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First Lady of Maryland Yumi Hogan by Anthony DePanise at The Grand Lodge, 304 International Circle, Cockeysville, Maryland 21030
An annual celebration honoring 25 Most Influential Asian Americans in Georgia and Asian American Spirit at Sonesta Gwinnett Place on July 12, 2016.
MARCEL DUCHAMP
Fountain, Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ sculpture, was one of the most influential artworks of the twentieth century.
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain 1917, replica 1964
Fountain is Duchamp’s most famous work. It is an example of what he called a ‘ready-made’ sculpture. These were made from ordinary manufactured objects. He then presented them as artworks. This invites us to question what makes an object ‘art’? Is this urinal ‘art’ because it is being presented in a gallery? The original 1917 version of this work has been lost. This is one of a small number of copies that Duchamp allowed to be made in 1964. Do you think it makes a difference that it is not Duchamp’s original urinal?
Gallery label, July 2020
Photography credit: Me (Constance L ArtEssco and 1️⃣ZebraPhotography at Tate Modern, London
Marcel Duchamp
Fountain
1917, replica 1964
ARTIST
Marcel Duchamp 1887–1968
MEDIUM
Porcelain
DIMENSIONS
Unconfirmed: 360 × 480 × 610 mm
COLLECTION
Tate
Source: tare.org.uk
An annual celebration honoring 25 Most Influential Asian Americans in Georgia and Asian American Spirit at Sonesta Gwinnett Place on July 12, 2016.
Lobbyists’ encounters with European Union’s Directorate General for Trade while the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations were being prepared in 2012 and early 2013
Creator: Bartz/Stockmar (License terms: www.boell.de/en/2017/10/31/agrifood-atlas-graphics-and-li...)
An evening of celebration in honor of the 25 Most Influential Asian Americans in Georgia on Sept 17, 2015 at Sonesta Gwinnett Place. Keynote speaker was Mr Douglas Hooker, Executive Director, Atlanta Regional Commission.
Influential men in the community took time out of their day to read to the students of Hodge Elementary.
An evening of celebration in honor of the 25 Most Influential Asian Americans in Georgia on Sept 17, 2015 at Sonesta Gwinnett Place. Keynote speaker was Mr Douglas Hooker, Executive Director, Atlanta Regional Commission.
Influential Danish fiddle player and instructor Peter Uhrbrand during the Whycocomagh Gathering, October 13, 2013 at the Whycocomagh Education Centre. photo: Murdock Smith [CC13-19]
An evening of celebration in honor of the 25 Most Influential Asian Americans in Georgia on Sept 17, 2015 at Sonesta Gwinnett Place. Keynote speaker was Mr Douglas Hooker, Executive Director, Atlanta Regional Commission.
London, UK, 15th September 2025, A landmark exhibition celebrating 100 years of Picasso’s groundbreaking painting The Three Dancers (1925). Bringing together over 50 works by one of the 20th century’s most influential artists, the exhibition delves into the role of performance in Picasso’s creative practice. Coinciding with Tate Modern’s 25th anniversary, Theatre Picasso continues the gallery’s tradition of reimagining the legacies of pivotal art historical figures., Andrew Lalchan Photography/Alamy Live News
An evening of celebration in honor of the 25 Most Influential Asian Americans in Georgia on Sept 17, 2015 at Sonesta Gwinnett Place. Keynote speaker was Mr Douglas Hooker, Executive Director, Atlanta Regional Commission.
Dance the Tango Bee-Le-May - 1982
Camille Billops
American, 1933 - 2019
Camille Billops (1933, Los Angeles, CA - 2019 New York, NY) was an influential artist and filmmaker whose staunch activism and profound belief in the power of memory and representation made her a pillar of the black New York-based artist community from the 1960s until her death in 2019.
As an artist, Billops came into her own within the converging contexts of the 1960s civil rights movement and New York’s emerging black artists movement. She has unapologetically drawn from her life experiences, family history, and community to carve out a space for her voice to be heard. Her work primarily touches upon themes of racism—which she considered ever present throughout society—gender dynamics, black culture, and personal narrative.
Billops began her career with ceramics, though she went on to investigate printmaking, book illustration, costume design, jewelry, and filmmaking throughout her five decade career. She first discovered ceramics while studying at the School of Occupational Therapy at the University of Southern California in the late 1950s. She later learned printmaking in 1973 at master printer Robert Blackburn’s studio under the tutelage of Romare Bearden and Krishna Reddy. As an artist, Camille was profoundly influenced by her extensive travel to Egypt, India, Ghana, Japan and Taiwan, among other locations. It is during her initial travels to Egypt and Ghana in the early 1960s that Billops discovered new concepts of black identity that she would later translate in her art. In 1978 she traveled to Alisah, Morocco to help Blackburn set up his Moroccan printmaking workshop. Billops’s longstanding interest in folk and ‘primitive’ art and Asian aesthetic practices, combined with her husband James V. Hatch’s lifelong dedication to theatre and storytelling, had a profound influence over her artistic practice, leading to a shift to filmmaking in the 1980s.
