Author: dig

LA Times – Art and race at the Whitney

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In regards of the fictional artist Donelle Woolford inclusion in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

In the art world, inhabiting a fictional character in order to produce work is not new. Marcel Duchamp had a female alter ego called Rrose Sélavy. There is Lester Hayes, the African American artist conjured by a pair of white New York gallerists. At the 2008 Whitney Biennial there was a Miami collective called BLCK, not really a collective, but the invention of a single Haitian-born artist. And late last year, L.A.’s Launch Gallery showed the work of the Namaak Collective, a group that was allegedly founded in Amsterdam, but is actually the work of Los Angeles artists Marischa Slusarski and Britt Ehringer.

Carolina A. Miranda at the LA Times.

Frederick Douglass read by Ossie Davis

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On work, payment, liberation, voice and language.

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From the 1966 album “Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 1”

www.folkways.si.edu/ossie-davis/aut…bum/smithsonian

Ossie Davis reads excerpts from Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, edited by Dr. Philip Foner, which traces the abolitionist and statesman’s life from early childhood through to his most significant political accomplishments. This first volume establishes the personal and educational foundation on which Douglass built his distinguished career, specifically addressing his birth into slavery, his battle to learn to read and how being forced to “drink the bitterest dregs of slavery” inspired his escape. (See also FW05526 Autobiography of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2.)