A true friend lets you experiment
#CaptionedBlackArt | Thursdaysº
Captioned Black Art
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“She’d committed one of the real ultimate sins by trying to be herself: Black. Unapologetic. Someone who told it like it was. Someone who rejected what was expected of her as a Black woman in a predominantly white industry.”
— Zakiya Dalila Harris, The Other Black Girl
A Snippet:
Did you know that, like many young Black girls, author Zakiya Dalila Harris (as a young woman) struggled with the decision of “relaxing” her hair vs. wearing it natural?
Harris stated, “I wouldn’t think to change [my hair style] until more than a decade later, when I moved to Brooklyn for graduate school. Everywhere I went, it seemed, I ran into a protest or a deeply disturbing headline about another police officer who’d killed a Black person without any repercussions. The unrest in the city was palpable, and I was starting to feel it in my own bones. It began to affect what I wrote, what I cared about. And it affected how I saw myself.”
Learn more . . .
28. “A Friend” (2012)
“It gives me pause when people ask me what I do, because there are so many different avenues that my work has gone down . . . I’ve always left it open as to how I work in different mediums and try not to put too many boundaries on what I do. It’s more about experimenting or the process of making that matters.”
— Lorna Simpson
Did you know?
Did you know that when Lorna Simpson (BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, New York; MFA from the University of California, San Diego) completed her graduate studies at San Diego in 1985, she was already considered a pioneer of conceptual photography?
Her initial body of work helped incite a significant shift in the view of photographic art—in terms of “transience and malleability.”
The artist Glenn Ligon, one of Lorna Simpson’s good friends, once quipped, ‘There’s a joke about a friend being someone who will help you move. But a true friend is someone who will help you move a body. Lorna is a true friend.’”
In fact, Lorna Simpson’s daughter, Zora, an up-and-coming actress and artist in her own right, describes her mom as her “best friend.”
29. “Screaming Into The Ether” (2020)
“As a young artist, there’s certain things that happen along the way; it’s not just you. There are instructors and people along the way that help you get to where you are, and you have to at least acknowledge that.”
— Gary Simmons
Did you know?
Did you know that Gary Simmons (who received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1988, and his MFA from CalArts in 1990) began working on his ‘erasure drawings’ in the late 1980s?
At the time, Gary Simmons’s studio was located in an abandoned school in New York, which was littered with blackboards. Using his hands to blur white chalk, leaving residue that evokes a sense of loss, Simmons ‘erasure drawings’ seek (then and now) to express the lasting power of memory—surviving all kinds of erasure techniques.
For Simmons, “The act of erasure is a reflection on Black social and cultural narratives, providing a means by which to retrace, reclaim and reconstruct African American histories.”
30. “The Safety Patrol” (2018)
“I’m really interested just in the value scale: What is light? What is medium? What is dark? And what is the deepest dark?”
— Bisa Butler
Did you know?
Did you know that Bisa Butler (b. 1973) is an American fiber artist who creates quilts that look like paintings?
Although quilting has long been considered a craft, Butler’s methods have catapulted quilting into the world of fine art!
Trained as a painter at Howard University in Washington, DC, Butler shifted to a textile-based practice to add “vibrancy and dimension” she found lacking in her paintings.
It’s been noted that, “Fabrics offered Butler a practical way to pursue art making while pregnant with her daughter, when oil paints and thinners proved too toxic.”
”In turning to textiles, Butler also connected with her family history; she had learned to sew at a young age from her mother and grandmother.”
Butler made her first portrait quilt, Francis and Violette (her grandparents), while earning her master’s degree in arts education at Montclair State University, New Jersey.
Save for when you need that shoulder to lean on (or cry on . . .)
(Breathe In . . . Breathe Out)
A true friend lets you experiment
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