Christmas Movie of the Week

I love a movie with African American people in it and to make it be around Christmas makes it even better. This story is on a serious subject, done with comedy and real information. There are times I thought I was in the doctor’s office myself, but it was a learning experience. But you have to love the imagination that can take a hint of Scrooge and mix it with some culture and add purpose to it. I think I found this on Prime.

Artist of the Week

This was one of the first pieces of Kerry James Marshall that I saw live in a museum. I loved it and could not wait to show it to anyone who would come with me. Africa Restored (Cheryl as Cleopatra) (2003) There are a million little stories in buttons and memorabilia across this work. They each tell a story of a history of a people.

Kerry James Marshall describes Africa Restored (Cheryl as Cleopatra) as “the shape of Africa reconfigured as a cubist sculpture.” Reversing art-historical narratives of modernist painting’s appropriation of African sculpture, it offers a complex meditation on African ancestry and black aesthetics. Africa Restored formally references the nkisi nkondi, or power figures, of the Democratic Republic of Congo. These sculptures were crafted as basic armatures into which accretions of metals, mirrors, and nails were driven to activate their force. (Art Institute of Chicago)

Art of the Month

The Journey

These people took a journey to find something they had only heard in folklore. But something compelled them to move forward. The thing was a star and they began to follow it.

It led them far from home.

The Bible tells us they came from the East and were called wise men. Imagine the smartest people in the world at the time were following an astronomical phenomenon. Whatever was at the end of it had to be life changing.

Christian folklore sometimes refers to these wise men as kings using Isaiah 60 and Psalm 72. They also give them a racial identity making one from China, or India or Persia or even Africa.

Regardless of where they were from. They went somewhere. The star led them on a journey that changed everything.

Book of the Month

Privateers

A single young woman is tricked by modern day pirates losing everything she owned. As she tries to figure out what happened to her belongings, her world crashes around her as government and private agencies treat her as a suspect. Determined to find the man who did this to her, she stumbles onto a government top secret. Finding this modern-day pirate turns into a race against lethal forces.

Buy at Amazon or

Books2Read.com

Artist of the Week

“While the tonal values of Marshall’s figures are universal, their impressions are extremely varied— Marshall’s figures assume all facets of black life. Marshall’s 2012 painting, School of Beauty, School of Culture portrays a scene inspired by the cosmetology school “Your School of Beauty Culture” located in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side. The world defined in Marshall’s painting designates a space in which black women determine their own images of ideal beauty. With a nod to Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors, Marshall uses the anamorphic Sleeping Beauty head to register Euro-centric standards of beauty, populated in the academy for centuries, as a distorted reality. “