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In her article “Visiting ‘Soul of a Nation,’” Ashawnta Jackson reviews a 2018 Brooklyn Museum art exhibit that explored the idea of a Black aesthetic. According to the show’s curator, Ashley James, the exhibition brought together “artists who questioned the Black aesthetic and those who had an answer. [But it could] only offer a glimpse into a longer practice …  [by] surveying and charting the landscape.” From assemblage artist Betye Saar to quilter Faith Ringgold to jazz great Miles Davis, the following profiles of Black visual artists and musicians survey and chart a similar landscape on a much smaller scale.

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Art Is (Girlfriends Times Two)

Visiting “Soul of a Nation”

A new exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum asks: Is there a Black aesthetic?
A scene from Within Our Gates

How Oscar Micheaux Challenged the Racism of Early Hollywood

The black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux was one of the first to make films for a black audience, a rebuke to racist movies like The Birth of a Nation.
Kanye West performs Sunday Service during the 2019 Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival in 2019

The Gospel According to Kanye West

On the making of gospel music, from Gospel Pearls to Jesus Is King.
Award-winning artist Betye Saar, shown here setting up her "Tangled Roots" exhibit at the Palmer Museum of Art on the University Park campus of Penn State in 1996.

The Assemblage Sculptures of Betye Saar

Artist Betye Saar subverts, reclaims, and draws on both public and personal spaces. Her work remains as relevant today as it did when it was first created. 
Untitled, 1981, by Jean-Michel Basquiat

How Basquiat Used His Surroundings as a Canvas

Jean-Michel Basquiat created art that commented on New York City, while also contributing to its architecture and style.
Album cover in handmade paper (from the Heavy Rotation Series), 2015 Krista Franklin

Afrofuturist Artist Krista Franklin

Visual artist Krista Franklin uses various media to create fantastic new worlds inspired by science fiction, the Black Arts Movement, and Afrofuturism.
Album cover of Kendrick Lamar's "To Pimp a Butterfly"

Butterfly Flow: Tupac, Kendrick Lamar, and the Resurrection of New Black Godz

A look at mythic themes in Kendrick Lamar's recent #1 album To Pimp a Butterfly.
Art piece titled, "Negroes were leaving by the hundreds to go north and enter northern industry" by Jacob Lawrence

The Triumphant Return of Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Lawrence’s Great Migration series heads back to NYC where it first debuted. The lasting influence of Jacob Lawrence and his series is inarguable.
Artist Faith Ringgold poses for a portrait in front of a painted self-portrait during a press preview of her exhibition, "American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s" at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington on Wednesday, June 19, 2013. Ringgold explains her "confrontational art" _ vivid paintings whose themes of race, gender, class and civil rights were so intense that for years, no one would buy them. "I didn’t want people to be able to look, and look away, because a lot of people do that with art," Ringgold said. "I want them to look and see. I want to grab their eyes and hold them, because this is America." (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Power in the Painting: Faith Ringgold and her Story Quilts

Through a didactic retelling of history, artist Faith Ringgold uses her story quilts to reframe the past.
Emma Amos Flying Circus

Emma Amos’s Family Romance

Postmodernist painter and printmaker Emma Amos makes artwork that references historical figures as well as her family legacy.
Seydou Keïta

The Rediscovery of Photographer Seydou Keïta

Seydou Keïta captured Bamako life at the turn of independence in Mali. Keïta’s story is mythic and rich, as is that of his art and photography.
Miles Davis

Why Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” Is So Beloved

A music scholar suggests that Miles Davis combined the blues with the musical avant garde in a manner reflecting the integrationist spirit of the era.

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