A few weeks ago, as I was scrolling through my social media feed, someone commented on Chris Smith’s Devo, a documentary on the Akron, Ohio band. The post pointed out that watching the band’s early performances during the 1970s really solidified them within the lineage of punk. Taken together with their ideological positions and aesthetic, Devo embody punk. Inspired by the Dadaist and other twentieth … Read More Why We Need Art!
In her posthumously published memoir Family of Earth: A Southern Mountain Childhood, Wilma Dykeman asks us to think about the ways that we process reality and the stories we hear and share. Dykeman wrote the manuscript in her twenties in the early 1940s. Early on, she details learning to walk and learning to speak, moments that most people do not remember at all. I know, … Read More Look at the Landscape Through Your Legs: How Our Imagination Shapes Our View of the World
Over the past few months, I constantly walked by Kristen Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence on the shelf at my library. I would pick it up, periodically, and flip through it, telling myself I’d check it out one day and read it. I finally checked it out last week and read it. Ghodsee lays her argument outset when … Read More How Transactional Relationships Harm Intimacy
+ a long way from home, african american literature, american literature, art, claude mckay, france, harlem renaissance, Literature
What is the role of art in society? During the Harlem Renaissance, luminaries such as W.E.B DuBois argued that all art should serve as propaganda and should stem from classical traditions whereas others such as Langston Hughes sought to make art of and about the people, eschewing the position that art should be “lofty.” Throughout A Long Way from Home, Claude McKay addresses this … Read More Art Serves as Reflection of Ourselves
+ african american art, art, kara walker, national gallery of art, National Museum of African American History and Culture, titus kaphar
In my previous post, I wrote about some of the pieces that I saw when visiting the Reckoning exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and the Afro-Atlantic Histories exhibit at the National Gallery of Art during our recent trip to Washington D.C. Today, I want to continue looking at some other pieces from these exhibits that stood out to me. Again, I cannot … Read More Artwork from the NMAAHC’s “Reckoning” and the National Gallery of Art’s “Afro-American Histories” Exhibits: Part II
Interminable Rambling 