Without Masks: Contemporary Afro-Cuban Art at the University of British Columbia, May 2 - Nov 2

The Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at UBC opens a window into the lives and struggles of Cubans of African descent in its new exhibition Without Masks: Contemporary Afro-Cuban Art on display from May 2 to November 2. This remarkable exhibition has assembled a diverse group of Cuban contemporary artists devoted to two fascinating themes: on the one hand, an insight into contemporary Afro-Cuban cultural and religious traditions and, on the other, an intense dialogue on the complex racial issues affecting the country today. 

Above: Juan Carlos Alom, Sin Palabras (Without Words), 2008. 

Digital print laminated on PVC, edition 1 of 3.

Orlando Hernández, formerly of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, curated Without Masks following his own rigorous criteria. Focusing beyond aesthetic, the exhibit favours originality and the profoundness of the works' sociological, historical, anthropological, religious, ethical and political messages.

"There is a very strong African tradition in Cuba. We inherited many religious practices from Africa—Palo Monte, Santeria, Ifá, Abakuá—and there are a lot of Cubans of direct or mixed African descent," says Hernández. "In Without Masks we seek to make new and deeper studies of those cultural, aesthetic, symbolic, and religious legacies that we share and take for granted, without forgetting that we have received them from black sub-Saharan Africa."

Robin Rhode: Animating The Everyday at Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College, May 4 - Aug 10

South African artist Robin Rhode's exhibition, Animating the Everyday, a ten-year survey of his digital videos, is on at the Neuberger Museum of Art of Purchase College from May 4 through August 10. The 22 works in the exhibition focuses on the digital videos that Rhode identifies as "animations" and photographic series that correspond to or complement the time-based work.

Above: Robin Rhode, Kinderstoel, 2011. Digital animation, 2:20 minutes. Courtesy of the artist; Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong; and White Cube

Rhode's exuberant animations—created in the streets, studios, his parents' yard in Johannesburg, and Berlin, where he now lives and works—transform the quotidian into the playful and fantastic but include an underpinning of melancholy, danger, and risk. "I embrace chaos. I don't create a work only with the idea that it has to be lighthearted; there's something dark underneath," Rhode explained at a recent visit to the Neuberger Museum of Art. "I come from a culture that is very spontaneous, that has a lot of humor and sarcasm. It stems from the South African mentality and has to do with freedom, and with the possibility of imagining or reinventing another world quite rapidly...Approachability and accessibility are fundamental to my work."

Aperture: Summer 2014 Available Now, "The São Paulo Issue"

The summer 2014 issue of Aperture focuses on the dynamic photography scene in South America's art capital, São Paulo. Aperture's editors worked onsite in São Paulo with guest editor Thyago Nogueira, head of the Contemporary Photography Department at Instituto Moreira Salles, one of Brazil's leading cultural institutions. 

The issue showcases a rich cross section of both historical and contemporary photography, reflecting curatorial and research activity taking place today, with a broad embrace, from the inception of photography in the early 19th century to the most exciting contemporary figures. In between are key touchstones: the postwar avant-garde photo clubs, the photo-conceptualists of the 1970s, art and photojournalism during the repressive dictatorship years, and the recent rise of politically engaged, new-media-savvy photography collectives who engage questions of inequality in Brazil's booming economy. The issue offers a fresh take on São Paulo's exceptional photographic culture, reflecting the energy, diversity, and history of the city itself. 

Gallery MOMO presents, Dorky Park in collaboration with Ayana V Jackson, May 30, 2014

[EXHIBITION] Unbound: Contemporary Art After Frida Kahlo, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, May 3–Oct 5, 2014

Frida Kahlo is one of the most famous artists in the world. Her reputation and persona have grown immensely since her death in 1954, yet posthumously she has been turned into a stereotype of Latin American art. This predicament, along with her celebrity status, often overshadows the confrontational and boldly transgressive nature of her paintings, and ultimately undermines the revolutionary intent of her work. 

Left: Image 1, Right: Image 2. See image credit below.

At the time it was made, Kahlo’s unabashedly intimate portrayal of her physical and psychological experiences and her appropriation of Mexican folk art aesthetics challenged the bourgeois European mainstream. The scale and content of her work also stood in opposition to the monumental, nationalistic history painting being produced by her male Mexican contemporaries. Her work subverted accepted notions of gender, sexuality, social class, and ethnicity, and was prophetic in anticipating the broader cultural concerns—postcolonialism, feminism, civil rights, multiculturalism, and globalization—that reached a crescendo in the 1960s and continue to be relevant today.

Image 3: See image credit below.

In 1978, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago presented Kahlo’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. Using two of the works included in the original 1978 exhibition, Unbound: Contemporary Art After Frida Kahlo brings her work into a dialogue with contemporary art. The selected artists in this exhibition share Kahlo’s spirit of rebellion and similarly assert themselves against the patriarchy as they insert their voices into dominant artistic discourses. This exhibition highlights four themes in Kahlo’s paintings to examine their continued relevance to international artists: the performance of gender, issues of national identity, the political body, and the absent or traumatized body. 

Sharon Lockhart's 'Milena, Milena' at Bonniers Konsthall

Milena, Milena is the second in an exhibition trilogy - a narrative triptych that grows from Lockhart's relationship with Polish teenager Milena. Lockhart first befriended Milena in 2009 in Łodź, Poland during the filming of Podwórka (included in the exhibition). Several years later, Lockhart rekindled her friendship with Milena and discovered Milena's desire to write a book about her life. Triggering an ongoing dialogue between Lockhart and Milena, this imagined autobiography has become the impetus through which the two have explored the ambiguous autonomy of the young adult.

Sharon Lockhart, "Milena, Jarosław, 2013," 2014. Three framed chromogenic prints, 128.8 x 103.3 cm. Courtesy the artist, neugerriemschneider, Berlin, Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.