Billops’s life and career is marked by the myriad of people that she affected with her art, activism, leadership, and friendship. With her husband, Billops founded the Hatch-Billops Collection in 1975 in an effort to preserve and promote black culture and the remarkable work that her peers were producing. This impressive archive currently counts thousands of African American oral histories, books, slides, photographs and other historical references.
Starting in the 1970s, her SoHo loft became a gathering place for visual artists such as Vivian Browne, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence and Clifford R. Joseph; playwright George C. Wolfe and novelist John A. Williams, among many others. The social meetings of like-minded artists and intellectuals in the Hatch Billops loft eventually grew into more formal salons, where a variety of creative folk converged to discuss the social, cultural, and political issues of the day. Within this context, Billops and Hatch began recording artists’ stories and publishing the annual publication Artist and Influence in 1981. This extensive journal paired prominent curators and thinkers with active black artists in the NYC scene for interviews in the Hatch Billops loft. The interviewees and interviewers include among others Betye Saar, Emma Amos, Norman Lewis, Faith Ringgold, David Hammon, bell hooks, Henri Ghent, Benny Andrews, Elizabeth Catlett, Lowery Sims, and Romare Bearden. Over the decades, Billops and Hatch coordinated more than 1,500 interviews, with just over 400 appearing in print.
Throughout her life, Billops was involved in many activist organizations including the Black Emergency Culture Coalition—which was formed in response to the Metropolitan Museum’s controversial 1968 exhibition Harlem on My Mind—becoming co-directors of the BECC in 1972. She also was a founding member of the short-lived Black Artist Meeting group, which discussed the challenges of black American artists, and was further involved in civil rights groups such as the Black Arts Movement (BAM) which asserted and advanced a global vision of new political directions and possibilities for black people to embrace. In 1974, Billops was invited to become one of Just Above Midtown (JAM)’s gallery artists, and was included in the inaugural exhibition later that year. She further co-edited with David Hammons an edition of the gallery’s publication Black Currant (later known as B Culture). Billops also collaborated with James Van Der Zee and poet Owen Dodson in the 1978 publication of The Harlem Book of the Dead.
Frequently one of the only women present in the black activist circles of the 1960s and 1970s, she was encouraged by her friend Vivian Browne to participate in more multi-racial or white feminist spaces, such as Soho20 and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics in the 1970s and 1980s.
A lifelong educator, Billops taught at Rutgers University, New Jersey; the City College of New York; Kaohsiung Teacher’s College, Taiwan; and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Maine among others. She was recommended to be a fellow at the Huntington Hartford Foundation by Charles White, and was awarded the Fellowship In 1963, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 1975, The International Women’s Year Award in 1976, The James Van Der Zee Award in 1994, the Brandywine Graphic Workshop in 1994, and finally the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002.
In 1982, Billops began her filmmaking career with Suzanne, Suzanne, and subsequently made Finding Christa in 1991, an autobiographical work that garnered the Grand Jury Prize for documentaries at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. Finding Christa has also been aired as part of the Public Broadcasting Station’s P.O.V. television series. Her other film credits include Older Women and Love in 1987, The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks in 1994, Take Your Bags in 1998, and A String of Pearls in 2002. Billops produced all of her films with her husband and their film company, Mom and Pop Productions.
In 2023, Billops’s and her husband James Hatch’s documentary filmmaking was the focus of a major solo retrospective entitled A String of Pearls: The Films of Camille Billops & James Hatch at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, organized by Third World Newsreel. In 2022, Billops was included in the landmark group exhibition Just Above Midtown, 1974 to the Present at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, a retrospective focusing on the historic Just Above Midtown gallery. Billops’s work has also been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at the Hudson River Museum, NY (2022); Featherstone Center for the Arts, PA (2022); Hanes Gallery at Wake Forest University, NC (2021); Georgia Museum of Art, GA (2019); David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, MD (2019); Brooklyn Museum, NY (2017); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, NY (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, MA (2017); Delaware Art Museum, DE (2017); Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture, NC (2012); among other institutions.
