31 March 2008

from Afterellen.com (thanks, Deb):


EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY, DON'T IT?
Noted photographer Charzette Torrence's exhibit Just as We Are, a collection of 36 black-and-white portraits of LGBT Americans of all walks of life that toured the country in 2006, is set to open again in Ferndale, Mich., on April 4, 2008.

Charzette "Charlie T" Torrence

The tour includes portraits of people such as poet Staceyann Chin, NBA star John Amaechi and HIV activist June Washington. Check the news section on JustAsWeAreTour.org to keep an eye on when it might be coming to a city near you.

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Race Conference at Monmouth University, November 2008
Seeking papers, panels, workshops, on race from multiple disciplines.
Contact hwilliam@monmouth.edu for questions.

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27 March 2008

Ijaba Films
Presents...
Shades of Love:
Black Homosexuality
Where to Buy...

Buy Volume One
Buy Volume Two
Buy Volume Three
Our partners:

Amazon.com


ZawadiBooks.com


createspace.com


africansupermarket.com


6colourclique.com


ukblackout.com


curvemag.com


redbonepress.com


zami.org


ijabafilms.com

Shades of Love: Black Homosexuality is a trilogy of documentaries that express the experiences and problems of black homosexuals.

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Volume One

Volume one dispels the myth about the origin of homosexuality among those of African descent. It exposes the many misconceptions that there was no homosexuality in pre-colonial Africa and that homosexuality was introduced to Africans by Europeans. This volume also brings into the open the rampant racism within the LGBT communities. It exposes the hypocrisy among those invoking the spirit of the civil rights movement in an effort to obtain gay rights, who, while doing so, are ferociously practicing the same racism that sparked the civil rights movement of days past.



------------------------------------------------------------------------

Volume Two

This is Volume 2 of the three volume documentary, "Shades Of love: Black Homosexuality". This volume covers HIV in the black community and each participant discusses what it's like to be black and gay.


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Volume Three

This is the final volume of the trilogy of documentaries "Shades Of Love: Black Homosexuality". This volume features the life stories of a wonderful group of proud, black, gay and lesbian sistahs and brothas and one heterosexual sistah who speaks about what life was like being raised by a lesbian mother.

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upcoming exhibitions--UPDATED

I generally don't do much self-promotion here, ironically, but since I have work in a show that just opened and one about to open I thought I ought to do my duty (and I finally updated this info on my site, too):

"Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body," Hood Museum of Art Dartmouth, New Hampshire 04.01 - 08.10.2008

"Hood Explores Views of Black Womanhood Through Time and Across Continents" (Art Daily review)

"Double Exposure: African Americans Before and Behind the Camera," Museum of the African Diaspora San Francisco, CA 06.19 - 09.28.2008

"Land Rits: Land at the Confluence of Human Cultures," Northlight Gallery, Arizona State University, Tempe 02.18 - 04.05.2008

"Image and Identity," Southeast Museum of Photography Daytona Beach, Florida 03.01 - 05.23.2008

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25 March 2008


The closing reception of my solo show and the After Dark DiVa Art Fair Block Party is THURSDAY March 27, 6 - 10 pm, not Friday.


SIMONE LEIGH
RUSH ARTS GALLERY PROJECT SPACE
526 West 26th Street, 311, Open Feb 1 - March 29th
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Friday 11am - 6pm, Saturday 1-6pm
212.691.9552


CLOSING RECEPTION THURSDAY MARCH 27TH, 6-10 PM
WORKS-IN-PROGRESS
MARCH 28 AND 29TH
Studios are located at 200 Hudson Street, 4th floor just south of Canal. A/C/1 to Canal St. Photo ID
Friday and Saturday 12 - 5PM
YOU MUST RSVP
here's the link:


ETHNOGRAPHIES OF THE FUTURE
ROTUNDA GALLERY
curated by Sara Reisman
33 Clinton Street
Gallery Hours Tues-Sat, noon - 6pm
Directions: A/C trains to High Str. 2/3 Clark St. 4/5 Borough Hall
M/R Court Street. 718.875.4047
through May 5th


LMCC WORKSPACE OPEN STUDIO WEEKEND
APRIL 26-28
SAT FILM/VIDEO SCREENING AT 92 Y/TRIBECA

Cheers,
Simone


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(I got this forwarded from Tina T., so I'm passing it along)


Dear Friends,

At long last. After 6 months of working 16/7, without time even to ride on my beloved bike path beside the river, I've finally finished. My website is up and welcoming visitors.

