ATLANTA, Aug. 29, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Clark Atlanta University Art Museum is among several HBCU museums and galleries to have artwork featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.” The exhibition is scheduled to run from February 25 through July 28, 2024.

“Through some 160 works, it will explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in New York City’sHarlem and Chicago’sSouth Side and Nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South. The first survey of the subject in New York City since 1987, the exhibition will establish the Harlem Renaissance as the first African American–led movement of international modern art and will situate Black artists and their radically new portrayals of the modern Black subject as central to our understanding of international modern art and modern life.” The MET News Release

CAU Art Museum’s Woman in Blue, a painting by William H. Johnson, is the signature image for all media and banners for the exhibition. The portrait is of a Black woman in a vibrant blue dress, staring straight ahead but facing forward, seated sideways on a wooden chair.

“The colors are striking,” said Danille K. Taylor, director of the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, in an article appearing in the New York Times announcing the exhibition. “It’s the angle that she looks at you. The colors and texture give it a three-dimensional quality.”

The CAU Art Museum loaned the MET four additional paintings: Woman with Kerchief by William Artis, Mr. and Mrs. Barton by John N. Robinson Jr., Friends by Margaret Taylor Goss, and Pickets by Roy DeCarava. Denise Murrell, the Merryl H. & James S. Tisch Curator at Large at the MET, researched and traveled to several HBCUs over a two-year period identifying pieces for the exhibition. The MET provided funding for conservation of Woman in Blue. Fisk University Galleries, Hampton University Art Museum, and Howard University Gallery of Art Howard, Fisk also loaned pieces to the exhibition.

About Clark Atlanta University 
Clark Atlanta University was formed with the consolidation of Atlanta University and Clark College, both of which hold unique places in the annals of African American history. Atlanta University, established in 1865 by the American Missionary Association, was the nation’s first institution to award graduate degrees to African Americans. Clark College, established four years later in 1869, was the nation’s first four-year liberal arts college to serve a primarily African American student population. Today, with nearly 4,000 students, CAU is the largest of the four institutions (CAU, Morehouse College, Spelman College, and Morehouse School of Medicine) that comprise the Atlanta University Center Consortium. It is also the largest of the 37-member UNCF institutions. Notable alumni include James Weldon Johnson, American civil rights activist, poet, and songwriter (Lift Every Voice and Sing, “The Black National Anthem”; Ralph David Abernathy, Sr., American civil rights activist; Congressman Hank Johnson, Georgia District 4; Kenya Barris, American award-winning television and movie producer; Kenny Leon, Tony Award-winning Broadway Director; Jacque Reid, Emmy Award-winning Television Personality and Journalist; Brandon Thompson, Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion for NASCAR; Valeisha Butterfield Jones, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the Recording Academy. To learn more about Clark Atlanta University, visit www.cau.edu.

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SOURCE Clark Atlanta University

ATLANTA, Aug. 29, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Clark Atlanta University Art Museum is among several HBCU museums and galleries to have artwork featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s upcoming exhibition, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.” The exhibition is scheduled to run from February 25 through July 28, 2024.

“Through some 160 works, it will explore the comprehensive and far-reaching ways in which Black artists portrayed everyday modern life in the new Black cities that took shape in the 1920s–40s in New York City’s Harlem and Chicago’s South Side and Nationwide in the early decades of the Great Migration when millions of African Americans began to move away from the segregated rural South. The first survey of the subject in New York City since 1987, the exhibition will establish the Harlem Renaissance as the first African American–led movement of international modern art and will situate Black artists and their radically new portrayals of the modern Black subject as central to our understanding of international modern art and modern life.” The MET News Release

CAU Art Museum’s Woman in Blue, a painting by William H. Johnson, is the signature image for all media and banners for the exhibition. The portrait is of a Black woman in a vibrant blue dress, staring straight ahead but facing forward, seated sideways on a wooden chair.

