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The article discusses the Avignon Theatre Festival, directed by Theatre actor Tiago Rodrigues, which has evolved into a political laboratory and platform for questioning identity. It reports that the festival includes works by Black French women and explores pressing issues like ecological destruction, war, immigration, racism, and patriarchy. It mentions that Rodrigues's approach disrupted the festival's traditional programming, bringing optimism and protest theater back to Avignon stages.

In this article, I conceptualize the term "black op art" to consider how black artists are centralizing speculative sensory effects as both object and subject within their work and therefore as dynamic interventions within the political, hyper-racialized, and dispossessing field of visuality. I consider themes of dispossession through a studied meditation of two works that similarly play and push on the edges of optical effects: James Baldwin (2018) by Nekisha Durrett and Requiem for Charleston (2016) by Lava Thomas. Black op art is neither about what is knowable nor enigmatic through the visual field, but rather about what lengths black artists must go to in order to work within it, as well as the ciphered language of mattering and meanings embedded within their works of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One theme in complaints from those with marginalized social identities is that they are seen primarily in terms of that identity. Some Black artists, for instance, complain about being seen as Black first and artists second. These individuals can be understood as objecting to a particularly subtle form of morally problematic attention: “relative attentional surplus on the wrong property.” This attentional surplus can coexist with another type of common problematic attention affecting these groups, including attentional deficits; marginalized individuals and groups themselves are routinely insufficiently attended to in virtue of the surplus attention given to their social identity properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The few known African American photographers in the 19th and early 20th centuries faced significant challenges, including racial prejudice and competition from white photographers for both white and the relatively few Black customers. The New Jersey photographers examined here were no exception and this may help explain why images by an artist with a long career, William M. Dutton, are so hard to find today and why other artists, like Isaiah Burton and Levi Bankson, worked only briefly in the medium before moving on to other, more remunerative occupations. Beginning his photographic career at the end of the 1800s, Albert Thomas Moore achieved considerable success in the first part of the 20th century in New Brunswick and South River but less so in Atlantic City. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author shares his reflections on the recognition of Black artists in Great Britain. Topics discussed include the increase in the number of Black artists in the Royal Academy of Arts, reasons for the difficulty in challenging white supremacy in art, and art gallery Tate Britain's disregard of Jamaican-born sculptor Ronald Moody, with the artist's reputation restored by "Tate Magazine" in its 2003 feature describing him as one of the country's most remarkable Modernist sculptor.

Mahon notes that Baker has not been the recipient of the kind of critical attention that her position as one of the first rock and roll stars warrants, such as "sustained attention in college textbooks surveying rock and roll from its beginnings in the post-World War II era to the twenty-first century" (53). While both Brooks and Neal present us with meticulous theoretical and critical work whose implications are wide ranging, Mahon's work has a more granular focus. Mahon examines how Tina Turner "wended her way into the mainstream of rock through a skillful navigation of the race, gender, and genre boundaries that governed American popular music at the end of the twentieth century" (240). In their recent books, Daphne Brooks, Maureen Mahon, and Mark Anthony Neal reckon with such questions raised by Black musicians and musical archives at a time when Black music and its influence on popular culture is both ubiquitous and contentious. [Extracted from the article]

The arts sector in South Africa is portrayed as a multiracial, emancipatory and inclusive sector that promises to reduce youth unemployment and to mitigate inequality. In postapartheid art institutions, artistic merit and perseverance are deemed to be sufficient in order to access the art sector and its market. The paths of individual black artists from poor areas who have succeeded in accessing the institutional art circuit are praised by the media, policymakers and curators. A romanticisation of their efforts is coupled with identifying them as role models for younger generations. Despite emphasis on the inclusivity of the art sector and the hailing of successful paths, black artists report a long-standing difficulty in gaining access to, and being fully accredited in, the institutional art circuit. The ambiguity of the art sector, which claims to be inclusive in word but is de facto exclusionary, deeply affects young black artists whose first steps into the art sector are often accompanied by a feeling of uneasiness and bewilderment. Drawing on the multivocal accounts of the everyday life of young black artists who work in the field of performance art in Gqeberha, this article unveils the 'entrance fees' that black artists have to negotiate in order to access the institutional art circuit, i.e. the obstacles they have to overcome, but also the deals and concessions they have to make in order to build their career and be fully recognised as artists. Moreover, the article sheds light on a double invisibility in the performing arts sector: on one side the economic, spatial and reputational obstacles that artists deal with are dismissed as part of the everyday life of individuals coming from marginal areas; on the other side, the performing arts and spaces that young black artists create within alternative or complementary circuits are not considered part of the city's artistic production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through this generic recategorization, she argues that Griggs critiques the idea of the social survey's observer in a way that Du Bois, author of the more traditional social survey I The Philadelphia Negro i , could not quite manage. Womack insists that "this is not expressly a book about Du Bois, but he haunts every chapter" (29). Womack calls his remarkable 1899 I Imperium in Imperio i "liberation sociology" and "more of a social survey than a novel" (72). [Extracted from the article]