Billops’s work is in the collections of the The Arts and Science Center for Southeast Arkansas, Pine Bluff, AK; Boston Museum of Fine Arts, MA; The Burgess Group Fine Arts Collection, New York, NY; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Donnell Media Center, New York Public Library, NY; Featherstone Center for the Arts, MA; Georgia Museum of Art, GA; Harold A. and Ann R. Sorgenti of Contemporary American Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA; Hofstra University, NY; K Caraccio Collection, NY; Library of Congress, DC; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Museum of Fine Arts, MA; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Nasher Museum of Art, NC; Paul Jones Museum, University of Alabama, AL; Petrucci Family Collection, NJ; Photographers Gallery, London; Robert Blackburn Print Collection, NY; Das Schubladenmuseum, Bern; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery, CT.
Camille Billops (1933, Los Angeles, CA - 2019 New York, NY) was an influential artist and filmmaker whose staunch activism and profound belief in the power of memory and representation made her a pillar of the black New York-based artist community from the 1960s until her death in 2019.
As an artist, Billops came into her own within the converging contexts of the 1960s civil rights movement and New York’s emerging black artists movement. She has unapologetically drawn from her life experiences, family history, and community to carve out a space for her voice to be heard. Her work primarily touches upon themes of racism—which she considered ever present throughout society—gender dynamics, black culture, and personal narrative.
Billops began her career with ceramics, though she went on to investigate printmaking, book illustration, costume design, jewelry, and filmmaking throughout her five decade career. She first discovered ceramics while studying at the School of Occupational Therapy at the University of Southern California in the late 1950s. She later learned printmaking in 1973 at master printer Robert Blackburn’s studio under the tutelage of Romare Bearden and Krishna Reddy. As an artist, Camille was profoundly influenced by her extensive travel to Egypt, India, Ghana, Japan and Taiwan, among other locations. It is during her initial travels to Egypt and Ghana in the early 1960s that Billops discovered new concepts of black identity that she would later translate in her art. In 1978 she traveled to Alisah, Morocco to help Blackburn set up his Moroccan printmaking workshop. Billops’s longstanding interest in folk and ‘primitive’ art and Asian aesthetic practices, combined with her husband James V. Hatch’s lifelong dedication to theatre and storytelling, had a profound influence over her artistic practice, leading to a shift to filmmaking in the 1980s.
Billops’s life and career is marked by the myriad of people that she affected with her art, activism, leadership, and friendship. With her husband, Billops founded the Hatch-Billops Collection in 1975 in an effort to preserve and promote black culture and the remarkable work that her peers were producing. This impressive archive currently counts thousands of African American oral histories, books, slides, photographs and other historical references.
Starting in the 1970s, her SoHo loft became a gathering place for visual artists such as Vivian Browne, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence and Clifford R. Joseph; playwright George C. Wolfe and novelist John A. Williams, among many others. The social meetings of like-minded artists and intellectuals in the Hatch Billops loft eventually grew into more formal salons, where a variety of creative folk converged to discuss the social, cultural, and political issues of the day. Within this context, Billops and Hatch began recording artists’ stories and publishing the annual publication Artist and Influence in 1981. This extensive journal paired prominent curators and thinkers with active black artists in the NYC scene for interviews in the Hatch Billops loft. The interviewees and interviewers include among others Betye Saar, Emma Amos, Norman Lewis, Faith Ringgold, David Hammon, bell hooks, Henri Ghent, Benny Andrews, Elizabeth Catlett, Lowery Sims, and Romare Bearden. Over the decades, Billops and Hatch coordinated more than 1,500 interviews, with just over 400 appearing in print.
Throughout her life, Billops was involved in many activist organizations including the Black Emergency Culture Coalition—which was formed in response to the Metropolitan Museum’s controversial 1968 exhibition Harlem on My Mind—becoming co-directors of the BECC in 1972. She also was a founding member of the short-lived Black Artist Meeting group, which discussed the challenges of black American artists, and was further involved in civil rights groups such as the Black Arts Movement (BAM) which asserted and advanced a global vision of new political directions and possibilities for black people to embrace. In 1974, Billops was invited to become one of Just Above Midtown (JAM)’s gallery artists, and was included in the inaugural exhibition later that year. She further co-edited with David Hammons an edition of the gallery’s publication Black Currant (later known as B Culture). Billops also collaborated with James Van Der Zee and poet Owen Dodson in the 1978 publication of The Harlem Book of the Dead.
Frequently one of the only women present in the black activist circles of the 1960s and 1970s, she was encouraged by her friend Vivian Browne to participate in more multi-racial or white feminist spaces, such as Soho20 and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics in the 1970s and 1980s.
