Mixed Race Studies

Incognegro: Renaissance Author Mat Johnson Talks About Living a Black Life With Skin That Can Look White

Comics
Gizmodo
2018-02-12

Charles Pulliam-Moore

Dark Horse

In Dark Horse’s Incognegro: Renaissance, Zane Pinchback—a young black journalist and New York transplant by way of Tupelo, Mississippi—finds himself smack dab in the middle of Harlem at the height of its Renaissance during the 1920s. Zane, like Incognegro: Renaissance creator Mat Johnson, is a black man with a light enough complexion that people are sometimes unsure or entirely unaware of his race.

To those who know him, Zane’s identity isn’t a question, but for many of the new people he encounters in New York—particularly the white ones—Zane is able to pass as white, and thus move through certain spaces that other black people can’t. Drawn by Warren Pleece, Incognegro: Renaissance opens on a very taboo and illegal book party in Harlem where black and white people co-mingle as the champagne flows freely.

When a black guest suddenly turns up dead of an apparent suicide, the authorities show up on the scene to shut the gathering down, but have zero interest in investigating whether the death may be a homicide because the man is black. Realizing that his ability to pass (and willingness to do work others won’t) might allow him to dig deeper into the potential crime, Zane sets out on a mission to uncover the truth.

When I spoke with Johnson recently about his inspiration for the new series, he explained that much of the core premise is based on his own experiences and a life-long love of Walter Francis White, the civil rights activist who was the head of the NAACP from 1931 to 1955. But what Johnson really wants readers to get out of the series, he said, was a better understanding of the fact that identity in all its forms is fluid…

Read the entire interview here.

Kaufmann’s ‘Black Tudors’ to be ‘epic’ TV drama

The Bookseller: At the Heart of Publishing since 1858
2018-02-15

Benedicte Page

The production company behind the ITV series “Vera” and BBC1’s “Shetland” has acquired exclusive television rights to Black Tudors: The Untold Story by Miranda Kaufmann (Oneworld).

Kate Bartlett’s drama label, formerly known as ITV Studios, London Drama, and now rebranded as Silverprint Pictures, bought rights from Emily Hayward Whitlock at The Artists Partnership and Charlie Viney at The Viney Shaw Agency. Silverprint plans to develop stories from the book into “an epic and ambitious returning drama series.”…

Read the entire article here.

Paintings Of Barack And Michelle Obama Unveiled At Portrait Gallery

National Public Radio
2018-02-12

Camila Domonoske

Former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama stand next to their newly unveiled portraits during a ceremony Monday at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Brand new portraits of former president Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama — wearing matching calm, strong expressions — were revealed on Monday at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Kehinde Wiley painted Barack Obama sitting in a chair, elbows in his knees, leaning forward with an intense expression. The background, typical of a Wiley painting, is a riotous pattern of intense greens.

“Pretty sharp,” Obama said with a grin.

Amy Sherald, a Baltimore-based artist, painted Michelle Obama sitting in a floor-length gown, chin on her hand, looking directly at the viewer with a calm, level gaze.

The paintings, like the presidency they honor, are a historic first. Wiley and Sherald — both already famous for their portraits of black Americans — are the first black painters to receive a presidential portrait commission from the museum…

Read the entire article here.

Barack Obama [Recent Acquisition of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery]

National Portrait Gallery
Washington, D.C.

For more information, click here.

Lena Horne Honored With A Stamp From the United States Postal Service

WBGO Journal
WBGO 88.3 FM
Newark, New Jersey
2018-01-30

Ang Santos

Lena Horne Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Lena Horne is remembered as an all-around entertainer, Hollywood actress, Grammy Award winning singer, and a Tony Award winning Broadway star. But equally important to her legacy was a willingness to use fame as a platform to promote Civil Rights in the 1960s.

Horne’s daughter Gail Lumet Buckley believes her mother would be proud to be put alongside the other members of the USPS Black Heritage Stamp Series.

