Captioned Black Art
Your Curated Art Museum
“Come for the art, stay for the quotes.”
“‘The world takes more than its pound of flesh sometimes. It’s devised all kinds of torture, the most exquisite being a colossal indifference.’”
— Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones
A Snippet:
Did you know that a teenage Valenze “Pauline” Burke (b. 1929)—smitten with author and poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (d. 1906)—changed her middle name from Pauline to Paule (pronounced with a silent “e”) in order to honor the late-great Black poet?
Learn more . . .
67. “Ethereal”
“Through art, we have the luxury to find inspiration and beauty in everything.”
— Zeinab Fofana
Did you know?
Did you know that Zeinab Fofana's artwork has a focus on empowerment, love, Black people and culture, modern Muslim women, and abstract design?
Zeinab Fofana is a painter and illustrator from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who has been an artist since childhood, and has done various showcases, paint parties, commissioned work, illustrations, and live paintings.
ethereal [adjective] definition:
“Extremely delicate and light in a way that seems too perfect for this world.”
68. (Untitled) (2020)
“I love my job, if you want to call it that. I love what I do.”
— Henry Taylor
Did you know?
Did you know that Henry Taylor (b. 1958) grew up in Oxnard, California (same as Silk Sonic musician Anderson.Paak), where he worked as a psychiatric technician before attending the California Institute of the Arts (where he graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1995)?
From 2011, Blum & Poe, “Henry Taylor’s nuanced portraits shed a sentimental light on friends, family members, lovers and heroes, both dead and alive, real and imagined. They are generous and democratic likenesses of the people most central to his life and thought, with equal emphasis placed on a portrait of his niece and nephew in relaxed pose or a statuesque representation of Serena Williams or Jackie Robinson.”
“An acute documentarian of his community, Taylor fits squarely into the lineage of painter as social observer, channeling amongst others, Alice Neel, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, and John Singer Sargent.”
69. “Into Bondage” (1936)
“We have no axes to grind. We are primarily and intensely devoted to art.”
— Aaron Douglas
Did you know?
Did you know that artist Aaron Douglas, widely acknowledged as one of the most accomplished and influential visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, attended a segregated primary school (McKinley Elementary in Topeka, Kansas) in the early 1900s?
Following graduation, Douglas worked in a glass factory and later in a steel foundry to earn money for college.
In 1918, he enrolled at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and in 1922 earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts.
The following year he taught art at Lincoln High School in Kansas City, Missouri, and the rest (they say) is history. “Word of Douglas’s talent and ambition soon reached influential figures in Harlem, including Charles S. Johnson, who was actively recruiting young African American writers, poets, and artists from across the country to come to New York.”
“Douglas arrived in Harlem shortly after the publication of what was immediately recognized as a landmark publication: the March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic titled, ‘Harlem: Mecca for the New Negro.’ This special issue included an introductory essay by Alain Locke, intellectual founder of the New Negro movement.”
“Welcomed by the leaders of the New Negro movement, Douglas enjoyed the support of both Johnson (who arranged for him to study with German émigré artist Fritz Winold Reiss) and W.E.B. Du Bois, who gave him a job in the mailroom of The Crisis.”
“Eat well, move, stress less, and try to love more.”
(Breathe In . . . Breathe Out)
We have no axes to grind
A STEM Grew Petals Newsletter
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