Segregation photos on Flickr

Birmingham City Cycle Route A34 by Commercial Hard Landscaping by Aggregate Industries

Cycle Kerb

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Illustrator Kesh Ladduwhahetty (L) and librettist Carolivia Herron ( R) are collaborating on an illustrated young-adult book based on Herron’s opera, “Let Freedom Sing: The Story of Marian Anderson.”

100_2077 by Strannik45

Montgomery Greyhound Bus Station by National Register of Historic Places

Highlighted New Listing – May 27, 2011

Montgomery, Montgomery County, AL

The Montgomery Greyhound Bus Station, located at 210 S. Court Street in Montgomery, Alabama, was made famous world-wide on May 20, 1961, when the Freedom Riders, a group of civil rights activists and students who wanted to test the validity and enforcement of segregation on the nation’s new interstate system in the south, were attacked by a white mob awaiting their arrival at the station. The South was the scene of many civil rights struggles where state laws segregated African Americans and European Americans. The Montgomery Greyhound Bus Station itself is a small, modest, single-story building constructed in 1950-51, but has earned its place in history by focusing the federal government to intervene instead of deferring to states to solve civil rights issues.

National Register of Historic Places

Weekly Features

Waste Segregation by amando achay

Tons of tear gas in ni'llin - 3.6.13 by Tal King

Rev. Dr. James Forbes Preaches at Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, Alabama by On Being

Photo by Trent Gilliss

Inside old postal wagon, segregation posts by Jerzy Jabłoński

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Muzeum Kolejnictwa - Kościerzyna

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Camera: Pentax K2

Lens: smc Pentax-M 28mm f/3.5

Film: Fomapan 200

Developer: Rodinal @ 19degC for 11min15sec

Tons of tear gas in ni'llin - 3.6.13 by Tal King

Cedar Hill by GHSBP

100_2082 by Strannik45

The Permanent Collection - Smithsonian American Art Museum - Washington, DC - September 15, 16 and 17, 2024 by JR P

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Thornton Dial, Sr.,Born Emelle, AL 1928-

died McCalla, AL 2016

The Beginning of Life in the Yellow Jungle, 2003, plastic soda bottles, doll, clothing, bedding, wire, found metal, rubber glove, turtle shell, artificial flowers, Splash Zone compound, enamel, and spray paint on canvas on wood, 75 x 112 x 13 in.,

"When I start making something, I gather up the pieces I want to work with," Thornton Dial once explained. "Everything I pick up be something that done did somebody some good in their lifetime. . . . When you make things beautiful out of another person's ideas, it make the world more beautiful."

Dial mastered the art of speaking through objects--he gathered, combined, and painted them to create artworks that ask us to look closely and think carefully. Here, he invokes a jungle landscape, a place where survival can be hard. In Dial's junglescape, wild and urban realms are indistinguishable: plastic cups and bottles are plants, rubber gloves and rags are vines. The entire scene is conjured from something found, repurposed, and reimagined.

Thornton Dial was born into a sharecropping family in rural Alabama, on the eve of the Great Depression. He experienced the trauma and tumult of both Jim Crow segregation and the civil rights movement. Profoundly influenced by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dial used art to confront issues of racial oppression in the United States, developing an allegorical style that was abstracted but narrative, conveying concerns both personal and universal. His large, bold works, with incisive titles and themes of race and class, captivated the art world through sophisticated content and an aesthetic that defied stereotypes of “folk.” Dial bridged the worlds of Black vernacular self-taught artists and the contemporary mainstream. He was a conduit between nineteenth-century-born artists like Bill Traylor; African American quilters who had, for too long, gone unrecognized as artists; and a younger generation of Black creatives seeking a way forward.

Dial lived to see his work acquired by some of the most revered museums in the United States and became relevant to the mainstream art world in unprecedented ways. As the art world increasingly embraced him, Dial used his voice to raise serious questions about its long-standing hierarchies and inequities. He became emblematic of a shifting southern landscape in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—as the deeply rooted vision of Black Americans revealed its tremendous power.

(We Are Made of Stories: Self-Taught Artists in the Robson Family Collection, 2022)

Across nine decades in Alabama, Dial experienced racism and oppression firsthand, but he discovered that he could speak freely through artmaking. Dial's critiques of race relations were often somber, dark in color and mood. Yet here, warm hues shower the day in optimism; polarized divisions of black and white give way to a sunny palette of possibility.

