Jordan Casteel wants to change the staleness of the high art world and how it views black men. The Denver artist has been painting portraits of people in her community before she was an art student at Yale and it evolved as she made a home in Harlem, N.Y.
Black excellence has been awarded again. On Thursday, the Guggenheim Museum awarded its coveted Hugo Boss Prize to Brooklyn, N.Y.-based artist Simone Leigh.
Terence Nance is the lead visionary behind HBO’s Random Acts of Flyness and was recently named as the director for Space Jam 2. His first film, 2012's An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, won rave reviews at Sundance and put Nance on the map in the indie film world. The film even impressed Jay-Z, who became an…
At 76, Nell Painter dresses differently than she did just 10 years ago—but not in the ways one might expect.
The MTV Video Music Awards, like others, are highly anticipated each year. We keep a special close eye out to see how our fave black artists are represented during these award shows and thankfully, we weren’t disappointed this year.
The youngest professional artist in Nigeria is gaining international exposure for his stunning lifelike portraits. Eleven-year-old Kareem Waris Olamilekan draws family members, friends and other community members from his makeshift art studio in Lagos. He also recently caught the attention of French President Emmanuel…
Angelic iconography. The streets of Paris. Baroque architecture. The halls of the Louvre Museum, lined with French and Italian masterworks and iconic Greek and Egyptian sculptures that date well before Christ. The murals that adorn the ornately gilded ceilings of the museum’s Galerie d’Apollon (the Apollo gallery) ...
Long before social media liberated unadulterated images of black women’s beauty, there was Kamoinge.
America’s No. 1 protest artist? Forget Banksy—meet Hank Willis Thomas. The African-American conceptual artist challenges ideas and oppression through themes of pop culture. He’s gained a huge following in the art and celebrity community, among them art lover Swizz Beats. Whether it’s photography, sculptures,…
Updated: Friday, May 18, 2018, 11:14 a.m. EDT: Plot twist—turns out, none other than Sean “Diddy” Combs was the mystery buyer of the Kerry James Marshall painting. The mogul made his bid through another buyer via phone. Marshall’s dealer told the New York Times that Combs was introduced to the artist’s work by fellow…
Kwame Akoto-Bamfo’s visa application for entry into the United States was denied last year. He’s from Ghana and was invited by the Equal Justice Initiative to build sculptures of African slaves at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which is dedicated to the victims of lynching in America. The memorial, along…
The Studio Museum in Harlem Spring Luncheon is the hot ticket event of the social season for Manhattan’s most powerful and influential black women.
Is hat-making a lost art? No way. At B.M. Franklin & Co., a black-owned bespoke haberdashery in the heart of New York City, founded by classically trained hat-maker B.M. Franklin, the art of hat-making is thankfully alive and well.
For the 20th anniversary of his Sean Jean clothing brand, Sean “Puffy” Combs’ latest artist collaboration is a partly posthumous one: a five-piece T-shirt-and-denim capsule collection featuring the work of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat.
In the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans, across the tracks from where Homer A. Plessy was removed from a train, sparking the infamous Supreme Court decision “separate but equal,” is visual artist Brandan “Bmike” Odums’ Studio Be.
At this year’s Whitney Biennial, the award for the most discussed and divisive piece of art easily goes to white artist Dana Schutz’s painting of the dead body of Emmett Till called Open Casket. The painting has provoked protests and sparked debates about white exploitation of black trauma, freedom of expression and…
On its surface, when news hit of Beyoncé leading the 2017 Grammy Awards with nine nominations, it read as nothing short of a win for the behemoth pop star. The Houston native has scored nods in the three big categories: Album of the Year, for her sixth studio offering, Lemonade; and Song of the Year and Record of the…
