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.”
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]]>1st Class: Saturday, February 25 | 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
2nd Class: Saturday, March 4 | 1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Location: South Dallas Cultural Center
This workshop is free with registration. Participants must be 16 years of age or older and commit to both classes to complete the workshop.
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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
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Date: Saturdays – Jan. 21, Jan. 28, and Feb. 4
Time: 3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Location: South Dallas Cultural Center
All three classes are free with registration, but walk-ins are welcome after registration closes. Participants must be 16 years of age and older.
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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.
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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
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“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
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DCP invited us to hang out with fellow photographers of all skill levels to trade tips, tricks, and tales as we photographed our way around the center’s grounds located in South Dallas. This two hour walk was led Marcus Cole, an educator at the Trinity River Audubon Center. DCP instructors Peter Poulides and Whitney Daude was there to answer questions, offer suggestions, and give feedback on photos. After the photo walk, the instructors hosted an an online photo review, providing supportive group feedback and insight from the final images that the participants captured.
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“Black Legend Heirloom is the first whole whisper of skill I have been able to express as a visual creator. I am making solid my voice. I put painting, collage, design, Decoupage and paper mache to use in a way that captures memory in alter form to house memory, legacy, heritage, and inheritance.”
Camika Spencer
About the artist: Camika Spencer M.A., M.F.A is an Oak Cliff native of Dallas, Texas. She is a best-selling author, award-winning playwright, and educator. In 2019 she was announced as a Lee Daniels/Represent OMV creatives winner, and she is currently scripting a one-woman show titled, One Year in Egypt. The Black Legend Heirloom Project is a first for Ms. Spencer and she hopes to continue evolving the art as a teaching practice beyond the borders of Dallas, Texas.
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Below are resources that were shared during the two-day conversation:
Books:
- The Accommodation: Politics or Race in an American City by Jim Shutze
- White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity, and Religion in Dallas 1841 – 2001 by Michael Phillips
- Our Stories: Black Families in Early Dallas by George Keaton Jr. and Judith Garrett Segura
Website and organizations:
- Meetup.com
- Byp100.org
- Dallas Police Oversight Coalition
- Faith in Texas
- Mothers Against Police Brutality
- North Texas Team
- Project Unity
- Volunteering While Black
- Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation
- Black Futures Lab
- Campaign Zero
- Movement for Black Lives
- Art Inspired Healing
Films:
- Dallas At the Crossroads with Walter Cronkite from 1961
- ‘Racism is probably one of the biggest issues in Dallas’
- Inside Texas Politics: Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price on protests, racism, his legacy
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