“The colors are striking,” said Danille K. Taylor, director of the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, in an article appearing in the New York Times announcing the exhibition. “It’s the angle that she looks at you. The colors and texture give it a three-dimensional quality.”

The CAU Art Museum loaned the MET four additional paintings: Woman with Kerchief by William Artis, Mr. and Mrs. Barton by John N. Robinson Jr., Friends by Margaret Taylor Goss, and Pickets by Roy DeCarava. Denise Murrell, the Merryl H. & James S. Tisch Curator at Large at the MET, researched and traveled to several HBCUs over a two-year period identifying pieces for the exhibition. The MET provided funding for conservation of Woman in Blue. Fisk University Galleries, Hampton University Art Museum, and Howard University Gallery of Art Howard, Fisk also loaned pieces to the exhibition.

About Clark Atlanta University 
Clark Atlanta University was formed with the consolidation of Atlanta University and Clark College, both of which hold unique places in the annals of African American history. Atlanta University, established in 1865 by the American Missionary Association, was the nation’s first institution to award graduate degrees to African Americans. Clark College, established four years later in 1869, was the nation’s first four-year liberal arts college to serve a primarily African American student population. Today, with nearly 4,000 students, CAU is the largest of the four institutions (CAU, Morehouse College, Spelman College, and Morehouse School of Medicine) that comprise the Atlanta University Center Consortium. It is also the largest of the 37-member UNCF institutions. Notable alumni include James Weldon Johnson, American civil rights activist, poet, and songwriter (Lift Every Voice and Sing, “The Black National Anthem”; Ralph David Abernathy, Sr., American civil rights activist; Congressman Hank Johnson, Georgia District 4; Kenya Barris, American award-winning television and movie producer; Kenny Leon, Tony Award-winning Broadway Director; Jacque Reid, Emmy Award-winning Television Personality and Journalist; Brandon Thompson, Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion for NASCAR; Valeisha Butterfield Jones, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the Recording Academy. To learn more about Clark Atlanta University, visit www.cau.edu.

SOURCE Clark Atlanta University

The art market is moving closer and closer to Indigenous villages. In recent years, several exhibitions have been held abroad that focused on Indigenous peoples from Brazil and Latin America, giving unprecedented visibility to their artists, historically erased by gallery owners and museums.

At this time of high demand for Indigenous art, Europe is also debating how colonialism usurped Amerindian culture and wrongly appropriated its artifacts. An example is the 16^th-century Tupinambá mantle at the National Museum of Denmark, which will be returned to Brazil after three centuries in the institution’s collection. A late reckoning.

Such renewal in the circuit shows how art and politics are inseparable, and it may guide exhibitions and change curators’ colonial thinking. This is the case of Siamo Foresta, an exhibition that opened at Milan’s La Triennale  in June, gathering works by 27 artists related to the Amazon Rainforest. They include Indigenous collectives such as the Yanomami Group, one of the best known in the country, with artists such as André Taniki, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Vital Warasi and Joseca Mokahesi.

This is the collective’s second international exhibition in 2023, after The Yanomami Struggle, at The Shed culture center in New York in February. Alongside the work of photographer Claudia Andujar, who has documented changes in the Yanomami Territory for 50 years, the artists showed, in the largest U.S. city, the struggle of a people who have recently faced one of their worst humanitarian tragedies.

French anthropologist Bruce Albert, the exhibition’s curator, pointed out in a statement to the press that “Siamo Foresta stages an unprecedented encounter between thinkers and defenders of the forest; between Indigenous … and non-Indigenous artists.” The exhibition “draws its founding inspiration from this aesthetic and political vision of the forest as an egalitarian multiverse of living beings, human and non-human and, as such, offers the vibrant allegory of a possible world beyond our anthropocentrism.”

