https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/2023/05/22/dallas-artist-niki-dionne-uses-wool-whimsy-to-spotlight-black-women/ 

April 7 – May 27 | Opening Reception: Friday, April 7 from 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. | South Dallas Cultural Center

Actual Footage of Me is a vibrant and playful collection that features some of the most beloved artworks by Dallas-based Illustrator and Fiber Artist Niki Dionne. The exhibition showcases Niki’s unique artistic vision and explores themes of self-discovery and identity as a black woman.

As visitors enter the show, they will be immediately drawn into Niki’s world, where they will encounter a variety of faceless black women brought to life through different mediums such as fiber, oil pastels, and digital illustration. The exhibition space will be filled with Niki’s signature illustration style and textures that create a captivating visual experience.

This exhibition is free and open for public viewing from April 7 – May 27, 2023. An opening reception will be held Friday, April 7 from 6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. at the South Dallas Cultural Center.

The 1300 sq. ft. one-story frame house was the home of Juanita J. Craft, one of Dallas´ most significant civil rights figures and the second African American woman to serve on the Dallas City Council. Programming at the Juanita Craft Civil Rights House is coordinated by the South Dallas Cultural Center of the City of Dallas’ Office of Cultural Affairs.

In 1935, Craft joined the NAACP, and in the years that followed, she started 182 rural NAACP chapters.Craft joined demonstrations against the segregated University of Texas Law School and North Texas State University, each resulting in successful lawsuits in 1950 and 1955. Afterwards, she opened a dropout preparation program in Dallas. Craft also served as a delegate to the White House Conference on Children and Youth, and as a member of the Governor’s Human Relations Committee. In 1975, at the age of 73, she was elected to the Dallas City Council, where she spent two terms working to improve the status of Hispanic and Native Americans.

Click here to learn more about the Juanita J. Craft Civil Rights House and Museum

Learn more about SDCC’s New Year, New Skills creative program

Music

JESS GARLAND is a Dallas-based singer-songwriter, recording and performing artist. She is a multi-instrumentalist who combines harp and guitar loops to evoke her unique brand of celestial avant-garde pop with ethereal jazz tones. Jess is also the President and Founding Director of Swan Strings and has recently been appointed Executive Director at Girls Rock Dallas.

BANDAN KORO AFRICAN DRUM & DANCE studies and shares experiences associated with African culture and history through the medium of dance, music, and specialized presentations for African and African Diaspora related music, dance, and culture.

Movement

BECKLES DANCING COMPANY provides a platform where performers and audiences of all ages are inspired to celebrate the techniques, creative powers and fusion of dance movement.

Spoken Word

THE ART INSPIRED HEALING COLLECTIVE is a community-based organization that is committed to promoting compassion, mindfulness, meditation, and healing for the people of Dallas. They view healing and self-care as a revolutionary act, one, which can help all individuals lead a more productive and healthy life. The spoken word segment was led by King Shakur and Jonathan ‘GNO’ White.

Click here for more upcoming programs at SDCC

From the City of Dallas Arts & Culture website:

“City Manager T.C. Broadnax appointed Martine Elyse Philippe as the Director of the Office of Arts & Culture, effective December 5, 2022.

With over 15 years of experience in arts administration, Martine comes to Dallas having served as the National Community Art Manager for A Window Between Worlds based in Los Angeles, CA and as the Chair for District 12 Arts Task Force for the Atlanta City Council. In her role with AWBW she is the national creative strategist for the development of art- based leadership and resources to transform trauma and create community-based methods of change and social justice through art.

Martine’s art administration experience spans across city government and the non-profit sector. As a trained dancer, she began her arts administration career with the City of Atlanta whereby she developed dance curriculum and then went on to become the Cultural Affairs Project Coordinator for the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs. She has served in several executive roles, such as the Executive Director of Atlanta’s Resource for Entertainment & Arts.

Martine has a Master of Arts in Education Leadership from Argosy University and a BA in African American Studies from the University of Georgia. Martine is devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusion in every facet of art and culture. She has a desire to utilize the breadth of her experiences to make a tremendous impact in the City of Dallas.”