Spread across three institutions and unfolded over a span of three years, each iteration of Milena, Milena features a slightly varied selection of works and marks an organic progression to the overall project. Comprising research (CCA Warsaw, 2013), production (Bonniers Konsthall, 2014), and contextualization (Kunstmuseum Luzern, 2015), Milena, Milena's trajectory aims at reflecting both highlights of the artist's 20-year career and her focus on a single character's choreography of selfhood and identity. 

The exhibition trilogy includes a series of strategically selected identifications that claim the biographical dimension of Lockhart's work, thus operating as (self-)portraits as well as projections. As such, the exhibition is framed by two works of a subtly biographical background: It opens with the cinematic tour de force of Double Tide (2009)—filmed in Maine, USA, where Lockhart spent her childhood—and concludes with the rarely exhibited series "Untitled Studies" (1993–ongoing), the artist's photographic diary, composed of re-photographed snapshots found in her own family album. At the center of the exhibition's narrative is Milena, an enigmatic figure who remains disquietly absent, distilling the different threads of identification in her very non-presence.

Lockhart's new work is a study of intimacy, shaped largely by the artist's reading of theoretical writings of Polish-Jewish educator, children's author and pediatrician Janusz Korczak (1878–1942). A legend of his own time, Korczak experimented with the methods of institutional education, based on the developmental enhancement of a child's inborn abilities. Representative of the social pedagogy approach to education and a pioneer of children's rights, he envisioned a future in which children structured their own world and became experts in their own matters. He crystallized his knowledge of child psychology, while learning to "(speak) not to the children but with the children."

Words from e-flux announcement.

True Grit | AMFW 2012 in Downtown Lagos

Photographer: John de Lima

Womenswear Stylist: Sabrina Henry

Menswear Stylist: KK Obi

Hair: Ranelle @ Johnnie Sapong

Make Up: Philip Ueberfellner

Casting: Kevin Robinson

Models: Jaunel McKenzie & Georgie Badiel, Roberta Narciso and Kimmie

Location: Lagos, Nigeria

Travel Etiquette | Style Profile in Luanda, Angola

In the summer of 2012, Joshua Kissi and Travis Gumbs of Street Etiquette visited Luanda for their Travel Etiquette series. Below are the photos, a video and description from the duo on their trip.

"Our Travel Etiquette series was started on the notion of “How do you live in your clothing/style?” rather than the clothing itself.  I’m quite ecstatic that our Travel Etiquette series ended up taking place on the continent of Africa, with so much to dispel and add on, it was a great opportunity to touch down in Angola. Being from Ghana, West Africa it was a very similar cultural experience but obviously a different language barrier. We saw, heard, smelled and felt familiar things in a distant place and that’s a big part of Travel Etiquette. We hope this is just the very beginning of an continuous awesome project series where we will travel the seven seas via the interwebs to bring you guys great culturally diverse content and hopefully you will have the opportunity can do the same."

Marketplace: "Believe it or not this footage was shot on our first day in Luanda. To start the trip on this note set the momentum for the rest of the trip. This market was not quite like everywhere else in Luanda. Being on the more rural side of things, it felt like a detached city buzzing with pride, culture and passion. At its core it was simply just a market where locals buy and sell everyday goods but it gave a feeling of so much more."

Barbershop: "Josh decided early on that inorder to really experience all that Luanda had to offer, he had to get a his haircut by a real, Angolan barber. It is easy say why barbers make up a big part of the culture they operate in. There is something about getting your hair cut in a foreign place that tells a story about so much more than the haircut. While only using a comb and a double sided razor, this barber was able to do a taper and shapeup with pristine precision."

For more on everything Street Etiquette, visit www.streetetiquette.com.

Sharleen Dziire For Elle South Africa January 2013

Sharleen Dziire For Elle South Africa January 2013

Colorama | Men's Fashion

You might also like:

Namibia's "Hereros" | African Adaptation of Victorian fashion
Get Busy, Get Dizzy for Paper Magazine
'Nairobi' | LOVE magazine S | S 2012 Editorial
My Rockstars | Portraits from Morocco
"Awaiting" for Factice Magazine | African Inspired

The Coiffure Project | Natural Hair Photography

Created by Glenford Nunez of TYP Photography Studio, The Coiffure Project features models of diverse backgrounds with various natural hair styles. When describing his work with The Coiffure Project, Glenford Nunez explains, "..I want people to look at good photography. The Coiffure Project is a portrait project first. The catch is it's all about natural hair."

See more of Glenford Nunez's work at the TYP Photography Studio.

History In Photographs | Ghana & USA

From left to right, top-down:

Ghana, 1961, By Willis E. Bell from "Playtime in Africa". Source

NYC., Harlem, Neighbourhood ballet class, 1968 By Eve Arnold from the Black is Beautiful series

Harlem, 1938

"New Car", South Richmond, VA, 1938. By Robert McNeill, from The Negro in Virginia. Source.
1924 Ghana, West Africa - Prempeh I
June Jordan, Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde at Phillis Wheatley Poetry Fest, 1979

Delphine Diaw Diallo | Photography

Delphine Diaw Diallo is a French-Senegalese photographer, who is recognized as one of the World's Best Emerging Photographers in 2009. Her portfolio is a collection of portraits, collages, and commercial work.

Delphine created the Magic Photos Studio (below) in homage to Malick Sidibe's photo studio, using collages, adding drawings, and colours to her photographs to underline the emotions conveyed.

From left to right, top-down:

1st and 2nd: "Highness" series

3rd and 4th: "Portraits" series

5th to 8th: "Magic Photo Studios"

For more on Delphine's work, visit www.delphinediawdiallo.com