...Steve McQueen, OBE, CBE The Spoken Word Steve McQueen OBE, CBE This poem, To Elsie, by William Carlos Williams (1883 1963) was the last e-mail I received from Okwui in early 2019. At that point, he was reading a lot of poetry out loud. I imagine that he needed to conjure up the idea that one...

... title, Phoebe Boswell: For Every Real Word Spoken , is taken from Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (1977). The exhibition is composed of a series of eight drawings of eight female figures, an animation, and ephemeral drawings and texts on the gallery walls...

... testimony, and scholarly research to bear witness to her status as a contemporary history painter. Coming to grips with the imaginative, political, and aesthetic force of one of her many series, I examine Louder Than Words to trace Walker’s visual and textual resistances to the intersecting relationships...

...Lauren Kroiz In 1971, Harold Cousins published an essay explaining the sculptures that he had begun creating in the mid-1950s, following his relocation in October 1949 from New York to Paris. Cousins described his series named Plaiton , his own neologism combining the English word plate...

... that revolves around constant transaction and negotiation. In general, a curator’s duties are similar to those of a host in setting up the conditions to welcome a diverse array of artists, ideas, and viewers into a designated space. Keeping in mind how curating, in the words of Erica Lehrer and Cynthia Milton...

...Elizabeth W. Giorgis Ethiopian artist Dawit Abebe’s Jerba paintings were first exhibited in Addis Ababa in 2015. Jerba , a word that means “back” or “background,” is a series of mixed media and acrylic paintings concerned with historical memory and the political and cultural accounts attending...

... from the ragged, yet beautiful, threads of daily life as influenced by the long-term effect of history and its implications on what plays out in the present. These narratives are punctuated by an abundance of words, text, and literary references that are written, spoken, sung, recited, projected...

...Margo Natalie Crawford This essay considers the very use of the word “black” in diasporic freedom struggles as a type of strategic abstraction. Crawford’s focus on blackness as a strategic abstraction deepens our understanding of the practice of diaspora as the practice of black abstraction...

... , but also the variety of art forms it encompasses, including performance, the spoken word, drawing, sculpture, film, and radio. It reaches backward and forward in history, exposing and questioning one of the most contentious collections in the museum, yet always with a deep humanity that acknowledges...

...Chika Okeke-Agulu Ghada Amer’s 2010 work 100 Words of Love is the product of a tactical realignment with aesthetic principles evident in her early work, and a radical rearticulation of those principles as groundwork for new sculptural forms. While it is impossible to predict the works’ reception...

... as exemplars of good grooming in their sartorial attention to detail as words for the ladies danced off their tongues like Lord Kitchener’s calypso. These “lonely Londoners” would later become Jamaican rude bwoys, swaggering as if to a ska or reggae beat in their two-tone mohair suits, with the attitude...

... and Third Worlds, looking at vehicular transport as a metonymic element within consciousness. His Colours of Cotonou installation uses the device of the frame as a relatively traditional meditation on art and value, but Gaba goes beyond this in two ways: in his conscious play on the French word cadre...

...Julia Kim Werts The many names and titles of Haile Selassie, Ethiopia’s last emperor, proclaim the grandeur and majesty of his role in the country’s recent history. As elaborate and expressive as the words used to describe him, the role of his physical body as a public embodiment of modernity...

... this movement, about the need for both representation and abstraction. As artists worked books for their most antitext and anti-object possibilities, words were worked for their most oral and visual possibilities. The antitext impulse became the impulse to shape the black aesthetic around sonic imagetexts...

...Pamela Allara In the installation of twenty-five drawings on exposed photographic paper made between 2005 and 2008 Paul Emmanuel explores the ritual events that construct masculinity and, in his words, “help to form and perpetuate identities and belief systems throughout history.” Although...

...Kay Brown This essay outlines the formation of the Weusi Artists, begun in Harlem in 1965 as an African American artists’ collective. The word Weusi translates as “blackness” in Swahili. Together the artists founded a gallery and academy of fine arts and studies, both of which became great...

... next step, Iago’s Mirror (2009), shifts attention to Othello’s nemesis. The mirror’s silence corresponds to Iago’s refusal to talk announced in his final statement: “From this time forth I never will speak word.” How does Wilson’s mirror speak, and what critical perspective does it imply toward...

... expectations of the relationships among word, image, and sound. Like the stuttering black bartender in Blonde Venus , these dissonant divas reclaim inarticulacy and nonsense to assert other histories and experiences that are situated at the very center of our own lived experiences of the world. Copyright ©...

... Rumi, Attar and Ibn Arabi are like threads drawn words of Ibn Arabi is indeed to reinvigorate a form of existence across the world, threads that intersect and weave through which he expresses himself anew. The great Master a web connecting...

... Worke Kosrof Christine Mullen Kreamer and Allyson Purpura Journal of Contemporary African Art • 31 • Fall 2012 124 • Nka DOI 10.1215/10757163-1586499  © Color of Words, Inc., Berkeley, CA 94703 From the Center Visual Poetry...