Category Archives: African American history

  1. Women’s Suffrage and Women’s Suffering

    The Center on Contemporary Art (COCA) WHAT STORY WOULD THE UNINTENDED BENEFICIARIES TELL (WSWUBT), which closes in two days, is a wonderful small selection of artists addressing the suffrage amendment and who was left out. The artists include Carletta Carrington Wilson with a selection from her incredible Letter to a Laundress series that I have […]

  2. Jack Whitten’s Odyssey: A New Perspective

                    Jack Whitten made his name  as an abstract painter in New York City beginning in the 1970’s and had a solo exhibition in 1974 at the Whitney Museum! During the 1960s and 1970s in New York City he was friends with musicians, poets, writers, and other artists. […]

  3. Charles White: Humanist

          The huge mural by Charles White, “5 great American Negroes” overwhelms us before we even enter the Charles White retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.   In this first mural Charles White created for the government sponsored WPA mural program, Sojourner Truth leads a march of freed slaves […]

  4. Carletta Carrington Wilson’s “letter to a laundress”

            Carletta Carrington Wilson addresses her  “letter to a laundress”  to her great great grandmother, but her profound photo/poem installation currently on view at the Kittredge Gallery in Tacoma  (only until September 29) honors the work of all those who, in her words, “took in wash.”   She found photographs of anonymous […]

  5. Kerry James Marshall Maestro and Shaman

    Kerry James Marshall Retrospective glories in the humanity and history of African Americans, and confronts the prejudices of the white eye, the white museum, the white art history