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"Women, queer artists, and artists of color have finally become the protagonists of recent American art history rather than its supporting characters. This is the lesson to be learned from the programming at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art since it reopened in 2015, and it is now the big takeaway in the nation’s capital, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, whose contemporary art galleries have reopened after a two-year closure.

During that time, architect Annabelle Selldorf refurbished these galleries, which have the challenge of pushing art history’s limits without going too far. Her interventions in these spaces are fairly inoffensive. Mainly, she’s pared down some of the structural clutter, removing some walls that once broke up a long, marble-floored hallway. To the naked eye, the galleries are only slightly different.

What is contained within, however, has shifted more noticeably—and is likely to influence other museums endeavoring to diversify their galleries. For one thing, I have never encountered a permanent collection hang with more Latinx and Native American artists, who, until very recently, were severely under-represented in US museums. That unto itself is notable.

It is a joy to see, presiding over one tall gallery, three gigantic beaded tunics courtesy of Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw artist who will represent the US at the next Venice Biennale. Printed with bombastic patterning and hung on tipi poles, they hang over viewers’ heads and allude to the Ghost Shirts used by members of the Sioux to reach ancestral spirits. One says on it “WITHOUT YOU I’M NOTHING.” That statement can also be seen as a confession on behalf of SAAM’s curators to the artists now included in this rehang: a multiplicity of perspectives is more nourishing than having just one.

Something similar can be seen in Judith F. Baca’s Las Tres Marías (1976). The installation features a drawing of a shy-looking chola on one side and an image of Baca as a tough-as-nails Pachuca on the other. These are both Chicana personae—the former from the ’70s, the latter from the ’40s—and the third component, a long looking glass, sutures the viewer into the piece. It’s no surprise this piece is shaped like a folding mirror, an item used to examine how one may present to the outside world. Baca suggests that a single reflection isn’t enough. To truly understand one’s self, many are needed.

It is hardly as though the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection ever lacked diversity. Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (2002), a video installation featuring a map of the country with each state’s borders containing TV monitors, is a crown jewel of the collection. It has returned once more, where it now faces a 2020 Tiffany Chung piece showing a United States strung with thread. So, too, has Alma Thomas’s magnum opus, Red Azaleas Singing and Dancing Rock and Roll Music (1976), a three-part stunner showing an array of petal-like red swatches drifting across white space.

But the usual heroes of 20th century art history are notably absent. Partly, that is because the Smithsonian American Art Museum doesn’t own notable works by canonical figures like Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. (For those artists, you’d have to head to the National Gallery of Art.) Yet it is also partly because the curators want to destabilize the accepted lineage of postwar American art, shaking things up a bit and seeing where they land.

There is, of course, the expected Abstract Expressionism gallery, and while works by Willem de Kooning and Clyfford Still are present, those two are made to share space with artists whose contributions are still being properly accounted for. The standouts here are a prismatic painting by Ojibwe artist George Morrison and a piquant hanging orb, formed from knotted steel wire, by Claire Falkenstein.

This being the nation’s capital, there is also an entire space devoted to the Washington Color School. Come for Morris Louis’s 20-foot-long Beta Upsilon (1960), on view for the first time in 30 years, now minus the pencil marks left on its vast white center by a troublemaking visitor a long time ago. Stay for Mary Pinchot Meyer’s Half Light (1964), a painting that features a circle divided into colored quadrants, one of which has two mysterious dots near one edge.

From there, the sense of chronology begins to blur. The Baca piece appears in a gallery that loosely takes stock of feminist art of the 1970s; a clear picture of the movement’s aims fails to emerge because the various artists’ goals appear so disparate. It’s followed by an even vaguer gallery whose stated focus is “Multiculturalism and Art” during the ’70s and ’80s. Beyond the fact that all five artists included are not white, the gallery doesn’t have much of a binding thesis.

This partial view of recent art history leads to gaps, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it offers due recognition for art-historical nonpareils. Audrey Flack is represented by Queen (1976), a Photorealist painting showing a view of a sliced orange, a rose, photographs, a playing card, and trinkets blown up to a towering size. It’s both gaudy and glorious. Hats off to the curators for letting it shine.