Click here for more content on our Black Culture Celebrated blog

“I don’t think about art when I’m working. I think about life.”

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement. His father was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and his mother was born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents.

Born and raised in New York, Basquiat first achieved notoriety as part of SAMO (shorthand for “same old shit”), an informal graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s where the hip hop, post-punk, and street art movements had coalesced. By the 1980s, he was exhibiting his neo-expressionist paintings in galleries and museums internationally. Basquiat’s art focused on “suggestive dichotomies”, such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, and figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique.

Basquiat primarily used texts as reference sources. A few of the books he used were Gray’s Anatomy, Henry Dreyfuss’ Symbol Sourcebook, Leonardo da Vinci published by Reynal & Company, and Burchard Brentjes’ African Rock Art, Flash of the Spirit by Robert Farris Thompson. From late 1982 to 1985, his work featured multi-panel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage and imagery. The years 1984 to 1985 were also the period of the Basquiat–Warhol collaborations. The crown, Basquiat’s signature artistic motif, both acknowledged and challenged the history of Western art. “Jean-Michel’s crown has three peaks, for his three royal lineages: the poet, the musician, the great boxing champion,” said artist Francesco Clemente.

Basquiat died at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose in 1988, but his work has steadily increased in value. In 2017, a 1982 painting depicting a black skull with red and yellow rivulets named Untitled sold for $110.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased. (Source)

Learn more about Jean-Michel Basquiat:

• The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat
• Video: Growing Up With Jean-Michel Basquiat | I Was There
• Article: The Enigma of the Man Behind the $110 Million Painting
• Video: Getting to Know – Jean Michel Basquiat

Click here for more Art Heritage Legacy artists

Swan Strings founder and multi-instrumentalist Jess Garland has a mission to bring concerts to communities where she provides free music education. All of Swan Strings music instructors are Dallas legends in the music and arts community. Swan Strings currently provides seven music lessons (6 in person and one virtual) in guitar and ukulele. The program partners with Southwest Adventist Junior Academy in Cedar Crest, Raul Quintanilla STEAM Academy in Kessler, and Artstillery in West Dallas. In 2023, Swan Strings will return with classes at Pan-African Connection, South Dallas Cultural Center, and Arts Mission Oak Cliff with the new board of director member Zach Galindo from Lake Highlands School of Music. Founded in 2019, Swan String is a 501c3 nonprofit organization with a mission to provide free music education, community concerts, and sound therapy services to North Texas individuals without access.

Jess Garland is a Dallas-based singer-songwriter, recording and performing artist. She is a multi-instrumentalist who combines harp and guitar loops to evoke her unique brand of celestial avant-garde pop with ethereal jazz tones. Jess was recently announced in the 22-23 season of the Elevator Project at the AT&T Performing Arts Center. Jess most recently performed and presented a talk for TEDx titled, Facing The Music: Finding Your Purpose in October 2022. In 2021, Garland was awarded the Local Legend award in Nashville, TN from Wild Turkey’s Creative Director, Matthew McConaughey for keeping music alive in Dallas. Jess is also the President and Founding Director of Swan Strings and has recently been appointed Executive Director at Girls Rock Dallas.

Learn more about SDCC Music Lounges

The DMMA is a 5019(c)3 nonprofit organization founded in 1985. As an affiliate of the historic National Association of Negro Musicians, DMMA promotes the profession of music among local African American musicians, works to preserve the legacy of distinctively African American music such as the Negro Spiritual, and nurtures musical talent by awarding annual scholarships.

Click here for more upcoming programs at SDCC

In her research of Queen Nanny, four words stood out: ohemmaa (means queen mother in Kromanti (the language of the Jamaican and Surinamese Maroons heavily influenced by Twi (the language of Ghana)), xaymaca (means land of wood and water in Arawakan (the language of the indigenous people of South America and the Caribbean)), abeng (means horn in Kromanti), and gumbay (means drum in Kromanti). Nanny was an obeah woman (a woman who practices traditional African religions) who is portrayed historically as having used her powerful science to protect her people. 