Though some of you may be busy, I hope you can still drop by. My goal is to get the site up to the top of my Google search. . . above the outdated materials from the Thomas Erben Gallery. . . as quickly as possible, and every hit counts! The site is at: http://lorraineogrady.com/

It is designed to be a teachable website that places my images and writings in their full conceptual context. But it contains more personal info as well, with interviews, bios, and pics. And there will be a blog where I can extend the interaction with visitors.

Thank you for visiting the site. Please feel free to forward this to anyone who might be interested.

Love,
Lorraine

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haven't seen it yet, but...

I was excited to get this from Amazon. I have an essay in this volume and work in the accompanying exhibition, which just opened.

Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Boo) by Barbara Thompson (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Boo) will be released on April 1, 2008. You can pre-order yours at a savings of $18.50 by following the link below.

Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Boo) Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body (Weyerhaeuser Environmental Boo)
Barbara Thompson
List Price:$50.00
Price: $31.50
You Save: $18.50 (37%)

Release Date: April 1, 2008



Pre-order now!

Book Description
Explorations of contemporary art have focused on issues of identity and race for some time. Few, however, have sought to investigate these themes by juxtaposing historical and contemporary frameworks. Black Womanhood examines an especially charged icon - the black female body - and contemporary artists' interventions upon historical images of black women as exotic Others, erotic fantasies, and supermaternal Mammies.

This book presents icons of the black female body as seen from three separate but intersecting perspectives: the traditional African, the colonial, and the contemporary global. The display and contemplation of such iconic images addresses complex and often competing forces of self-presentation and the representation ... Read more

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11 March 2008


March 11, 2008






Prospect.1 New Orleans



TONY FITZPATRICK Boeuf Gras, 2008,
Mixed media and collage on paper.
7 1/2 x 10 1/2 in.
Courtesy the artist and Pierogi, Brooklyn








Announces Artists for its Inaugural Biennial
and Highlights of Works to be Presented


November 1, 2008 - January 18, 2009

Additional Venues Announced

http://www.prospectneworleans.org





Dan Cameron, Director and Curator of Prospect.1 New Orleans, announced today the names of the 81 local, national, and international artists selected to participate in the inaugural edition of the biennial, on view November 1, 2008, through January 18, 2009. Hailing from 36 countries and five continents, many of these artists are creating new and original works that respond both to the locations in which they will be installed and to the city of New Orleans as a whole, for the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States.

Selected artists (in alphabetical order)
ALLORA & CALZADILLA, GHADA AMER, EL ANATSUI, JANINE ANTONI, ALEXANDRE ARRECHEA, LUIS CRUZ AZACETA, JOHN BARNES, JR., SANFORD BIGGERS, WILLIE BIRCH MONICA BONVICINI, MARK BRADFORD, CANDICE BREITZ, CAI GUO-QIANG, CAO FEI, FRANCIS CAPE, CHEN CHIEH-JEN, ADAM CVIJANOVIC, JOSE DAMASCENO, ANNE DELEPORTE, LEANDRO ERLICH, SKYLAR FEIN, ROY FERDINAND, JR., TONY FITZPATRICK, GAJIN FUJITA, RICO GATSON, KATHARINA GROSSE, TRENTON DOYLE HANCOCK, VICTOR HARRIS & FI YI YI, ARTURO HERRERA, JACQUELINE HUMPHRIES, ISAAC JULIEN, WILLIAM KENTRIDGE, LEE BUL, KALUP LINZY, SRDJAN LONCAR, RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER, DEBORAH LUSTER, JORGE MACCHI, SHAWNE MAJOR, NALINI MALANI, McCALLUM & TARRY, DAVE MCKENZIE, JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER, JULIE MEHRETU, AERNOUT MIK, BEATRIZ MILHAZES, TATSUO MIYAJIMA, YASUMASA MORIMURA, ZWELETHU MTHETHWA, WANGECHI MUTU, SHIRIN NESHAT, MARCEL ODENBACH, KAZ OSHIRO, MIGUEL PALMA, PEREJAUME, PIERRE ET GILLES, JOHN PILSON, SEBASTIÁN PREECE, NAVIN RAWANCHAIKUL, ROSÂNGELA RENNÓ, PEDRO REYES, ROBIN RHODE, STEPHEN G. RHODES, NADINE ROBINSON, CLARE E. ROJAS, KAY ROSEN, MALICK SIDIBÉ, AMY SILLMAN, NEDKO SOLAKOV, MONIKA SOSNOWSKA, JACKIE SUMELL and HERMAN WALLACE, SUPERFLEX, FIONA TAN, PASCALE MARTHINE TAYOU, FRED TOMASELLI, JANNIS VARELAS, XAVIER VEILHAN, PAUL VILLINSKI, , NARI WARD, XU BING, HAEGUE YANG

Highlights of the Biennial
A number of biennial highlights respond to the destruction wrought on the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Region in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina. Mark Bradford will create a wooden Ark utilizing the shell of a destroyed house and other discarded scraps of wood in the Lower Ninth Ward. Paul Villinski, a New York-based artist known for creating work from debris who has said he found “new, urgent purpose in the disaster of Hurricane Katrina,” will create his Emergency Response Studio, a “green”-powered mobile artist’s studio, out of a discarded, now-iconic FEMA trailer. South African photographer Zwelethu Mthethwa, who first visited New Orleans in the more immediate wake of the hurricane, returned to the Lower Ninth Ward in late 2007 to create his first photographs outside of Africa, which will debut at Prospect.1.