The author discusses the 1960s Black Arts Movement, its artists and their impact on contemporary arts as of 2023. Topics covered include the artists' challenge of prevailing cultural norms and encouragement of Black self-expression of their own experiences, and the pivotal roles of visual artists Wadsworth Jarrell and Jae Jarrell who respectively founded an artists' collective, and empowered fashion via the "Revolutionary Suit." Also noted is the movement's influence on artists like Nick Cave.

Body Vessel Clay: Black Women, Ceramics and Contemporary Art set out to explore form and function as this relates to object histories. In presenting a range of ceramics and clay artworks by an intergeneration of Black women artists working with clay, the exhibition conveys the material's conceptual, transformative and metaphoric qualities. Additionally, it brings to the foreground a group of Black women artists, in particular a younger generation whose work looks to matrilineal links, black female subjectivity. The exhibition expands on my curatorial position, that of framing ceramics as an expansive and evolving field intersecting with performance art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the representations and discourses about black and white women artists in the magazines O Cruzeiro and Manchete (1950-1959), through the concept of intersectionality, imbricated with the categories of color, class and gender in historical analysis. The narratives about women artists in these magazines presented themes involving discrimination and race and gender relations, evidenced in their pages from the construction of discourses of ambiguous character about black women artists, presented under principles of hypersexualization and/or under the pure manifestation of structural and cultural racism, from the stereotyping of black female bodies. The white women artists were represented according to the standards usually imposed on women, such as the vocation to marriage and motherhood, corroborating to consolidate the stereotype of the ideal wife/woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on a painting by Los Angeles-based Black artist Mark Bradford, On a Clear Day, I Can Usually See All the Way to Watts (2001), which was exhibited at SFMOMA in an installation that juxtaposed it to a series of drawings by abstract artist Agnes Martin, Untitled (Study for 'On a Clear Day'), <> (2019–2020). In an extended reading of abstraction and its social implications and of Bradford's engagement with abstract traditions, the article explores the material traces of impurity in his contemporary non-representative visual art. In particular, it focuses on hair as complex sign of impurity, concealment, animality, decay, aesthetic beauty, etc, and of the ways in which its incorporation, materially and metonymically, in the painting disturbs the clarity of the white aesthetic gaze. The article thus considers how the material practices of certain, broadly speaking, postcolonial artists, but in particular the Black Abstraction exemplified by Bradford's work, challenge the Kantian aesthetic tradition that has dominated the visual arts even in a post-Kantian artistic realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identity of Jewish-Israeli men of Ethiopian descent has undergone deep-seated changes in the last decade, as evident in visual representations created by contemporary black artists living in Israel. In recent years, a new generation of Ethiopian-Israeli artists has revitalized local art and engendered deep changes in discourse and public life. Ethiopian-Israelis, who comprise less than two percent of the total Jewish population in the country, suffers multiple forms of oppression, especially due to their religious status and given that their visibility—as black Jews—stands out in a society that is predominantly white. This article draws links between events of the past decade and the images of men produced by these artists. It argues that the political awareness of Jewish-Ethiopians artists, generated by long-term social activism as well as police violence against their community, has greatly impacted their artistic production, broadened its diversity, and contributed a wealth of artworks to Israeli culture as a whole. Using intersectional analysis and drawing on theories from gender, migration and cultural studies, the article aims to produce a nuanced understanding of black Jewish masculinity in the ethno-national context of the state of Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How has presence transformed under recent pandemic conditions and ongoing digital saturation? José Esteban Muñoz's now classic critique of liveness illuminates the works of several contemporary Black performance artists whose work intervenes against the corporeal burdens of our moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the linguistic policing of grime and UK drill music. Existing studies often focus on the immediacy of the penal system. This article will instead explore the extent to which institutional bodies uphold and maintain a programme of racialised censorship across radio broadcasts, seeking to understand how these value judgements impact upon creative practice. It presents an ethnographic study of three radio shows that aired on BBC 1Xtra, demonstrating through interviews and analysis how the broadcaster's censorship practice unfairly renders Black artists as dangerous with criminal associations. Lyrical assertions of musical skill are misread as direct threats, while evocations of the quotidian are seen to cause violence rather than reflect artists' surroundings. Importantly, it will show how artists' work and words are adversely discriminated against owing to a legacy of racialised public morality that imposes greater sanctions and restrictions on artistic output: radio personalities must strike a balance between presenting voyeuristic excitement about a genre, and the need to meet (racialised) editorial standards; producers assiduously monitor new slang to make sure that it is censored; and artists are encouraged to self-censor and alter their musical output, to protect themselves from unwanted ramifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Later Odundo pots are displayed upstairs alongside works by Kwali and Bisila Noha. As expected, Ladi Kwali's pots reflect the examples of the Nupe and Gwari water pots, and seeing them alongside each other, the power of a single artist signature cannot be ignored. In mid-twentieth century Nigeria, Ladi Kwali was taught to make pots by her aunt in the traditional Gwari style of her community. [Extracted from the article]

