Artist Betye Saar on a Sordid History

Betye Saar’s success relies on her exceptional ability to reconsider master narratives through revised visualizations of history. She is an artist whose work is political but not overwrought, small but not insignificant, gentle but not pliant. She’s also someone who, despite international recognition, lacks the acclaim she deserves. Although her work is present in virtually every museum collection from LACMA to MoMA, Saar’s last major institutional survey show in the US occurred almost 40 years ago in 1980 at the Studio Museum Harlem. Fortunately, LACMA has announced that it will mount another big exhibition in 2019, called Betye Saar: Call and Response. Hopefully that show will expand upon the foundations of Keepin’ It Clean, championing Saar as a clear-eyed historian of one of America’s cruelest chapters. Via

Betye Saar: Keepin’ It Clean continues through May 27, 2019 at the New York Historical Society (170 Central Park West, Upper West Side, Manhattan).
Author, Small Press Publisher, Mosaic Artist, maybe a Poet

Comments

Post a Comment
Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.
~Kahlil Gibran (1883 –1931), Lebanese American artist, poet, and writer.

sexism is the primal, or first, form of oppression in humanity

Sexism is a form of oppression and domination. As author Octavia Butler put it, "Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world."

READ

Little Man Little Man

White Fragility

Reparations?

02019 and beyond - this topic is coming up and we need more information.

Popular posts from this blog

Committing to Anti-Racism in Galleries of European Art

Image
Amidst a surge in white supremacist violence across the country, the time has come to reconsider how American museums are presenting European art.
“Globalization,” “interconnectivity,” and “diversity” are more than museum “buzzwords”; they are the battles white supremacists are fighting.

BIG READ: Committing to Anti-Racism in Galleries of European Art

#Whitenationalists and American #NeoNazis want the rest of us to see them as legitimate social and political movements

Beware of #Greeks Bearing Gifts: How Neo-Nazis and Ancient Greeks Met in Charlottesville | https://t.co/hXsbHuKxXkpic.twitter.com/HzKr964XKl — Origins (@OriginsOSU) July 22, 2018
Read more

They were once America’s cruelest, richest slave traders. Why does no one know their names?

Image
They were once America’s cruelest, richest slave traders. Why does no one know their names?
Hannah Natanson, September 14, 2019, The Washington Post



The two most ruthless domestic slave traders in America had a secret language for their business.

Slave trading was a “game.” The men, Isaac Franklin and John Armfield, were daring “pirates” or “one-eyed men,” a euphemism for their penises. The women they bought and sold were “fancy maids,” a term signifying youth, beauty and potential for sexual exploitation — by buyers or the traders themselves.

Rapes happened often.

“To my certain knowledge she has been used & that smartly by a one eyed man about my size and age, excuse my foolishness,” Isaac Franklin’s nephew James — an employee and his uncle’s protege — wrote in typical business correspondence, referring to Caroline Brown, an enslaved woman who suffered repeated rape and abuse at James’s hands for five months. She was 18 at the time and just over five feet tall.

continu…
Read more

A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind

Image
Did you know...
Middle-class African American households with incomes between $50,000 and $60,000 live in neighborhoods that are more polluted than those of very poor white households with incomes below $10,000.When swallowed, a lead-paint chip no larger than a fingernail can send a toddler into a coma -- one-tenth of that amount will lower his IQ.Nearly two of every five African American homes in Baltimore are plagued by lead-based paint. Almost all of the 37,500 Baltimore children who suffered lead poisoning between 2003 and 2015 were African American.(click book cover for more) Featuring extensive scientific research and Washington's sharp, lively reporting, A Terrible Thing to Waste is sure to outrage, transform the conversation, and inspire debate.
Read more