A lifelong educator, Billops taught at Rutgers University, New Jersey; the City College of New York; Kaohsiung Teacher’s College, Taiwan; and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Maine among others. She was recommended to be a fellow at the Huntington Hartford Foundation by Charles White, and was awarded the Fellowship In 1963, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship in 1975, The International Women’s Year Award in 1976, The James Van Der Zee Award in 1994, the Brandywine Graphic Workshop in 1994, and finally the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002.
In 1982, Billops began her filmmaking career with Suzanne, Suzanne, and subsequently made Finding Christa in 1991, an autobiographical work that garnered the Grand Jury Prize for documentaries at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. Finding Christa has also been aired as part of the Public Broadcasting Station’s P.O.V. television series. Her other film credits include Older Women and Love in 1987, The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks in 1994, Take Your Bags in 1998, and A String of Pearls in 2002. Billops produced all of her films with her husband and their film company, Mom and Pop Productions.
In 2023, Billops’s and her husband James Hatch’s documentary filmmaking was the focus of a major solo retrospective entitled A String of Pearls: The Films of Camille Billops & James Hatch at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, organized by Third World Newsreel. In 2022, Billops was included in the landmark group exhibition Just Above Midtown, 1974 to the Present at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, a retrospective focusing on the historic Just Above Midtown gallery. Billops’s work has also been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at the Hudson River Museum, NY (2022); Featherstone Center for the Arts, PA (2022); Hanes Gallery at Wake Forest University, NC (2021); Georgia Museum of Art, GA (2019); David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, MD (2019); Brooklyn Museum, NY (2017); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, NY (2017); Institute of Contemporary Art, MA (2017); Delaware Art Museum, DE (2017); Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture, NC (2012); among other institutions.
Billops’s work is in the collections of the The Arts and Science Center for Southeast Arkansas, Pine Bluff, AK; Boston Museum of Fine Arts, MA; The Burgess Group Fine Arts Collection, New York, NY; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Donnell Media Center, New York Public Library, NY; Featherstone Center for the Arts, MA; Georgia Museum of Art, GA; Harold A. and Ann R. Sorgenti of Contemporary American Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA; Hofstra University, NY; K Caraccio Collection, NY; Library of Congress, DC; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Museum of Fine Arts, MA; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Nasher Museum of Art, NC; Paul Jones Museum, University of Alabama, AL; Petrucci Family Collection, NJ; Photographers Gallery, London; Robert Blackburn Print Collection, NY; Das Schubladenmuseum, Bern; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and Yale University Art Gallery, CT.
________________________________
With Passion and Purpose
Gifts from the Collection of Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson
June 7 - October 5, 2025
Locations East Building, Mezzanine — Gallery 214
See standout works by Black artists from the past century, newly gifted to the Nation.
For over four decades, Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson have championed the work of Black artists. They have supported exhibitions and scholarship as they built a remarkable collection that spans 100 years of Black creativity in America.
This exhibition celebrates the recent and promised gifts of 175 works from the Thompsons to the National Gallery—the largest group of objects by Black artists to enter our collection at one time. Explore more than 60 paintings, sculpture, drawings, and prints organized in sections around themes of music and abstraction, figuration and portraiture, civil rights and social politics, as well as landscape and transcultural connections and influences.
Works range from a captivating portrait by Beauford Delaney and lyrical abstractions by Mildred Thompson to a towering allegorical woodcut by Alison Saar and an intricate sculpture of found objects by vanessa german. Enjoy works by renowned artists—Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley, and Kara Walker—and discover artists you may not yet know, such as Camille Billops, Vivian Browne, Moe Brooker, and Alonzo Davis.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/passion-and-purpose
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"In April of this year, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC announced that it received a substantial gift of more than one hundred seventy artworks by Black American artists from art collectors Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson. “The breadth of artistic achievement across media and styles in this transformative gift enriches the story of American art that we can share with our visitors,” Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, stated in the press release. The National Gallery of Art collection includes one hundred sixty thousand artworks that span the history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the contemporary moment, but although the collection covers a huge period of time, its holdings are not as diverse as the people who live and work in the Western world. The Thompsons’ gift is the largest gift of Black art the museum has ever received, and because Western art is so heavily Eurocentric, the Thompsons’ gift is, indeed, “transformative”—and vital.
The exhibition With Passion and Purpose: Gifts from the Collection of Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson, on view at the museum until October 5, features sixty paintings and sculptures from the collection. The donation spans one hundred years and features works by well-known artists, including Jacob Lawrence and Kara Walker, and more obscure artists like Moe Booker and Alonzo Davis. The collection is diverse in style, subject matter, and genre, featuring representational portraits to abstract paintings.