Tosten’s thoughts and emotions connected with the sounds made by the abeng and the gumbay, her continued study of Queen Nanny, and exploration of her mother’s homeland of Jamaica inform the composition of the work in this show. The video included in the exhibition (with music by Dashon Moore and edited by Ciara Elle Bryant) features sounds by the abeng and gumbay and distorted footage from Moore Town (formally Nanny Town) that she filmed during a trip to Jamaica at the end of May in 2022.

She Blinded Them With Science is her sixth solo exhibition. Tosten often utilize letterforms, paper, and sewing to recontextualize and conceptualize her Catholic upbringing, background, and where she fits in how history has unfolded.

I want to be active and present, a part of my community from my perspective as a Black woman. I am often engaged in an open exploration of social constructs, how they affect me, and how I can shift and change them. As a maker, I’m very into technique and love to indulge in perfection. Even as I work towards that perfection in a very technical way, the materials are going to do what they are going to do. Visual conversations between me, community, gender, race and the material form the identity of my work.

Andrea Tosten

Andrea Tosten

Andrea Tosten is a calligrapher and a bookbinder. She has a Bachelor of Science in BioMedical Science from Texas A&M University and a Master of Liberal Arts in Museum Studies from the University of Oklahoma.

Common themes explored through my work are social constructs, binary thinking, and the nature of existence. Influences include Annette Lawrence, Janine Antoni, Tierney Malone and Glenn Ligon.

“I want to be active and present, a part of my community from my perspective as a Black woman. I am often engaged in an open exploration of social constructs, how they affect me, and how I can shift and change them. As a maker, I’m very into technique and love to indulge in perfection. Even as I work towards that perfection in a very technical way, the materials are going to do what they are going to do. Visual conversations between me, community, gender, race and the material form the identity of my work.” -Andrea Tosten

She Blinded Them With Science is free and open to the public Dec. 2, 2022 through Feb. 4, 2023. Click here for more information on our current exhibitions.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

James Baldwin; As Much Truth As One Can Bear – 1962 New York Times review

James Arthur Baldwin was an American author from New York City and has acclaimed works across various media, including essays, novels, plays, and poems. In addition to writing, Baldwin was a well-known public speaker during the civil rights movement in the United States.

In 1953, Baldwin published his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain. He was only seventeen when he first started writing the piece and published it in Paris. His first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, appeared two years later and continued to experiment with literary forms throughout his career, publishing poetry, fictions, and essays. Some of his other popular novels included Giovanni’s Room, The Fire Next Time, Another Country, and If Beale Street Could Talk, which adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 2018. In 2016, an unfinished manuscript by Baldwin called Remember This House was expanded and adapted for cinema as the documentary film I Am Not Your Negro.

Baldwin’s work focuses on personal questions and dilemmas amid difficult social and psychological issues. Common themes of masculinity, sexuality, race, and class were main narratives in his works and some of the major political movements toward social change in mid-twentieth century America, such as the civil rights movement and the gay liberation movement. Baldwin’s protagonists are often but not exclusively African American, and gay and bisexual men were frequently featured in his literature. These characters often face internal and external obstacles in their search for social and self-acceptance.

Baldwin left the United States at the age of 24 and settled in Paris to see himself and his writing outside of an African-American context and escape the American prejudice again Black people. He wanted not to be read as “merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer.” Baldwin spent nine years living in Paris, mostly in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with various excursions to Switzerland, Spain, and back to the United States in 1957. He eventually settled back to Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France in 1970, were he lived and worked for the rest of his life until his death in 1987. (Source)

Learn more about James Baldwin:

• Article: 13 James Baldwin Quotes
• Video: I Am Not Your Negro
• Article: Native son – an interview with James Baldwin; Archive, 1962
• Article: As Much As I Can Bear

Click here for more Art Heritage Legacy artists