I want to name them

#CaptionedBlackArt | Thursdaysº

May 22, 2025

Captioned Black Art

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“She’d learned early on about a certain unfairness in life. Some folks struggled disproportionately, carrying things that others couldn’t even lift.”
— Diane Marie Brown, Black Candle Women

A Snippet:

Did you know that Diane Marie Brown, a professor at Orange Coast College and a public health professional for the Long Beach Health Department, received a BA and a MPH (Master of Public Health) from UCLA, plus owns a degree in fiction from USC’s Master of Professional Writing Program? Incredible!

When discussing her many varied interests and accomplishments, Professor Brown commented, “I want my students to know that they can have multiple passions, that they can have multiple careers.”

Learn more . . .

Diane Marie Brown - Black Candle Women

Jafari Joseph

November 7, 2024

Read full story

205. “Indiana Hutson (bowl)” (2020)

“Surprisingly, African Americans are not thought of as farmers, even though farm work was what we were brought here to do. I read about the Southern African American Farmers Organic Network and learned that there are many multi-generational family farms in the South, owned by African Americans. I contacted several of them, asked them if I could visit, and planned a tour. In speaking with them, I saw the difficulty of staying on the land, of keeping it. I see them as nameless heroes and wanted to shed light on their anonymity, give them the recognition that is due. I wanted to name them.”

— Syd Carpenter

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Did you know?

Did you know that Syd Carpenter’s Indiana Hutson bowl is named in memory of her grandmother, who was known for her Pittsburgh garden?

Syd Carpenter, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1953, earned an MFA from Tyler School of Art, and over the course of her career, received awards from the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the National Endowment for the arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the Leeway Fellowships in the Arts.

Carpenter’s piece (Indiana Hutson) originates from her series of farm-themed ceramic bowls inspired by a long history of African Americans who worked the land.

The series is the result of Carpenter’s meticulously detailed research—visiting African American owned farms in the South and learning about the multi-generational history of each farm’s crops, sheds, tools and fences.

Each bowl in the series is named for an African American farmer from the past, honoring them as individuals who may otherwise be forgotten by history.

206. “Modern:Ancient:Brown” (2021)

“I wanted to come from a different place historically and first abandoned the paintbrush because I wanted to break the rules. I was born in a house with no bathroom nor water for nine children and two parents. There wasn’t any music or books or anything like that, so it was like I made myself up.”

— McArthur Binion

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Did you know?

Did you know that McArthur Binion, despite hardship, excelled in secondary school and college and 'made himself up'—as he describes—on his journey to becoming a prominent artist across Detroit, New York, and Chicago over a 40-year period?

Born to sharecroppers in Macon, Mississippi, in 1946, McArthur Binion grew up in a small house with a large family who migrated to Detroit in 1951 (given his father’s new job in Detroit’s burgeoning automotive industry).

Having begun his career as a writer, Binion is highly influenced by language and music, as can be seen in his titles, and his minimalist abstractions have led many to compare his work to that of Jasper Johns, Robert Ryman, or Brice Marden.

McArthur Binion received his BFA from Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, in 1971, and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 1973.

207. “Bird In Hand” (2006)

“I’ve collected archival material from black photo journals from 1939 to 1972 . . . Initially I was attracted to the magazines because the wig advertisements had a grid-like structure that interested me. But as I began looking through them, the wig ads themselves had such a language to them—so worldly—that referred to other countries . . . this sort of lost past . . . And then I realized that I also had a kind of longing for the other stories, the narratives, wanting to bring them back into the paintings and wanting the paintings to function through the characters of the ads—to function as a kind of chart or a map of this lost world.”

— Ellen Gallagher

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Did you know?

Did you know that Ellen Gallagher (a Providence, Rhode Island, product) attended Oberlin College, Ohio; artist Michael Skop’s private art school Studio 70; the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (graduating in 1992 and receiving a traveling scholar award in 1993); and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in 1993?

Gallagher’s interests in these years spanned across disciplines and time periods, including oceanography, microscopic life, popular media, the poetics of Black language.

Gallagher was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art in 2000 and began her ongoing Watery Ecstatic series the following year.

In Watery Ecstatic, she invents complex biomorphic forms that she relates to the mythical Drexciya—an undersea kingdom populated by the women and children who were the tragic casualties of the transatlantic slave trade.

“Death and life are in the power of the tongue.”

(Breathe In . . . Breathe Out)