Highlights of the biennial also include works by artists who have selected unique locations in which to install work. Adam Cuijanovic will paint one of his murals inside an abandoned house in the Lower Ninth Ward, and Nari Ward will convert an abandoned church in the Lower Ninth Ward into an installation. Kay Rosen will transform city billboards and benches into enigmatic word-puzzles. Navin Rawanchaikul will present his New Orleans I Love Taxi Project, similar to one created in New York in 2001 with the Public Art Fund. In New Orleans, he will interview taxi drivers and weave their tales into a comic book story that he will produce and print, then distribute in city taxis during the biennial.

A number of New Orleans-born and based artists have also been selected to participate in the biennial, among them Shawne Major, who is creating three large-scale wall hangings; Willie Birch, who will present a new series of drawings; and Croatian-born, New Orleans-based sculptor Srdjan Loncar, who will erect a sculptural pile of money in front of the Old U.S. Mint and encourage the public to carry some of it away in briefcases provided at the site.

Participating Venues
Previously Announced: Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, The Historic New Orleans Collection, L9 Center for the Arts, Louisiana Artworks, The Old U.S. Mint Louisiana State Museum, The National World War II Museum, New Orleans African American Museum, New Orleans Center for Creative Arts|Riverfront, New Orleans Museum of Art, Newcomb Art Gallery at Tulane University, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

New Venues: Ashé Cultural Arts Center, The George & Leah McKenna Museum of African American Art, and Longue Vue House & Gardens.

Funding

This exhibition has been made possible with the support of Prospect.1 New Orleans Founding Benefactor Toby Devan Lewis; U.S. Biennial, Inc. Board of Directors; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.; and the Prospect.1 Kingfishers Leadership Committee.

U.S. Biennial, Inc., the nonprofit organizer of Prospect.1, continues active outreach for funds to underwrite the exhibition. To make a donation, please visit http://www.prospectneworleans.org

About Prospect.1 New Orleans:
Dan Cameron
conceived Prospect.1 New Orleans to reinvigorate the city, a historic regional artistic center, following the human, civic, and economic devastation of Hurricane Katrina. The primary goal of the biennial exhibition is to redevelop the city as a cultural destination where the visual arts are celebrated and can once again thrive. New Orleans was the first U.S. city to host a recurring international art exhibition, beginning in 1887 with the Exhibition of the Art Association of New Orleans. In this tradition, Prospect.1 will provide the public with work by 81 artists conceived and developed for the city. The largest international art biennial ever held in the United States, Prospect.1 will reach an estimated audience of 100,000 visitors, half of whom will likely be Louisiana state residents.

For more information on Prospect.1 New Orleans, please visit http://www.prospectneworleans.org or contact U.S. Biennial, Inc. at (212) 686-5305 or info@prospectneworleans.org .


Media Contact:


Kellie Honeycutt
Blue Medium, Inc.
T: (212) 675-1800
F: (212) 675-1855
E: kellie@bluemedium.com











53 Ludlow street
New York, NY 10002, USA

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05 March 2008

Venus, Venus, everywhere

Wow, so yesterday Deb sends me this link to "Sara Baartman (The Original Video Vixen)" (I see where she was going with it, but seriously, why are none of the images in focus?); then I get my Bitch magazine and read about feminist porn director Venus Hottenot; and then today Stephanie send me this (thanks, Deb & Stephanie):

Commentary: The Media, Aided by Sisters in Hip-Hop Videos, is Creating Hottentot Venuses for a New Generation

Date: Wednesday, March 05, 2008
By: Tonyaa Weathersbee, BlackAmericaWeb.com

I learned something last week. And it's still troubling me.

Tim Reid, the actor and director known for his roles in the 1970s series "WKRP in Cincinnati" and later in "Frank's Place" and "Sister, Sister," recently walked an audience at North Carolina A&T State University through a presentation on how film and media has been used to keep black people mired in stereotypes to assure white audiences of their otherness.

He started out talking about "Birth of a Nation," that 1915 film that put white America on a perpetual red alert about black men by portraying them as "violent, wild-eyed bucks" whose only hope of being controlled rested with the Ku Klux Klan.