This article contextualizes the professional life and traumatizing lynching death of African American blackface minstrel Louis Wright in New Madrid, Missouri, in 1902. It unearths the physical dangers of "entertaining while Black" in early twentieth-century America. Wright's life serves as a window into the racialized, gendered world of the American minstrel stage, which is gleaned from advertising information, entertainer biographies, and the early twentieth-century theatrical press. The essay highlights the mid-nineteenth-century origins of African American blackface minstrelsy, chronicles obstacles unique to Black traveling performers, and investigates contradictory reporting in African American and White newspaper media accounts of white supremacist violence. Ultimately, the Wright case and the persistence of racial violence were among the motivating factors in the pursuit of autonomous Black traveling theater in American entertainment during the nadir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SLĀV is a musical stage play directed by Robert Lepage, and based on recordings by singer Béatrice "Betty" Bonifassi. The recordings are Bonifassi's reinterpretations of music composed by enslaved and incarcerated African Americans--that is Black people labouring under, and resisting, the conditions of slavery and its afterlife. Though Lepage and Bonifassi promoted the show as an homage to Black people, SLĀV opened at the 2018 Montreal International Jazz Festival to protests by the SLĀV Resistance Collective, accusing it of cultural appropriation. SLĀV was eventually cancelled as Black artists began pulling out of the festival. Unsurprisingly, Lepage, Bonifassi and much of the Quebec public accused the protestors of censorship, and of misunderstanding Quebec's unique context. Situating its analysis within the field of Black Canadian Studies, in this article Howard examines the discourse around SLĀV as manifested through the words of Bonifassi, Lepage, journalists, and commenters. Howard argues that SLĀV instantiates the broader context of antiblackness in Quebec, and pays particular attention to gestures of inclusion and proximity consistent with modes of slavery and its afterlife in New France/Quebec. These gestures attempt to contain Blackness within national, linguistic, and other boundaries, disciplining the ways it is allowed to assert itself. Black resistance must therefore defy these boundaries and claim solidarity between and across variously located Black people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the landmark 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists to re-examine the gendering of the Black public sphere. Organized by Présence africaine , the journal/publishing house that served as the hub for the negritude movement, the congress is one of the iconic moments in African and Black intellectual history. Women were notoriously absent among its delegates, yet this article reconstructs the contributions of Christiane Yandé Diop, Dorothy Brooks and other collectives whose myriad contributions were critical to its success. It argues that the congress was representative of what feminist theorists and organizers have called the fused nature of 'work' (production) and 'domestic work' (social reproduction), that is, labour necessary to sustain life. As they have shown, where labour takes place impacts its gendering. Because most of the planning for the congress took place in social reproductive settings like homes and cafés, this often compressed re/productive labours, gendering negritude's intellectual life in consequential ways. Yet though negritude's women exemplify the frequently blurred lines between re/productive labour, between so-called 'intellectuals' and those who operated without such a designation, their own self-understandings sometimes reinstated these gendered divisions. Yandé Diop, Brooks and many others were critical to shaping negritude, and yet the alternative choices they made in that shaping need to be reckoned with on their own terms. I thus argue that we need to take such choices seriously at the same time as we do justice to the integral nature of their contributions. Doing so can help us negotiate with greater nuance the different choices that women made in their contributions to intellectual life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text discusses the work Murmúrios (1960) by the Maranhão-based black poet Mariana Luz (1871-1960), second woman to get into Maranhão's Letters Academy in 1949. Teacher, poet, artist and playwright, Mariana Luz has suffered, as many other black artists, an invisibility process of her life and work. Here, we aim to recover this black poet trajectory and to analyze her lyric production. This research, mainly bibliographical, is also based on the documental analysis of newspapers articles. The analytical and interpretative reading of her poetry, besides exploring aesthetic tendencies, aims to show the relations of her production with the social and cultural end-of-century period, especially the poems that address the melancholy and the feminine themes. To discuss Mariana Luz's poetry is essential not only for the Brazilian Literature History, but for the historical reparation of her invisibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]