Poetics of Cloth

Here is a sample of my series of animated stills, when completed I'm hoping to incorporate some music from the ever inspiring Flying Lotus.

Artist: Kwaku Adoma Ananse

Akosua Adoma Owusu creates films and videos that blend popular culture, music and mythology from both West African and American sources, examining the crossover and exchange of cultural representation in the contemporary African diaspora. Her videos range from documentaries to pastiche to experimental abstraction.
 Drawing on this narrative, Owusu explores the parallels and differences of merging cultures, using the double-sided trickster character of Kwaku Ananse, halfspider and half-man, as a guiding metaphor.

In Anancy, as in her other films, Owusu blends lush, colorful imagery with diverse musical accompaniment. She has investigated cross-cultural pollination in other ways, for instance through examinations of beauty practices and their relationship to racial politics. Her cinematic vision encompasses the increasing ubiquity and lingering unease of transnational identity.

http://akosuaadoma.com/home.html

Resisting Invisibility: Black Faculty in Art and Art History in Canada

"There is an ongoing invisibility and even erasure of talented black intellectuals, artists, writers and scholars in the Canadian academy. But we also need to acknowledge and challenge the dominant lens through which this invisibility tends to be examined. Contrary to popular belief, not all issues, objects, events and materials of relevance to race, racism, colonialism, slavery and the Black Diaspora can be situated within or examined from the perspective of social science disciplines such as politics, sociology, psychology or law. Art and visual culture more broadly were and continue to be central to western programs of slavery, colonialism and ongoing conditions of racial oppression and marginalization.  Monarchs, colonial administrators and European citizens had to be convinced of the rightness of the colonial project and the morality and economic viability of empire building."
-Charmaine Nelson

Charmiane is the only black female art historian in Canada, teaching Black Diasporic Art at McGill University. I find this alarming and infuriating, that there is a lack of accessibility to Black History and Black Art History studies in Canadian universities. Why is this so?
The neglect of Afro-American art, history and distortion of the facts concerning Negroes in most history books, is the  deprivation of a heritage, that plays a valuable role in Canadian and American Culture. A knowledge of history is crucial if we want an understanding of the past in relationship to current discourse. Historical ignorance breeds contemporary ignorance!


Here is a link to Charmiane speaking about the presence or lack there of African representation at the  UAAC Universities Art Association of Canada annual convention and the American equivalent CAA  College Art Association.
http://www.congress2013.ca/blog/resisting-invisibility-black-faculty-art-and-art-history-canada

Digital Print: Afrocentric/ Diaspora

I've begun to create and compile a series of prints related to african culture and its relationship to colonization and the African diaspora. In fusing these ideologies, with the digital process, the amalgamation of  the modern and traditional creates a hybrid of patterns embedded with a multitude of meanings. I'm hoping to incorporate color through screen as well as compile color using stop motion for a small video.