He moved on to the mammy and coon characters that reassured white audiences that despite the savagery that was ever-present in black people, most were really happy, docile types eager to serve up food or laughs.

Then Reid brought up the Hottentot Venus.

I'd always known about her, but I thought she was an "it." I thought she was a piece of African sculpture with exaggerated buttocks and breasts.

The Hottentot Venus had a name -- Saartje Baartman. She was a descendant of the Khoi Khoi tribe in South Africa who found work in the home of a Boer farmer whose brother, Peter Cezar, took a fascination to her protruding buttocks and exotic skin.

Not unlike the male rap provocateurs of today, Cezar and a British surgeon, Peter Dunlop, decided that her posterior could turn big profits for them. So in 1810, they took her to London, dressed her in a revealing silk sheath and, as one would do with an animal or object, put her on exhibit in a cage at the Piccadilly circus. Crowds came six days a week to leer at Baartman and touch her backside, as her handlers billed her as being "sex incarnate."

Baartman ultimately wound in Paris, where she drank herself to death by age 26. But her death led to more indignity.

When she died, her body was cast and dissected. Baartman's brain and sexual organs -- which scientists used to craft racist theories comparing black people to apes -- were immersed in formaldehyde and displayed in Paris' Museum of Natural History until Nelson Mandela brought her remains back to South Africa in 2002.

The idea of any woman being reduced to the sum of her parts to the point where even death isn't enough to end her exploitation troubled me.

But what troubles me more is how the media today, with the help of single-minded black women blinded by the lure of money and their ignorance of history, is creating a new generation of Hottentot Venuses.

There's Buffy the Body, whose videos show her preening and smiling as a man rubs her enormous buttocks in baby oil, and she claps her butt cheeks, seemingly in gratitude. There's Lola Luv, whose disproportionately large derriere seems more the stuff of a side show than a display of sexiness.

They are the new Hottentot women. And while some may argue that their decision to display their bodies for money is the same as what Playboy centerfolds or Sports Illustrated swimsuit models do, I disagree.

Playboy centerfolds and Sports Illustrated swimsuit models tend to be put on pedestals and treated like goddesses. The Buffys and Lolas of the world are treated like freaks. Like the Hottentot Venus, they are viewed not just as oddities, but as convenient reminders to racists that black women are naturally filled with savage, unbridled sexuality; the kind that's aggressive, not submissive -- and therefore, the kind that can only be kept in check by constant sex.

Whether they want the sex or not.

It is that kind of thinking that gave slave owners the excuse to sexually exploit black women. But there are no more slave owners. There's only slave thinking.

That's the kind of thinking I imagine must be involved when women like Buffy and Lola -- women who have far more opportunities than Baartman ever had -- decide that their buttocks is the only asset on their body worth developing.

It's sad to see them relishing being part of a freak show than rejecting it and, with the help of Black Entertainment Television, reviving racist thoughts about sexual wantonness in black women. That so many young black women shrug at performing in videos in which they are called freaks, bitches and ho's; titles rooted more in misogyny than in endearment.

All black women ought to read up on Saartje Baartman. So the next time they look at Buffy the Body or Lola Luv or any other scantily clad, large-bottomed sister gyrating in a rap video, they should picture whether, when it's all said and done, all that self-denigration will land them atop a media pedestal.

Or, like the Hottentot Venus, in a cage.

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04 March 2008



Southeast Museum of Photography
Daytona Beach, Florida
Saturday, March 1, 2008
5:00-7:00 pm.
Opening Reception for Image & Identity.
Free and open to the public. No reservations required.


Image and Identity explores the influence of ethnicity, individual biography, cultural identity and social context on the function, meaning and execution of artworks. In the summer of 2007, the Southeast Museum of Photography, with sponsorship from a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, held its first ever Summer School in the Arts. In the program, three master artists were invited to lead a group of high school level photography and art students through three weeks of intensive artistic exploration and development. Photo works produced by the students are exhibited alongside work by their teachers in this exhibition.

Image above: "Myself as Harriet Tubman" by Alexis Calhoun

Okay, Alexis--fierce! I worked with these students last summer as part of the summer program described above. I was the first of the 3 artists to work with them, and felt like we'd just barely gotten started when my time with them was through. Yet they showed such amazing potential, creativity, and energy, and look at Miss Calhoun up there! I'm very proud!

I was supposed to attend the opening this weekend but ultimately could not, so I'm sending this cyber-congratulations to all of the students whose completed the program and whose work is in the exhibition. If you're anywhere near Daytona Beach, GO SEE THIS SHOW! And if you can go to their opening tomorrow night.