The four galleries that make up With Passion and Purpose are curated by Kanitra Fletcher, associate curator of African American and Afro-Diasporic Art; Shelley Langdale, curator and head of the department of modern prints and drawings; Claudia Watts, research assistant; and Emily Wehby, curatorial assistant, all of the National Gallery of Art. Vibrant abstract works greet the viewer upon arrival, setting up for a dynamic exhibition of varied artistic styles and subjects. While many artworks express narratives about Black America, not all of them take on such an arduous task; others celebrate beauty and joy. Artworks like Mento, 1968 by Mavis Pusey and Untitled, 1971 by Daniel LaRue Johnson exude the transformative nature of the post-civil rights moment they were created in. Other artworks like Sweeping Beauty, 1997 by Alison Saar and New York Rail, 1993 by Radcliffe Bailey illustrate Black life by expressing narratives that speak to harsh historical realities.
Sweeping Beauty, a woodcut on Okawara Natural Paper, depicts the figure of a pregnant nude woman positioned upside down, rendered in yellow pigment against a red and black background. The play on the classic children’s story Sleeping Beauty is evident, but Saar subverts the stereotypical female figure who is required to be chaste and dainty. The bold colors defy misogynist desires for women to be demure. For Black women, being modest was not always a choice, as from the time African women stepped onto American soil in the 1600s, they were relegated to chattel, and poked, prodded, and examined as such. Saar’s artwork of the nude figure might be also reckoning with the reality that Black women for so long were domestics made to clean and sweep. In these roles, Black women were not respected for their full humanity, and they were often forced to succumb to unwanted advances from their enslavers and bosses. Saar’s artwork is layered: her depiction of a fertility goddess highlights the notion that Black women birthed a workforce, and the figure’s hair sweeping the floor alludes to domestic servitude.
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With Passion and Purpose: Black Collectors Complicate Western Art Culture
on artessay
Shantay Robinson
Alison Saar
Sweeping Beauty,1997
3-color woodcut on Okawara Natural Paper
overall: 193.04 × 83.82 cm (76 × 33 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Promised Gift of Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson
© Alison Saar. Courtesy of L.A. Louver, Venice, CA
In April of this year, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC announced that it received a substantial gift of more than one hundred seventy artworks by Black American artists from art collectors Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson. “The breadth of artistic achievement across media and styles in this transformative gift enriches the story of American art that we can share with our visitors,” Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art, stated in the press release. The National Gallery of Art collection includes one hundred sixty thousand artworks that span the history of Western art from the Middle Ages to the contemporary moment, but although the collection covers a huge period of time, its holdings are not as diverse as the people who live and work in the Western world. The Thompsons’ gift is the largest gift of Black art the museum has ever received, and because Western art is so heavily Eurocentric, the Thompsons’ gift is, indeed, “transformative”—and vital.
The exhibition With Passion and Purpose: Gifts from the Collection of Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson, on view at the museum until October 5, features sixty paintings and sculptures from the collection. The donation spans one hundred years and features works by well-known artists, including Jacob Lawrence and Kara Walker, and more obscure artists like Moe Booker and Alonzo Davis. The collection is diverse in style, subject matter, and genre, featuring representational portraits to abstract paintings.
The four galleries that make up With Passion and Purpose are curated by Kanitra Fletcher, associate curator of African American and Afro-Diasporic Art; Shelley Langdale, curator and head of the department of modern prints and drawings; Claudia Watts, research assistant; and Emily Wehby, curatorial assistant, all of the National Gallery of Art. Vibrant abstract works greet the viewer upon arrival, setting up for a dynamic exhibition of varied artistic styles and subjects. While many artworks express narratives about Black America, not all of them take on such an arduous task; others celebrate beauty and joy. Artworks like Mento, 1968 by Mavis Pusey and Untitled, 1971 by Daniel LaRue Johnson exude the transformative nature of the post-civil rights moment they were created in. Other artworks like Sweeping Beauty, 1997 by Alison Saar and New York Rail, 1993 by Radcliffe Bailey illustrate Black life by expressing narratives that speak to harsh historical realities.
Sweeping Beauty, a woodcut on Okawara Natural Paper, depicts the figure of a pregnant nude woman positioned upside down, rendered in yellow pigment against a red and black background. The play on the classic children’s story Sleeping Beauty is evident, but Saar subverts the stereotypical female figure who is required to be chaste and dainty. The bold colors defy misogynist desires for women to be demure. For Black women, being modest was not always a choice, as from the time African women stepped onto American soil in the 1600s, they were relegated to chattel, and poked, prodded, and examined as such. Saar’s artwork of the nude figure might be also reckoning with the reality that Black women for so long were domestics made to clean and sweep. In these roles, Black women were not respected for their full humanity, and they were often forced to succumb to unwanted advances from their enslavers and bosses. Saar’s artwork is layered: her depiction of a fertility goddess highlights the notion that Black women birthed a workforce, and the figure’s hair sweeping the floor alludes to domestic servitude.