Then there are two totem-like sculptures by the late Truman Lowe, a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, that are allowed to command a tall space of their own. They feature sticks of peeled willow that zigzag through boxy lumber structures, and they refuse to enjoin themselves to any artistic trend. Later on, there are three deliciously odd paintings by Howard Finster, of Talking Heads album cover fame. One shows Jesus descended to a mountain range strewn with people and cars who scale the peaks. Try cramming that into the confines of an accepted art movement.

That’s just three lesser-knowns who make an impact—there are many others on hand, from Ching Ho Cheng to Ken Ohara. And yet, herein lies this hang’s big problem: its gaping omissions in between them all, which are likely to be visible not just to the literati of the art world but to the general public, too.

Despite the focus of these new galleries being the 1940s to now, Pop, Minimalism, Conceptualism, and their resultant offshoots are skipped over entirely as the curators rush through the postwar era in order to get closer to the present. The Paik installation aside, there is almost no video art in this hang (although there is a newly formed space for moving-image work where a Carrie Mae Weems installation can be found), and no digital art or performance documentation at all, which is a shame, given that the museum owns important works by the likes of Cory Arcangel and Ana Mendieta, respectively. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s and its devastating impact on the art world isn’t mentioned a single time in the wall text for these new galleries, and queer art more broadly is a blind spot.

Protest art periodically makes the cut, but any invocation of racism, misogyny, colonialism, and the like is typically abstracted or aestheticized. That all makes a work like Frank Romero’s Death of Rubén Salazar (1986) stand out. The painting depicts the 1970 killing of a Los Angeles Times reporter in a café during an unrelated incident amid a Chicano-led protest against the high number of Latino deaths in the Vietnam War. With its vibrant explosions of tear gas (Salazar was killed when a tear gas canister shot by the LA Sheriff Department struck his head) and its intense brushwork, it is as direct as can be—a history painting for our times. So, too, in a much different way, is Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s Run, Jane, Run! (2004), a piece that ports over the “Immigrant Crossing” sign, first installed near the US-Mexico border in Southern California in the 1990s, and remakes it as a yellow tapestry that is threaded with barbed wire.

In general, this presentation could use more art like Romero and Jimenez Underwood’s. Yet the curators at least cop to the fact they’re seeking to hold handsome craftmanship and ugly historical events in tension, and the methods on display are productive in that regard.

By way of example, there’s Firelei Báez 2022 painting Untitled (Première Carte Pour L’Introduction A L’Histoire De Monde), which features a spray of red-orange paint blooming across a page from an 18th-century atlas documenting Europe’s colonies. One could say Báez’s blast of color recalls the bloodshed of manifest destiny, but that seems like an unfair interpretation for a work that provides so much visual pleasure. Rather than re-presenting the violence of a bygone era, Báez beautifies it. The result allows history to begin anew—on Báez’s own terms."

www.artnews.com/art-news/reviews/smithsonian-american-art...

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Tons of tear gas in ni'llin - 3.6.13 by Tal King

Birmingham City Cycle Route A34 by Commercial Hard Landscaping by Aggregate Industries

Cycle Kerb

Tons of tear gas in ni'llin - 3.6.13 by Tal King

Left behind (0326-DPP) by Mark's Postcards from Beloit

Joint meeting of City of Beloit Parks and Recreation Commission and Landmarks Commission at Turtle Creek Park to tour the old pool Bathhouse building. The building's been sealed up for a many years waiting for some kind of decision on its future.

Parks and Recreation Commission wants to examine options and thus this meeting.

Inside was this old desk under a rooftop skylight vent.

[I'll find the Beloit Historical Society page with information on this 1938 Flexcore roofed historic landmark building later.]

Tons of tear gas in ni'llin - 3.6.13 by Tal King

Truman military headline by Carly Kahl

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A section of the Woolworth's lunch counter from Greensboro, North Carolina; this is where four African-American men began a sit-in to end racial segregation. by mama2emma

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A section of the Woolworth's lunch counter from Greensboro, North Carolina; this is where four African-American men began a sit-in to end racial segregation.

Racial Segregation by The UrbeX Ledger

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Segregation to Civil Rights: America’s Journey by Virginia Humanities

Richard Gergel (Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring) and Steve Luxenberg (Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation) discuss the historical backgrounds for groundbreaking court rulings that both denied and ignited civil rights for African-Americans in the United States. UVA Law School Dean Risa Goluboff moderates.

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