A new art history

This important role played by today’s Indigenous artists has drawn the attention of the international community, which is beginning to see the history of Indigenous peoples’ art in a different light, says curator Edson Kayapó, a member of the Mebengokré Indigenous community. He is co-responsible for programming at the Indigenous Histories department of the São Paulo Museum of Art Assis Chateaubriand (MASP). “We Indigenous peoples have always been here, producing art. And now that society has the opportunity to see this in great depth, it is important to debate issues that have been dragging on for some time,” he says.

Edson Kayapó mentions a point addressed by Albert when he explains that, from the Eurocentric point of view, “man had to dominate nature because it is hostile.” He points out that the COVID-19 pandemic was one of the factors that expanded discussions on our codependency with nature. “After that world crisis, people had to open their eyes. There are U.N. studies mentioning the possibility of new and worse pandemics if we keep devastating the system of biomes. We now face a major climate problem: The Earth is getting hotter and therefore the human project is in a crisis,” the researcher adds.

Edson Kayapó points out that the role of today’s Indigenous art goes beyond exposing socioenvironmental problems; it is a means of preserving traditions and everyday ritualistic acts, something that can be seen in the visions of the Mahku collective, created by the Huni Kuin people, who are also participating in the Siamo Foresta exhibition.

“Mahku is a very sound resistance act, which arises from an artistic and educational project within Indigenous communities. They say, ‘We sell land to demarcate our territories,’ ‘We make art to fight drugs and any other vice within the community,’” says Edson Kayapó.

One of Mahku’s best-known members, Cleiber Bane takes part in Siamo Foresta alongside names like Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe from the Venezuelan side of the Yanomami community, who had a solo exhibition at MASP in July and August. There are also works by Jaider Esbell, from the Makuxi people, one of the biggest names in today’s Brazilian Indigenous art.

Over the last decade, Esbell was responsible for a network that supported Indigenous artists as they established themselves on the circuit and brought many of them along in the wake of his meteoric career. In addition to taking ancient knowledge such as songs and myths of his people beyond Indigenous lands, the artist, who was born in the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Territory in Roraima, used his work to denounce crises in the territory, in addition to being a critic of the art scene itself.

One of the most notable artists of the 34^th São Paulo International Art Biennial, Jaider Esbell took his own life at the height of his career, in November 2021, in the same week he exhibited his works at the pavilion. His paintings were covered by black cloths. It was not only a shock to the art field and Indigenous communities but also a warning about the processes of the art market.

The Jaider Esbell Art Gallery was then created in Boa Vista, Roraima, to manage the artist’s estate and keep his legacy alive. A year later, in 2022, Esbell’s work was featured in Le Vivants, a collective exhibition of Amerindian artists in Lille, France, and some works were acquired by museums around the world such as Paris’ Centre Pompidou.

Indigenous benches in Japan

In addition to the political nature of the works, the alignment between aesthetics and cosmology is a strong feature of Indigenous artists’ works, as reported by sculptor Mayawari Mehinako from Kaupüna village in Xingu, who traveled to Japan in 2019 to open the exhibition BEĨ Collection: Indigenous Banks of Brazil. Such pieces have become objects of desire for the Brazilian intellectualized middle class and each cost an average of 5,000 reais (about $1,270 at the time).

With examples from 43 Indigenous peoples in Brazil, the BEĨ Collection became “a way of disseminating the millennia-old Indigenous culture,” says Mayawari about how Indigenous benches transcend their utilitarian nature.  “They are not decorative items; they are [associated with] cosmology, [since there is a specific moment] for the use of each bench. Our life is strongly related to nature. Some animals are exclusive to the chief’s throne; there are figures for singers, shamans and women.”

Encouraged by his father, who was also a bench maker, to sculpt in order to preserve the images of endangered species such as birds, snakes and the giant armadillo, the largest armadillo in the world, Mayawari bridges the gap between collectors and the village. Thanks to his role as a mediator, several infrastructure works have been built in his community in recent years, such as a health center. The artist also says that a school will be built in the village, in addition to projects that seek to encourage handwork such as the creation of benches, ceramics and basketry. It’s just the beginning,” he says.