Radcliffe Bailey
NY Rail (Transportation), 1993
cut-and-pasted offset printed paper and painted paper, acrylic paint, and blue crayon on wove paper
sheet: 45.8 x 58.9 cm (18 1/16 x 23 3/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Gift of Larry D. and Brenda A. Thompson
2023.145.14
Radcliffe Bailey, who passed away in 2023 and is known for telling Black American narratives through his artwork, is represented here by the six separate paintings that make up his NY Rail. Like Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, this artwork depicts the migration of Black people from the south and the Caribbean to parts of the United States. For NY Rail (Transportation), Bailey uses an archival photograph of Black people boarding a train, overlayed with a grid of colorful acrylic paint and a depiction of tree limbs with leaves. In NY Rail (Boats Arriving), he paints three and a half row boats, with the word “Mississippi,” “Jamaica,” and “Cuba” written on the sides of them, telling where and how Black people migrated. The background is in coordination with the other paintings in the series, as they incorporate the orange, blue, yellow, and green painted horizontal stripes depicting water and the landscape. In other artworks, NY Rail (Bird of Death) and NY Rail (Death of Infant), the artist illustrates the unfortunate trials faced during the migration. Though optimism drove the migrants, they still faced challenges that led to death in Northern cities, from mob violence to unhealthy environments in ghettos.
Without the stewardship of Black art collectors from the beginning of the early twentieth century when Black art burgeoned due to the New Negro Movement, commonly known as the Harlem Renaissance, the preservation of Black art would not have happened, and the art would be lost. During the early twentieth century, instead of exhibiting in downtown New York museums and galleries, Black artists exhibited their work in libraries, churches, and private homes. In 1921, the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem held its first exhibition by African American artists. The library became a focal point for the Harlem Renaissance. Today, the library is known as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, after Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, who was fundamental to the movement and in 1926 contributed his collection of more than four thousand books to the library for $10,000 furnished by the Carnegie Corporation. Black American artists were excluded from the art establishment largely until the mid to late twentieth century when postmodern conceptual art started to become popular. Because of this exclusion, museum collections around the country lack art that represents historical Black narratives. But today, museums are beginning to acquire art that fills the historical gaps in their collections through the generosity of collectors like the Thompsons, University of Georgia emeritus trustees, who have been collecting art since 1980. In 2011, they donated one hundred artworks to the Georgia Museum of Art, and in 2008, they gifted thirty nine artworks to the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park. Collectors Walter O. and Linda Evans, who hold one of the largest collections of Black art, gifted the Telfair Museums thirty artworks; Seteria and Najee Dorsey, founders of Black Art in America, gifted the Columbus Museum fifteen artworks; and Constance E. Clayton, an educator and civic leader who collected Black art over fifty years, gifted the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art more than seventy artworks.
Without Black art collectors, so much of the artwork by Black artists would be forgotten. With the loss of the physical art, the impalpable sensibilities of Black life throughout varied stages of history would not be preserved. Black collectors have cared for their collections and also contributed to the dissemination of the art and ideas through gifts to institutions that benefit from the inclusion of Black history. These Black collectors who steward Black art are making judgments on what should be preserved in a field that is dominated by western culture’s Eurocentric gaze. And though Black collectors have gifted historically Black institutions, including Clark Atlanta University, Hampton Unviersity, and Howard University, with artworks throughout African American art’s history, it is notable that the Thompsons are Black collectors making a profound contribution to one of the most highly regarded collections in the United States—the National Gallery of Art.
Shantay Robinson, educator and art writer, lives in Northern Virginia. Her work has appeared regularly in ARTnews, Smithsonian Magazine, Black Art in America, and other notable publications where she primarily writes about Black Art. She holds a PhD in Writing and Rhetoric from George Mason University."
hopkinsreview.com/features/with-passion-and-purpose-shant...
2022-07-30: President of the African Development Bank Group, Dr. Akinwumi A. Adesina sharing a stage with (L-R), H.E. Hajia Alima Mahama, Ambassador of the Republic of Ghana; Kamil Olufowobi, CEO, Most Influential People of African Descent (MIPAD) and the officials during the 97th Annual Convention and Exposition of the National Bar Association in Memphis, Tennessee.
