AfroDiaspores

(Source: theconcretearchives)

‘Figa’ talismans, Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, 2007

The most common Bahian amulet is the figa, represented by a small wood carving of a human fist with the thumb inserted between the index and middle fingers. Although some figas are crafted from bone, stone, or even plastic, the wood of guiné, arruda, native fig, and other spiritually powerful species is preferred. Dating from at least as far back as Roman times, the use of the figa symbol against evil eye was common at the turn of the nineteenth century in Lisbon and Madeira, and it is still displayed for this purpose in Portugal. Figa amulets in Brazil have been recorded since the early 1900s.

Mario Guzmán Oliveres [spelled ‘Olivares’ according to some sources] (b. 1975), “Gathering of Black Towns/Encuentro de Pueblos Negros,“ 2004

[I]n 1997 [was] the first regionwide meeting of Afro-Mexicans. This Primer Encuentro de Pueblos Negros (First Encounter of Black Towns) took place in El Ciruelo as a three-day meeting with representatives from some twenty-five Costa Chica communities in attendance. The explicit thrust of the event—the first of its kind in Mexico—was to initiate a discussion among Afro-Mexicans of the Costa Chica as to their own racial identity and heritage…[T]he very use of the term Pueblos Negros signaled a certain contestation of dominant ways of denying blackness.

Brazilian model Thiago Santos, the first black model featured in a Dior ad campaign

(via rivieracacharel)

thetaoofzoe:

stanleychowillustration:

Uhura.

http://stanleychow.bigcartel.com/product/lieutenant-uhura

This is so awesome I think I might have died.

During the first year of the series, [actor, singer, and voice artist Nichelle] Nichols was tempted to leave the show, as she felt her role lacked significance; however, a conversation with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., changed her mind. She has said that King personally encouraged her to stay on the show, telling her that he was a big fan of the series. He said she “could not give up” because she was playing a vital role model for black children and young women across the country, as well as for other children who would see African Americans appearing as equals…

“Uhura” comes from the Swahili word uhuru, meaning “freedom”. Nichols states in her book Beyond Uhura that the name was inspired by her having had with her a copy of the book Uhuru on the day she read for the part. When producer Robert Justman explained to [Gene] Roddenberry what the word uhuru meant, he changed it to Uhura and adopted that as the character’s name.

(Source: stanleychowillustration, via sufigeek)

Mural at 104th Street and Lexington Avenue, NYC, by ”Byzantine hip-hop visual artist” and Candomblé initiate, Manny Vega (b. 1956). The mural depicts the ‘warrior’ orixás in a style inflected by Afro-Cuban Lucumí iconography (especially in the representation of Exu/Elegba at right) with the hunter Oxóssi at center. Vega says,

I have been creating public art projects as an artistic expression for the past 33 years. The inspiration comes from a very unique “mestizo” [existence] here in New York City, where I have been active in expressing the cultural and historical imagery of the “Afro Diaspora” that flourishes here in neighborhoods like East Harlem, the South Bronx, San Juan, Havana, and Salvador, Bahia in Brazil.  

“You become the conduit, the channel, for the ‘orixa’…It’s not just about trance. Oxossi comes down through my work. He comes out through the work of my hands.”

Conjure woman from Washington County Georgia and great grandmother of [“Hoodoo and Conjure Quarterly”] artist Inga Kimberly Brown. Brown writes,

I met a new artist friend, Denise Alvarado and she has published a new book of articles and art that have much to do with our relative Voodoo, [what] we call Hoodoo and Root Work. As to my knowledge some of my Grandmother’s definitely lived by this old tradition and practiced it. Some of them did not. When Denise saw a picture of one of my Great Grandmother’s she asked if she could use the picture of my Grandmother Marie Steel in her new journal “Hoodoo and Conjure Quarterly” I said yes and stated that “my Grandma Marie would have loved it I’m sure”.  

