrose Plantation. Her work depicted plantation life in the early 20th century, documenting a bygone era. Her first paintings sold for as little as 25 cents. By the end of her life, her works were exhibited in museums around the world and sold by dealers and galleries for thousands of dollars. Hunter was the granddaughter of a former slave. Hunter received an hoary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Northwestern State University in 1986. Though she is considered a folk artist legend, she spent her entire life in poverty, even though she was selling her pieces of art in the 1970's for hundreds of dollars. She died in 1988 in Natchitoches, Louisiana.

Hunter is one of the most well-known self-taught artists, often referred to as the black Grandma Moses. Hunter painted from memory, and her works portray cotton and pecan picking, washing clothes, baptisms, and funerals. Many of her paintings feature similar subjects, but each painting is unique. Hunter's work features colorful displays of plantation life with powerful expressive force. 

Hunter was the first African-Amerian artist to have a solo exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and prominent collectors include Oprah Winfrey and the late Joan Rivers, among many others . Her work can also be seen in the Smithsonian Institute, the Museum of American Folk Art, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art, and the New York Historical Association. 

SOURCE: CLICK HERE

 

 

 

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Teach about Black Artists Series: Kimmy Cantrell Black History Art Lesson

 

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Kimmy Cantrell discovered his artistic vision in high school when he fell in love with clay in an art class. After his first hand-built vase was chosen for display at the local board of education, his teacher suggested he study art in college. Instead he decided to study business at Georgia State University and spent fifteen years in distribution management. In 1991 he accepted a job in Tifton, a small rural town four hours south of Atlanta. It was there, after almost twenty years, he decided to reconnect with clay. First there were vases, then bowls with faces, leading to clay pieced collages. The self-taught evolution of his art continues today.

Kimmy Cantrell enjoys developing fresh variations on several recurring themes: faces, still lifes, nudes and fish. Kimmy uses many forms to tell his stories, from free standing sculptures to still life collages. He uses asymmetry to challenge traditional definitions of beauty. “I want to show the beauty within flaws,” he explains. “Imperfections tell stories that are far more compelling than perfection.”

SOURCE: CLICK HERE

 

 Sculptor Kimmy Cantrell is known for colorful ceramic masks depicting expressive asymmetrical faces with exaggerated eyes and whimsical features. Cantrell uses his art as a way to challenge traditional European conceptions of beauty. After a 20 year career in business, Cantrell reconnected with his sculpting practice in 1994 and has worked as a professional artist ever since. He is self taught, and his style draws inspiration from the folk art of William Edmondson as well as from Cubism. Cantrell also creates mixed-media collages and still lifes from clay and metal. 

SOURCE: CLICK HERE

 

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Teach about Black Artists Series: William H Johnson Art Lesson Black History

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William Henry Johnson, one of the great painter/poets of American experience, left South Carolina, the state of his birth, in 1917, when he was only 17, and found a place in the Harlem home of an uncle who made a good living as a porter on the trains that ran north and south. Johnson’s journey was part of the Great Migration, the mass exodus of Black Americans from the South that had begun in earnest that year and that in the years to come would thoroughly transform American society and culture. The double “North/South” consciousness of Black migrants to American cities would become Johnson’s core subject.

Soon after arriving in New York, Johnson was already able to imagine himself as a professional artist, even with few Black figures as precedents and little formal education of his own. By working as a stevedore, cook, and porter, he saved the money to attend the National Academy of Design, where he excelled to the degree that his teachers raised funds to allow him to study in Europe. There he schooled himself in the lessons of European modernism, using bright colors and loaded brushstrokes to create expressionist landscapes that found small but steady sales. After marrying Holcha Krake, a Danish artist, designer, weaver, and ceramist, in 1930, he spent time in Scandinavia and developed a deep interest in folk art and culture that he carried into his later work.

In the fall of 1938, with Europe on the brink of war, Johnson and Krake returned to New York, settling in Greenwich Village. Their repatriation was prompted by their alarm at the rise of fascism—the previous year, Johnson’s brother-in-law, the Expressionist artist Christoph Voll, had lost his teaching position in Germany and had had his work denigrated in the Nazis’ Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art) exhibition in Munich. Johnson also spoke of a desire to come home to “paint his own people.” In these lean Depression years he found employment, in spring 1939, through the Work Projects Administration (WPA), as an artist/instructor at the Harlem Community Art Center (HCAC), the largest WPA-funded center in the country. There Johnson found himself at the heart of a vibrant community of artists, including Charles Alston, Henry Bannarn, Selma Burke, Gwendolyn Knight, Jacob Lawrence, and others.

Johnson’s work changed dramatically in New York. He learned screenprinting at the HCAC, where a workshop dedicated to the technique had been set up, and before and after teaching classes at the center he spent time creating hundreds of prints. Screenprinting was generally used for commercial art, but the fine artists at the HCAC were imaginatively repurposing it. The method helped Johnson to define a new visual language of simplified forms and flat planes of bright color laid down in inexpensive opaque inks. It also seems to have served as a prompt for him, allowing him to let go of the painterly expressionist idiom he had honed in Europe in order to embrace something that seemed newer and bolder, that mixed high and low, that could speak plainly of a new kind of urban experience with folk origins. Johnson made prints and paintings in parallel in these years, often tackling a subject virtually simultaneously in both mediums, and the spare forms and vibrant colors that he used in his prints carried over into his painted work too.

In both, Johnson began focusing on images of Black life in the urban North and rural South. Many of his images of this period depict the Harlem community and touch on the forces that made it what it was. The screenprint Blind Singer (c. 1940), for example, pays homage to two street performers. They wear city clothes—suit and tie, hats and heels—but the guitar speaks of the blues, with that music’s deep roots in the South, where it evolved from the songs of Black sharecroppers, and of those earlier enslaved, before making its way to urban areas with the Great Migration.

SOURCE: CLICK HERE 

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Teach About Black Artists Series: Alma Woodsey Thomas History Lesson and Art Project

 

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Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia, the oldest of four girls. In 1907, her family moved to Washington, D.C., seeking relief from the racial violence in the South. Though segregated, the nation’s capital still offered more opportunities for African Americans than most cities in those years.

As a girl, Thomas dreamed of being an architect and building bridges, but there were few women architects a century ago. Instead, she attended Howard University, becoming its first fine arts graduate in 1924. In 1924, Thomas began a 35 year career teaching art at a D.C. junior high school. She was devoted to her students and organized art clubs, lectures, and student exhibitions for them. Teaching allowed her to support herself while pursuing her own painting part-time.

Thomas’s early art was realistic, though her Howard professor James V. Herring and peer Loïs Mailou Jones challenged her to experiment with abstraction. When she retired from teaching and was able to concentrate on art full-time, Thomas finally developed her signature style.

She debuted her abstract work in an exhibition at Howard 1966, at the age of 75. Thomas’ abstractions have been compared with Byzantine mosaics, the Pointillist technique of Georges Seurat, and the paintings of the Washington Color School, yet her work is quite distinctive.

Thomas became an important role model for women, African Americans, and older artists. She was the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, and she exhibited her paintings at the White House three times.

 

“Miss Alma Thomas was a trailblazing pioneer,” said Melanee C. Harvey, art history coordinator and assistant professor of Howard University Department of Art. “During her time as a student at Howard, she embodied the spirit of creating across the Arts by designing costumes for the theatrical productions of the Howard Players and studying sculpture in the Department of Art.

 SOURCE: CLICK HERE

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