A landmark exhibition celebrating 100 years of Picasso’s ground breaking painting The Three Dancers (1925). Bringing together over 50 works by one of the 20th century’s most influential artists, the exhibition delves into the role of performance in Picasso’s creative practice. Coinciding with Tate Modern’s 25th anniversary, Theatre Picasso continues the gallery’s tradition of reimagining the legacies of pivotal art historical figures. The exhibition opens on the 17th September until 12th April 2026.
Photos taken at the press preview.
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An evening of celebration in honor of the 25 Most Influential Asian Americans in Georgia on Sept 17, 2015 at Sonesta Gwinnett Place. Keynote speaker was Mr Douglas Hooker, Executive Director, Atlanta Regional Commission.
An annual celebration honoring 25 Most Influential Asian Americans in Georgia and Asian American Spirit at Sonesta Gwinnett Place on July 12, 2016.
Nude Study - 1939
Lee Krasner (American, 1908 - 1984)
"Nude Study (Cubistic)" was done when Krasner was still a student of Hans Hofmann, the most influential teacher of his day in New York. A German who had worked in France, Hofmann had brought the School of Paris to New York. Krasner recalled the routine of the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts: "The classes were conducted in the most orderly sense. You drew from a model on a platform in the morning, and you drew a still life in the afternoon. You had the model again if you went to the evening class." (1) Krasner’s drawing is characteristic of Hofmann’s approach. The model is transformed into a series of planes that evolve from the constant erasing and reworking of the lines. Thus the work is more about the process of creation than about the product itself, and one may discern within it the creative mind of the artist at work.
This work was part of a series on which Krasner labored from the late 1930s until the early 1940s, producing many charcoal drawings of both male and female nudes. A prototype for those works was Picasso’s 1931 series of paintings of Marie-Thérèse Walter, in which his young mistress is metamorphosed into both a still life and the landscape surrounding her. Picasso’s Still Life on a Table from that series was exhibited in a 1939 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, where Krasner could have seen it. She adopted Picasso’s Cubist structure as well as his characteristic heavy black lines. (2)
When Piet Mondrian, the Dutch artist who pioneered pure abstraction, saw a Cubist still-life by Krasner at the annual American Abstract Artists exhibition in New York in 1941, he complimented her on the strength of her own "inner rhythm.” (3) That rhythmic, swinging characteristic of Krasner’s early drawings is even more apparent in her later work. One of the lessons that Hofmann taught her early on was that art has to express a definable rhythmic quality. Krasner remained mindful of that lesson throughout her artistic career: "I never violate an inner rhythm. I loathe to force anything . . . . I don't know if the inner rhythm is Eastern or Western. I know it is essential for me. I listen to it and I stay with it. I have always been this way." (4)
Although she painted many fine works while married to Pollock, Krasner really came into her own as an artist after Pollock's death. In 1956 she moved into the barn studio at their home near East Hampton, Long Island, increased the scale and intensity of her work, and tapped the more personal content that had been repressed and dormant during her marriage.
During the next quarter century, Krasner drove dynamically through a number of style shifts, achieving at her peak a powerful, dramatic, and at times disturbing imagery based on the forces of nature. Krasner's cubist background had given her a strong sense of how to manage her pictorial field as a whole. She should not be dismissed as a minor talent, working under the shadow of a great artist. Rather, her early work tells us that she was a deeply committed artist struggling with various styles and concepts long before she met Pollock.
Lee Krasner was born Lenore Krasner in Brooklyn. Her parents were Jewish immigrants from Odessa, Russia. She attended the all-girls Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, where she majored in art, and the Women’s Art School of Cooper Union, from which she graduated in 1929. Krasner also studied at the Art Students League (1928), National Academy of Design (1929-32), and City College (1933), all in New York City. From 1936 to 1940 she studied with the influential teacher and Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann.
Krasner worked as a supervisor on the WPA Mural Project in the mid-1930s, when she and Harold Rosenberg were assistants to the muralist Max Spivak. She was also an active member of the Artists’ Union and the American Abstract Artists group.
Through her participation in an exhibition at New York’s McMillen Gallery exhibition in 1941, she met the artist Jackson Pollock. To some, her 1945 marriage to Pollock was Krasner’s claim to fame. Yet Krasner was considered a formidable and well-connected artist at the time of her marriage, and she was actually important in the promotion of Pollock’s career. Krasner allowed her art to languish while she cultivated contacts for Pollock; she later referred to that time as her blackout period. Yet she never stopped painting, even during the most turbulent years of her marriage. Sadly, that marriage came to an abrupt end with Pollock’s death in an automobile accident in 1956.