Stamp photographer Christian Steiner, Horne’s daughter Gail Lumet Buckley (with family members), USPS Deputy Postmaster General Ronald Stroman, and WBGO President Amy Niles shared personal memories and stories during the Lena Horne stamp unveiling. Credit Ang Santos / WBGO

Read the entire article here. Listen to the story (00:02:57) here.

RCM Museum celebrates the life of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Classical-music.com: The official website of BBC Music Magazine
2017-10-19

Anna Maria Barry, Museum Research Assistant
Royal College of Music’s Museum of Music

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

The composer’s musical fight for civil rights is the focus of an intriguing new digital exhibition, explains Anna Barry

The Royal College of Music Museum has launched a new digital exhibition about composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (above). Released to coincide with Black History Month, the exhibition, entitled Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and the musical fight for Civil Rights celebrates the composer’s important role within civil rights movements in the UK and the US at the turn of the 20th century. Coleridge-Taylor was a student at the college and the exhibition draws on his remarkable collections which are held at its museum.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in London in 1875. His mother Alice was British, while his father hailed from Freetown in Sierra Leone. Dr Daniel Taylor had met Alice while studying in Britain, but most likely returned to West Africa without realising that she was pregnant. He never met his son. The young Coleridge-Taylor was given a violin by his maternal grandfather, and soon displayed great musical talent. He joined the Royal College of Music in 1890, studying composition under Charles Villiers Stanford. Coleridge-Taylor soon became a musical celebrity thanks to his trilogy of cantatas, known collectively as The Song of Hiawatha. Until World War II, this was one of the most performed choral pieces in Britain, rivalled only by Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah…

Read the entire article here.

Xenia Rubinos is Behind the New Theme Song for NPR’s Latino USA

Remezcla
2018-01-03

Julyssa Lopez
Berlin, Germany

Photo by Max Schiano. Courtesy of Xenia Rubinos

Boricua-Cuban artist and multi-instrumentalist Xenia Rubinos is no stranger to Latino USA, the longest-running Latino-focused radio program on American public media, distributed nationally by NPR. She’s a devoted listener who says she’s regularly tuned in to learn about everything from Pedro Almodóvar movies to the Puerto Rican debt crisis—and she’s also been on the show herself to discuss her music and identity with Latino USA host Maria Hinojosa.

“They are able to educate through really personal storytelling, which instantly brings you in and keeps you listening,” Rubinos told Remezcla. “I’m also a huge fan and admirer of Maria Hinojosa; she is a hero of mine. I think she will be an iconic and important voice in American journalism for many years to come…she’s a totally fierce badass journalist and woman.”

So, Rubinos was absolutely floored last July when the Latino USA team asked her to compose the program’s first-ever theme song, which will open each episode of Latino USA moving forward. Latino USA announced this week that in addition to its Rubinos-designed theme song, it is also premiering a new format. The team will focus on deep-dives into single stories and topics, dropping multiple 15- to 30-minute podcasts weekly and covering extended cuts of interviews, roundtable discussions and short “explainers” of the news. Devotees who want to stick to the original Latino USA hour can still get the whole show on terrestrial radio…

Read the entire article here.

Phoebe Collings-James: the artist and model taking on tokenism

The Chain
The Guardian
2017-11-14

The British artist’s paintings, video and sculpture explore desire, sexuality and violence. She’s the second link in The Chain. Scroll down to see images from her day

British artist Phoebe Collings-James grew up a poster girl for teen-zine, mixed-race models. But rather than being the break-out star, she broke out of the industry. She was 18 and increasingly uncomfortable with the casting process and lingerie shows under the male gaze. “As a model, I have often felt very conflicted as a reluctant acceptable face of blackness,” the Hackney-born, Goldsmiths graduate in fine art told Nylon magazine last year. “I have been used as a token black woman purely because I am ‘not too dark’.”…

Read the entire article here.

