On Dec. 13, 2023, during a ceremony attended by throngs of media reporters, the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, D.C. unveiled a nearly life-size oil painting of Oprah Winfrey. The painting was created by a 37-year-old Black artist from Chicago named Shawn Michael Warren. The newest painting to grace the National Portrait Gallery was commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution,…
While visiting Boston, Massachusetts in July, 2023, I visited the city’s Museum of Fine Art (MFA). Strolling through the museum’s Art of the Americas wing I happened upon the Artists of African Descent gallery. I was puzzled by an artwork I found there, an acrylic portrait painting created in the red, black, and green colors favored by black nationalists and…
The Embrace, a new sculpture dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King, has turned out to be contentious rather than unifying. Black conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas won the commission to create the monument now displayed in the Boston Common of Massachusetts. What Thomas came up with is a headless bronze structure—a jumble of…
I can’t recall such an unending fuss about a presidential portrait. The hoopla at the 2018 unveiling of the portraits of former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery was fairly understandable, but then came the media blitz. Every magazine and paper in the US celebrated the portraits. Likewise “The Obama Portraits Tour”…
On May 11, 2021 the Smithsonian Magazine ran an article with the headline, This Monumental ‘Oracle’ Statue in NYC Subverts Traditional Sculpture. Artist Sanford Biggers was being touted by the magazine as the first artist to be invited by the Rockefeller Center to take over their campus with a multimedia survey exhibition. He was also being applauded for exhibiting his…
Now that Juneteenth has become the 12th legal public holiday in the United States, I have a few words regarding the jubilee commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S., that began when Republican President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Sept. 22, 1862. I will start this short essay with a comment on the Juneteenth Commemorative Flag, which…
50 years ago on February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, New York. This short essay is a reflection on Black History Month and how the explosive social events of the 1960s helped to shape my life and viewpoint as an artist. By extension, it is also a rumination on how artists must react…
On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights activists, a 21 year-old black man from Meridian, Mississippi named James Chaney, and two white Jewish youth from New York, Andrew Goodman (21), and Michael Schwerner (25), were kidnapped and savagely murdered in Neshoba County in Philadelphia, Mississippi. They had been working in the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign to register African-American voters…