Krasner’s first solo exhibition was at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, in 1951, and her second, at the Stable Gallery, New York, in 1955. Her first retrospective exhibition was held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1965; her first United States retrospective was at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1983. Today she is considered one of the most important first-generation Abstract Expressionists.
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"Acknowledged as the first museum in the world dedicated solely to collecting American art, the NBMAA is renowned for its preeminent collection spanning three centuries of American history. The award-winning Chase Family Building, which opened in 2006 to critical and public acclaim, features 15 spacious galleries which showcase the permanent collection and upwards of 25 special exhibitions a year featuring American masters, emerging artists and private collections. Education and community outreach programs for all ages include docent-led school and adult tours, teacher services, studio classes and vacation programs, Art Happy Hour gallery talks, lectures, symposia, concerts, film, monthly First Friday jazz evenings, quarterly Museum After Dark parties for young professionals, and the annual Juneteenth celebration. Enjoy Café on the Park for a light lunch prepared by “Best Caterer in Connecticut” Jordan Caterers. Visit the Museum Shop for unique gifts. Drop by the “ArtLab” learning gallery with your little ones. Gems not to be missed include Thomas Hart Benton’s murals “The Arts of Life in America,” “The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy, September 11, 2001” by Graydon Parrish,” and Dale Chihuly’s “Blue and Beyond Blue” spectacular chandelier. Called “a destination for art lovers everywhere,” “first-class,” “a full-size, transparent temple of art, mixing New York ambience with Yankee ingenuity and all-American beauty,” the NBMAA is not to be missed."
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The NBMAA collection represents the major artists and movements of American art. Today it numbers about 8,274 paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and photographs, including the Sanford B.D. Low Illustration Collection, which features important works by illustrators such as Norman Rockwell, Howard Pyle, and Maxfield Parrish.
Among collection highlights are colonial and federal portraits, with examples by John Smibert, John Trumbull, John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, and the Peale family. The Hudson River School features landscapes by Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Martin Johnson Heade, John Kensett, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Church. Still life painters range from Raphaelle Peale, Severin Roesen, William Harnett, John Peto, John Haberle, and John La Farge. American genre painting is represented by John Quidor, William Sidney Mount, and Lilly Martin Spencer. Post-Civil War examples include works by Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, George de Forest Brush, and William Paxton, and 19 plasters and bronzes by Solon Borglum. American Impressionists include Mary Cassatt, Theodore Robinson, John Henry Twachtman, J. Alden Weir, Willard Metcalf, and Childe Hassam, the last represented by eleven oils. Later Impressionist paintings include those by Ernest Lawson, Frederck Frieseke, Louis Ritman, Robert Miller, and Maurice Prendergast.
Other strengths of the twentieth-century collection include: sixty works by members of the Ash Can School; significant representation by early modernists such as Alfred Maurer, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Max Weber; important examples by the Precisionists Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Preston Dickinson, and Ralston Crawford; a broad spectrum of work by the Social Realists Ben Shahn, Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Jack Levine; and ambitious examples of Regionalist painting by Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, and Thomas Hart Benton, notably the latter’s celebrated five-panel mural, The Arts of Life in America (1932).
Works by the American Abstract Artist group (Stuart Davis, Ilya Bolotowsky, Esphyr Slobodkina, Balcomb Greene, and Milton Avery) give twentieth-century abstraction its place in the collection, as do later examples of Surrealism by artists Kay Sage and George Tooker; Abstract Expressionism (Lee Krasner, Giorgio Cavallon, Morris Graves, Robert Motherwell, Sam Francis, Cleve Gray), Pop and Op art (Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, Robert Indiana, Tom Wesselman, Jim Dine), Conceptual (Christo, Sol LeWitt), and Photo-Realism (Robert Cottingham). Examples of twentieth-century sculpture include Harriet Frishmuth, Paul Manship, Isamu Noguchi, George Segal, and Stephen DeStaebler. We continue to acquire contemporary works by notable artists, in order to best represent the dynamic and evolving narrative of American art.
An annual celebration honoring 25 Most Influential Asian Americans in Georgia and Asian American Spirit at Sonesta Gwinnett Place on July 12, 2016.
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An evening of celebration in honor of the 25 Most Influential Asian Americans in Georgia on Sept 17, 2015 at Sonesta Gwinnett Place. Keynote speaker was Mr Douglas Hooker, Executive Director, Atlanta Regional Commission.
An evening of celebration in honor of the 25 Most Influential Asian Americans in Georgia on Sept 17, 2015 at Sonesta Gwinnett Place. Keynote speaker was Mr Douglas Hooker, Executive Director, Atlanta Regional Commission.