UPP Creative Media

Black History Month

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This week will feature artists

Aaron Douglass was born in 1899 in Topeka, Kansas . He was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. In 1936, Douglas was commissioned to create a series of murals for the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas. Installed in the elegant entrance lobby of the Hall of Negro Life, his four completed paintings charted the journey of African Americans from slavery to the present. Considered a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, the cultural phenomenon that promoted African and African American culture as a source of pride and inspiration, Douglas was an inspiring choice for the project.(From National Gallery of Art and Wikipedia)

Sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller was born in Philadelphia and studied art in her hometown, as well as Paris, at the turn of the 20th century. During this period, more women were trained as artists than ever before in America, and she was commissioned several times to create dioramas for the US government. Fuller was an important catalyst in the Harlem Renaissance; her work Ethiopia Awakening served as a celebration of African independence and aimed to shatter associations with slavery. (From complex.com)

Book of the Month

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Destiny’s Dilemma

An African American woman moved home to take care of her dying mother giving up the opportunity to experience a world beyond segregation. Zoraida Hughes Williams finds that some things have changed about her hometown of Fort Worth, Texas while some have stayed the same, like Hell’s Half Acre, an area where saloons, prostitution and gambling runs wild. Like most of the residents, she wants to keep her head down and stay away from trouble, but it comes in the unlikely form of an Anglo Baptist preacher. He messes up everything and almost gets them killed.

Available on Amazon.com

or Books2read.com which include Barnes & Noble, Apple, Indigo and more.

Black History Month

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Alice Walker Beauty In Truth Trailer

Alice Walker was born Georgia in 1944 into a large family which helped define her character and the way she saw the world. She graduated from Sarah Laurence College in 1965, but first she attended Spelman where she met Martin Luther King Jr which influenced her to work as an activist in the South.

Author of several novels, short stories and poetry, Walker won a Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple which was also made into a motion picture starring Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. She won many other awards and honors, and her work focus’ on the lives of African American people and their struggles in a society that is not always for them.

Black History Month

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Born Frederick August Kittel Jr. in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in 1945. The African American playwright won Pulitzers for Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990) which were stories that depicted celebrate the history and poetry of African Americans.

August Wilson’s father did not live with the family, so he took his mother’s maiden name in honor of her.  Living in predominantly white communities, Wilson dropped out of school and spent most of his time at the library.

As he tried to further his career as a writer, he worked as a cook, porter, a gardener and a dishwasher. He later founded the Black Horizon Theater in Pittsburgh with his friend.  He began to write and produce more of his plays.  He wrote more than 16 plays. He won a Tony for Fences and several awards and honors. He died in 2005 of liver cancer.