Michael Ned Holte on Barry Le Va
Barry Le Va, Minneapolis Institute of Art, 1968.
BARRY LE VA came into my life in fall 2002, my first semester of grad school, when I chose a large drawing by him as the subject for my lengthy final paper in Bruce Hainley’s art-criticism seminar. The drawing in question had been recently acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, where it hung alongside works by On Kawara, Adrian Piper, Ree Morton, and Lecia Dole-Recio. I remember this because I had never spent so much time looking at a single work in a museum. Its title
IN A SMALL GALLERY on the second floor of Virginia’s Hampton University Museum hangs Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson. A young boy sits in the lap of his grandfather, learning to play the titular instrument, the pair surrounded by the evidence of life lived: clothes hung in the background, a loaf of bread and a white pitcher on a table, cooking pots at their feet. Color and shadow blend exquisitely to create a subtle glow that is cast onto the pair together at the fireside.Tanner is widely regarded as the most important Black American artist of the nineteenth century, and this 1893 oil
In Compton, a School That Paved the Way for Generations of Black Artists
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/t-magazine/compton-communicative-arts-academy.html
In Compton, a School That Paved the Way for Generations of Black Artists
Between 1969 and 1975, the Communicative Arts Academy was a vital hub for a community largely excluded from Los Angeles’s cultural institutions.
A student at the Communicative Arts Academy in Compton, Calif., where the syllabus was designed to instill in participants a sense of Black pride.Credit.Courtesy of Willie Ford Jr. and the Compton Communicative Arts Academy Collection, Special Collections and Archives, John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, California State University, Los Angeles
"This is the location that has shaped the arc of their professional lives, and it's where they started their family. It's a homecoming," a museum official tells PEOPLE
Focusing on Bruce Nauman s work in sound, video and performance, Contrapposto Studies at Punta della Dogana, Venice, gives new meaning to body language