#black-art

#black-art

Drivers were delivering packages in deadly heat with no air conditioning; part-time employees, the majority of UPS' workforce, have been unable to receive benefits. Wages aren't rising at the same rate as the cost of living.

Carter Shocket stated, 'They kind of felt like they happened and then they were over, like it wasn't a long-lasting kind of project. It was just a flash-in-the-pan kind of thing.'

Karen Batchelor's discovery of her eligibility for the Daughters of the American Revolution was surprising, given the organization's long history of racism and elitism.

Joshua Johnson, born around 1763 in Maryland, was the first Black professional artist in the United States, overcoming the challenges of his early life as an enslaved person.

"The first step towards a cure is admitting you have a problem," artist Josh Kline writes, highlighting the inequities in New York City's real estate market and its impact on art.

The Duchamp exhibition at MoMA is encyclopedic, thought-provoking, and sometimes surprising. It spans the entire sixth floor and invites viewers to engage deeply with his work.

Dolores Huerta's 1974 rally photo captures her in a United Farmworkers sweater vest, symbolizing activism and cultural identity, featured in 'Chicano Camera Culture.'

First performed in 1910 by Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and adapted by George Balachine for New York City Ballet in 1949, Firebird was inspired by a Russian folk tale. The ballet tells the story of Prince Ivan, who captures the firebird, a creature who is part bird, part woman, and then lets her go.

A new report found that museums and cultural centers founded and led by people of color in the Northeast face severe staffing shortages, with over a third of responding institutions lacking a single full-time employee.

KAWS has shown an uncanny ability to connect with a wide variety of people. Younger buyers clamor for his $50 Uniqlo T-shirts, while trophy-hunting collectors shell out millions for paintings.

Frida Kahlo, during her 1933 trip to New York, created a colorful haven in her hotel room by covering the walls with prints by José Guadalupe Posada, which depicted sensational news and political imagery.

Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.

"These works are an exploration of the human body's elasticity and capacity to metamorphose. Informed by my own experience of pregnancy and the birth of my first child last year, these paintings are a meditation on physiological transformation and the body's underlying animalistic and mammalian nature."

The 2026 Whitney Biennial opened at the beginning of the month, providing a snapshot of current trends and curatorial interests in the art world.

Many of these posters are the only surviving proof of certain shows, with no recordings of plays, and certain films, having been lost over time. They offer a history of Black Americans trying to counter harmful stereotypes and provide vital and humanizing contributions to a growing Black culture.

Driskell started collecting in 1955 after taking a position as an art professor at Talladega College. As he explained in a 2017 lecture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he put aside a small budget for art each year from his beginning salary of $3,000.

While taking a break from her musical career, Tifrere founded the nonprofit organisations ArtLeadHER and Art Genesis in 2016. ArtLeadHER provides visual-arts education and exhibition opportunities to women and teenage girls, while Art Genesis helps organise shows for emerging and underrepresented artists.

Walking through Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imaginationat the Museum of Modern Art, I noticed that the exhibition didn't have definite sections or texts, and the wall labels abstained from naming the nationalities of the photographers. It was an invigorating experience to be in a show that eschews geographic boundaries set up by Western nations, as well as rejects a cause-and-effect narrative that centers Western colonialism as a framework for understanding African aesthetic production.

We also hope you had a lovely MLK Day! There's always a risk that even the most powerful legacies can be hollowed out into just a date on a calendar. But it's during these trying times that cultural institutions can help bring the urgency of that history back to life, revealing how it continues to shape and undercut our lives.

Amid the savagery of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration - culminating in the killing of Renee Nicole MacklinGood - everyday Americans have shown incredible courage in pushing back against ICE's takeover of their cities. Joining them today are several Minnesotaart institutions that will close their doors to protest against the cruel treatment of their neighbors. You can read all about that today, plus a moving personal essay by Ifrah Mansour, a Somali-American artist based in Minnesota.