Georgia Trees & The Upper Room
Quotes and Black Art | Thursdaysº
Quotes and Black Art
Your Curated Art Museum
“Come for the art, stay for the quotes.”
“She comes to me in snatches—I remember pieces of her laugh, the look she gave when she was upset. Sometimes I sniff the bottle of perfume of hers that I saved, but it doesn’t come close to the robustness of her smell. It is her, flattened. This is what it’s really like to lose. It is complete and irreversible.”
— Zinzi Clemmons
A Snippet:
Did you know that What We Lose, the 2017 debut by American author Zinzi Clemmons, is based loosely on the author’s experience of caring for her mother dying of cancer?
Learn more . . .
202. “Self-Portrait” (1934)
“I have tried to show the escape of emotions which the plantation slaves felt after being held down all day by the grind of labor and the consciousness of being bound. Set free from their tasks by the end of the day and the darkness, they have gone from their cabin to the river’s edge and are calling upon their God for their freedom.”
— Malvin Gray Johnson
“In my opinion, he clearly is the most significant artist to come out of Greensboro, North Carolina. He aspired to be an artist when it wasn’t the most acceptable thing for an African American to do. He developed a stylistic direction that was truly original. I often wonder, had he lived a few more years, what might have been.”
- Kenneth G. Rodgers (on Malvin Gray Johnson)
Did you know?
Did you know that Malvin Gray Johnson and fellow artist Earle Richardson had planned to say much about the history and promise of Black folk in their mural series “Negro Achievement” - slated to be installed, in the mid to late 1930s, in the New York Public Library’s 135th Street branch, but neither young man lived long enough to complete the project?
Both men worked and painted commissions for the Federal Art Project of the New Deal during the Depression but, sadly, both ended up dying too young.
After Johnson’s sudden illness and death in November 1934 (at age 38), Earle Richardson continued to work on their mutual mural, but within a year he too was dead; ill with fever and heart-broken over the death of Johnson, who had been his lover, Richardson leapt from his fourth-floor apartment in New York and died of his injuries a year later (in 1935).
In describing one of his most popular works, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” Johnson once said, “I have tried to show the escape of emotions which the plantation slaves felt after being held down all day by the grind of labor and the consciousness of being bound.”
203. “Until I Die | Georgia Trees & The Upper Room” (1997)
“I’ve always felt, like, the only way I can heal myself is to go back through my memory, learn from memory.”
— Radcliffe Bailey
Did you know?
Did you know that one of Radcliffe Bailey’s most iconic works (“Windward Coast”) is composed of hundreds of discarded piano keys?
Bailey was quoted as saying that he was thinking about, “Sounds that come together; things that bond people” when creating Windward Coast.
The “undulating keys” are arranged to resemble the turbulent sea of the Middle Passage - the waves represented by musical symbols.
However, beneath the surface of Bailey’s work can be found broader themes of Water (“The Black Atlantic Passage as a site of historical trauma”), Blues (“The importance of music as a transcendent art form”), and Blood (“Ideas related to ancestry, race, memory, struggle, and sacrifice”), somehow illuminating a pathway towards healing from ancestor trauma.
204. “Be” (2022)
“Take your time, do what you love, be honest with yourself and others around you.”
— Shantell Martin
Did you know?
Did you know that Shantell Martin (a Southeast London philosopher, visual artist, and cultural facilitator best known for her large-scale, black-and-white line drawings) performs many of her works for a live audience?
”I’m a huge procrastinator so I don’t like a lot of time for projects. When you have that time, you think too much, you hesitate, you plan, you doubt,” Martin has said.
“I prefer to work with an audience because if there’s an audience watching me draw, I go for the most vulnerable, honest decisions since there’s no time to do anything else.”
Be At Rest (Rest In Peace).
(Breathe In . . . Breathe Out)
Georgia Trees & The Upper Room
My STEM Grew Petals - A Newsletter
Next issue is next Thursday:
11am (Pacific), 2pm (Eastern)
Like Quotes?
Follow on Instagram (at Quotes and Black Art)
Made in Silicon Valley (with love) by author Jafari Joseph.
Copyright (C) 2024 My STEM Grew Petals Publishing. All rights reserved.