Art
How Lorraine O’Grady Has Challenged a Segregated Art World
O’Grady has persistently raised questions about the lack of black representation in art and in the art world. But her latest exhibition represents a shift.
Chase Quinn
Art
Piecing Together Black Identity on Canvas
Juan Logan's work sees Black identity as both a cipher that contains the secret of America’s greatness and a constant reminder of its deepest shame.
Art
The Living History of Jacob Lawrence's 'Migration Series'
I am only one generation removed from the history of African American migrants who, between 1917 and 1970, travelled North seeking economic opportunity, education, and respite from the strictures of Jim Crow South.
Art
African Artists Take a Seat at the Table
Boundary lines make up much of the Richard Taittinger Gallery’s current exhibit, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? — lines that, like borders, criss and cross, divide and obscure.
Performance
Laughing (and Crying, and Laughing Again) About Slavery
Aside from innovative and well-executed visual effects, what makes Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play An Octoroon so remarkable is the unceasing state of anxiety in which you’re held from start to finish.
Art
Rediscovering the Roots of Black Radical Brooklyn
The energetic, jumbled print design of funkgodjazz&medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn, an exhibition by Creative Time and the Weeksville Heritage Center, strikes a bright, funkedelic chord in the mind’s eye. This is jazz; this is the casting off of the master’s linguistic tools; this is a celebration
Art
On Sochi, 'Queer' Art, Fashion, and Activism
On Friday night at the Louis B. James gallery, in a spare white room, a predominantly white and relatively good-looking American Apparelesque crowd gathered under the auspices of queer-art-fashion-activism for the launch of the Purple and Gold capsule collection.
Art
He Who Controls the Past: Highlights from "The Shadows Took Shape" at the Studio Museum
One part a literary subgenre of sci-fi, pioneered by the likes of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, and one part cross-cultural, interdisciplinary aesthetic movement, Afrofuturism — a term coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in his 1994 essay "Black to the Future"— can be tricky to describe.
Art
The Days of Future Past: Afrofuturism and Black Memory
When you walk into the main gallery of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s current exhibition The Shadows Took Shape, which explores contemporary art through the lens of Afrofuturist aesthetics, one of the first pieces to catch the eye is a glittering procession of black astronauts fanned across a faded l