Inga’s grandma Marie represents so much of what southern hoodoo is all about. She was black and Cherokee Indian, and that cigar…

Artist and designer Inga Kimberly Brown, “Born with a Veil,” 2010. Brown writes:

I am of mixed Creole heritage Cherokee, Lumbee Native Americans, Black American of African American slave heritage and Scottish/English…My family’s creole history has inspired me to paint the paintings I have… 

I created my own unique style using an abundance of color instead with use of the extreme lights and darks using the verdaccio method and painting in vast colors and lights [in] Alla Prima with direct color on the surface of canvas or wood. 

I see my paintings in the future progressing and growing in their own originality as I am. Spirit.

This painting is called Born With A Veil, which in Black American folklore means when one is born with a veil or a caul, one can see spirits, the child is born knowing, “one who knows”. The painting is of the artist Inga Kimberly Brown as a infant…

Emory Douglas, “We Shall Survive. Without a Doubt,” 1971

Headed with the phrase, “We shall survive. Without a doubt,” the image depicts a brilliantly smiling young African-American child wearing glasses and, in place of lenses, are images of the young being educated—we assume in Black Panther community schools. Atop his head is a floppy, zoot-style hat, emanating red rays quoted directly from Chinese revolutionaries…Typically in the Chinese source images, one would see the red rays emanating from behind Mao, the leader, but in his works Douglas links them to the children, granting them [as the] agents of change. 

Douglas got started in the Black Panthers while attending rallies at San Francisco State University and City College of San Francisco where he studied commercial art, art geared toward advertising.  He remembers learning from one of his professors that “you should be able to draw in a way that a child will understand.” …[He] chose a righteous path of arming people in low-income neighborhoods with knowledge as he provided kids with clothing and free vegetables.

 Detail of an artwork by mixed-media artist, art historian, curator, and scholar Amalia Amaki (b. 1949), exhibited in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport

Incorporating fabric, beads, pearls, buttons, paint, and glitter, Amaki, in many of her works, turns found objects, photographs, and quilts into playful visual puns…

Drawing from such sources as blues music, photography, familial history, and American heritage, Amaki’s work challenges traditional views of African American culture and focuses on positive images of African American life – love, loyalty, pride, and strength. 

Say magazine, May 26, 1955 

The pictorial magazines of the Johnson Publishing Company—Ebony, Jet, Tan, and Ebony Jr., among others—were pivotal in promoting affirmative black imagery in popular culture…

The visual revolution [John H. Johnson] initiated inspired a host of other, often short-lived black pictorial magazines, including Hue, Our World, Say, Sepia, and The Urbanite.

Aunt Caroline Dye was a famous hoodoo woman or two-headed doctor who lived in Newport, Arkansas…According to one blues historian (Stephen C. La Vere), she was born in 1810 and died in 1918 at the age of 108; according to another (Paul Oliver) she died in 1944. Neither story completely fits the evidence, however…

In any case, from this photo one can infer something else—Aunt Caroline Dye was a spiritualist as well as a root worker, for the crudely sketched aura around her head and the winged, dog-headed figure with its hand or paw on her right shoulder—which, like her name, were drawn on the film negative before making prints—indicate that she maintained some form of contact with other-worldly spirits…

Caroline Dye of Newport was not a musician, but she figures prominently in several important pieces of American recorded music…She was born to slaves…

Felipe Galido, “4th of July (view from La Frontera),” shown in the 2010 exhibition, “AriZONA, Artists Respond to the Immigration Issue” 

My father (1939-2006) immigrated 44 years ago today. Remembering him.

Eligio Sardiñas Montalvo, better known as Kid Chocolate (1910-1988), by the Von Romerheim Studio, ca. 1930. Also called “the Cuban Bon Bon,” he was the first Cuban to win a world championship title, in 1931.

The Kid was one of the first boxers who seriously studied films of other famous fighters and integrated the moves he saw into his own repertoire. [Kid] Chocolate studied films of Joe Gans-Battling Nelson, Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries and the Benny Leonard-Lew Tendler fights over and over.

His classic upright stance, his boxing skill, his defensive agility, and his all-around boxing ability, combined with his windmill style of boxing — his hands ablur as he threw a baker’s-dozen punches in the time it took to say [his given name] “Eligio Sardinias” [sic] — and his little touches, like tying his laces behind his shoes, made the tall, graceful Cuban one of the most exciting fighters of his day.