‘A Lot Is Still So Much the Same’: Misty Copeland on Decades of Racism and Ballet

TIME
2018-01-16

Olivia B. Waxman

Misty Copeland (right) and Raven Wilkinson at the Urban World Film Festival in New York, NY, on Sep. 27 2015. MediaPunch/REX/Shutterstock

In the years since she became the first black ballerina to be a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre, Misty Copeland has become a well-known symbol of breaking down barriers in her art. The strides she has made build on the work of one particular dancer — a mentor of Copeland’s, Raven Wilkinson, who broke new ground in similar ways during the 1950s. And, though much has changed since that era in both civil rights and on the stage, Copeland tells TIME that there is still a long way to go.

Wilkinson’s passion for ballet began at an early age and would take her around the nation with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. As the first African American ballerina to dance with a major touring troupe, she performed the coveted solo waltz in Les Sylphides.

But her story — which is told in the new picture book Trailblazer: The Story of Ballerina Raven Wilkinson, written by Leda Schubert and illustrated by Theodore Taylor III, and released Tuesday in time for Black History Month in February — didn’t always feel like a fairy tale…

Read the entire article here.

Interview: Phoebe Boswell “I always want drawings to be open and moving and shifting”

Moving Histories: History and Memory through the Moving Image and its dialogue with other media
2017-04-13

Yvette Greslé

Phoebe Boswell, wall drawing, “For Every Real Word Spoken”, Tiwani Contemporary, 2017. © Sylvain Deleu, courtesy of the artist and Tiwani Contemporary.

This interview (Yvette Greslé and Phoebe Boswell) was conducted at Tiwani Contemporary, 14 March 2017.

Phoebe Boswell was born in 1982 in Nairobi, Kenya and raised, as an expatriate, in the Middle East. Boswell, who is now based in London, studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art and 2D Animation at Central St Martins. Her dialogue with her Gikuyu-Kenyan born mother (Joyce) and British-Kenyan (Timothy) father underpins her first major multimedia installation The Matter of Memory (2014) shown, together with work by John Akomfrah and Rashaad Newsome, at Carroll/Fletcher (London) in 2014. In 2015, The Matter of Memory was shown at the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA) curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose. A second major multimedia installation, Mutumia (2016) was commissioned and produced for the Biennial of Moving Images at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva in 2016. In 2017, Mutumia was exhibited in Kiev for the Future Generation Art Prize for which Boswell was shortlisted; and subsequently awarded the Special Prize which supports a residency program. In addition to The Matter of Memory and Mutumia, Boswell has produced a number of works notably Prologue: The Lizard of Unmarriedness (It’s All About How You Tell It) and The Stranger in the Village (both 2015). She was awarded a Sky Academy Arts Scholarship in 2012 and has been an artist-in-residence at the Florence Trust and the Konstepidemin, Gothenburg (2015). Since 2016 she has been an artist-in-residence at Somerset House (London). Boswell’s film Dear Mr Shakespeare, directed by Shola Amoo, was selected for the Sundance Film Festival in 2017. The medium of drawing, as an art practice encompassing animation, is central to Boswell’s oeuvre thus far. Her drawing work is also situated in relation to audience participation; architectural and spatial environments; video art; sound; and found objects and materials.

Yvette Greslé: What was the impetus for the work produced for For Every Real Word Spoken at Tiwani Contemporary? It is preceded by Mutumia and emerges from this work?

Phoebe Boswell: A friend of mine sent me an image of naked, older African women lying in a dirt path in Uganda. My own immediate visceral reaction was: “What’s happening to these women? What’s being done to them? How are they being violated?” I was horrified by this image. Then, my friend sent me the story of the photograph and I discovered that these were Acholi women. The Acholi people had been fighting for their land rights for a long time. On this specific day, the government had sent in people to physically remove people. The women decided: “Enough is enough, we’re going to do something”. They took off their clothes. It’s a taboo for men to see women naked, to see their mothers naked. So they took off their clothes and lay down in the path. They affected what happened next. They were not removed from the land that day. Actually, the image that I was looking at is a very heroic image but my conditioning made me read the naked female body and black women’s bodies through the filter of my own conditioning. I was so sure that this was a terrible image…

Read the entire interview here.