According to BEĨ director Tomás Alvim, more international exhibitions of the collection are already scheduled for next year in countries such as Portugal and Spain. Art dealer Carmo Johnson, who works with the Mahku collective, explains that the group will be responsible for a large mural on the main façade of this year’s Venice Biennale — a space coveted by artists from all over the world that opens the doors to a new panorama in the history of art.

Indigenous artists from the Amazon use art for environmental advocacy

Banner image: Siamo Foresta exhibition at La Triennale Foundation, in Milan, Italy. Image courtesy of Andrea Rossetti/La Triennale.

This story was first reported by Mongabay’s Brazil team and published here on our Brazil siteon Aug. 21, 2019.

2022 has witnessed significant shifts in the nonfungible token market landscape, with different sectors experiencing varied levels of volatility. At the center of this fluctuation is the Art NFT sector, which has managed to carve out a position of strength, Nansen research reported on Twitter.

Since January 2022, art NFTs have been the best-performing ETH NFT sector

They’ve done better than every other type of NFT, including Blue Chips and Metaverse NFTs, remember them?

But they’re down against the dollar…

Let’s take a look at how down each NFT sector is… pic.twitter.com/ZcZUI2EXDw

— Nansen 🧭 (@nansen_ai) August 29, 2023

The Game-50 index, which encapsulates a diverse range from GameFi to Play-to-Earn platforms, experienced a notably challenging year. Investors who commenced their journey in January with an optimistic $1,000 found their investments gutted to a meager $90 by year-end.

Similarly, the buzz and promise surrounding the metaverse sector were put to the test. The Metaverse-20 index, representative of this digital frontier, began the year with investments valued at $1,000, only to contract to a humbling $202 as the curtains closed on 2022.

The broader NFT market wasn’t immune to the year’s turbulence, according to Nansen. The NFT-500, touted as a barometer for the generalized NFT landscape, recoiled significantly. Starting the year on a high note with investments valued at $1,000, the index ceded ground, ending at a diminished $329.

Yet, not all sectors were mired in challenging terrain. The Social-100 index, emblematic of NFTs rooted in community and interpersonal connections, painted a slightly brighter picture. Starting positions in January, pegged at $1,000, saw a decline, but concluded the year at a relatively healthier $362.

Similarly, the revered Blue Chip-10 index, often perceived as the gold standard within the NFT universe, held strong. Despite facing the market’s unpredictable whims, investments here saw a descent from $1,000 in January to $405 by the year’s culmination.

2. Blue Chip-10: The cream of the crop. The very best and most recognizable NFTs takes the second spot

If you had invested $1,000 in Jan ’22, you would now have $405…

They may be the leading NFTs, but even they’re down in the current market… pic.twitter.com/1fMq9GFHc8

— Nansen 🧭 (@nansen_ai) August 29, 2023

However, the star of the year was undeniably the Art-20 index. Bucking the broader market trend, this index, representing the top 20 art collections by market cap, offered a glimmer of optimism. Investors in this segment would find solace, with January’s $1,000 valuation growing to an impressive $596:

“I guess people really do like the art.”

Ether, often regarded as a bellwether for the digital asset landscape, has had its challenges. A $1,000 allocation to Ether in January translated to $432 by the close of 2022, showing the performance of the Art NFT sector as other NFT sectors struggled.

After standing out in the sun at the San Gennaro festival on Saturday, Mrs. Large and I stopped into The Market-Bantam on our way home. It was hot outside, and as we made our way past produce, the automatic doors of their craft beer cooler swung open for us. What we found inside is now our new favorite art gallery in Connecticut.

We’re weak when it comes to beer knowledge, but strong in recognizing great marketing. The craft beer explosion has largely bypassed us, so we really haven’t paid much attention to the dark sense of humor that has emerged among the craft beer marketers. There are so many great names, I almost bought a Fuzzy Baby Ducks just to see why the hell they thought of that one.

Danbury’s Quirk Works Brewing Scavenger Hunt Items…