Traveling Art & Material Girls

Wow, it’s been a minute since I’ve blogged, but I’ve been busy, busy, busy. WHITE WATER debuts in 3 days! I’ve been working on a promotional material for that, including a shiny new trailer for my youtube channel (coming soon) ;-). School starts in a week and I’ve been obsessing over my syllabi, meeting people on campus, and getting to know more and more about my new city (which I adore). It’s going to be a great year! In awesome news – The Ashley Bryan Traveling Exhibit of Illustrated Africana Children’s Literature is now on display in the Barrow Media Center! This exhibit is provided through a collaboration between the Auburn Avenue Research Library and the National Black Arts Festival. The exhibit will be at Barrow until September 27^th when I will visit the school.  To support the exhibit, Barrow has copies of six books that accompany the exhibit, a curriculum guide to inspire lessons using the texts and artwork, and a school-wide subscription to Literacyhead. Woot Woot! You can read more about Barrow and the exhibit here:

Chakaia Booker and The Fatality of Hope

I visited the Reginald F. Lewis Musem today to see Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists and was blown away, specifically by the work of Chakaia Booker (New York, NY) who sculpts using old rubber tires. Equally inspiring was the work of:
Sonya Clark (Richmond, VA)
Torkwase Dyson (Brooklyn, NY)
Maren Hassinger (Baltimore, MD)
Martha Jackson Jarvis (Washington, DC)
Joyce J. Scott (Baltimore, MD)
Renée Stout (Washington, DC)

AMAZING. Sadly, I wasn’t able to buy a copy of the catalog because the gift shop was closed…on a Saturday afternoon *sigh*. It’s worth another trip to collect the catalog and see the museum again. There’s so much to take in from the permanent collection. If you are visiting B-more, I highly recommend seeing the exhibit. A huge THANK YOU to Dr. Leslie King-Hammond for recommending this.