Holding Hands With Carrie Mae Weems
This past Sunday at about this exact hour, this happened at The National Museum for Women in the Arts at their #FreshTalk4Change Sunday supper:
Read more...I had the last question of the night. By now all the platters of grilled salmon were bare and everyone was munching on their dessert cookies. I had the last question of the night and I wanted to ask Carrie Mae Weems if her radicalism, her #BlackGirlMagic if you
Happy 54th Birthday Sade!
Today is Helen Folasade Adu’s Birthday! She’s an incredible 54-years old today! Clearly, legends stay beautiful! As one of our most dynamic, sultry and sweetest soul singers, theHotness wishes her continued success and love. And thanks for putting us big foreheaded sisters squarely and magnificently on the map of beauty.
“Artistically, I have high aspirations. I don’t want to do anything less than the best I can do. I’m not trying to promote an image.” Read more...
Beauty, Booty & Beyonce: Loving My Black Body
Over the weekend Beyonce posted the note you see above on her Tumblr page and immediately her Beyhive started swarming. Without realizing or even considering that this may not even be a direct quote from Baby Blue’s momma, folks were in a hizzy over the first sentence. The idea that Beyonce would think, never mind write, that she was ugly had folks scratching their head, hypothesizing all kinds of scenarios. Most bloggers thought this letter Read more...
FLYASPORA: QUEENS
Bawse. Sharp. Foine. Smart. Mahogany. Awkward. Classy. Regal. Erotic. Heard. Loud & Clear. Honey. Sho Nuff. Soft. Sexy. Hard. Foxy. Brown. These are Mickalene’s queens. Shoot, let’s keep it real, these are OUR Queens. Our mamas, our aunties, our sisters, our homegirls, our teachers, our grandmas. us. Crown high. Roots–deep & low. Bout it.
- “Rumble” (from the “Brawling Spitfire Wrestling” series); 2005
Brooklyn-based artist Mickalene Thomas is best known for her photographs and her elaborate Read more...
Mona Lisa Ain’t Never Looked This Good!
It’s Friday. Flyaspora Friday here at theHotness and we thought we’d titillate your senses with a little fine art. I love these two portraits because they reappropriate what is considered classical, high art and dips them low in a point a view and representation that goes against the grain yet supports the woman I see in the mirror every day. Awol Erizku’s “Girl With A Bamboo Earring” reimagines Johannes Vermeer’s famous “Girl with a Pearl Read more...
5 Things We Can Learn From Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo– survivor, lover, revolutionary. When broken she reinvented herself. Her body was her canvas that became a site of empowerment for all women. Born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón, Frida was a bonafide Cancer who loved to love and be loved. Tomorrow will mark the 57th anniversary of Frida Kahlo’s death. The defiantly beautiful Mexicana who created some 200 paintings and drawings during her lifetime would’ve turned 104 last Wednesday– her birthday and Read more...
Artist Talk with Wangechi Mutu
Please join theHotness.com’s Nicole Moore and Artist of the Year Wangechi Mutu this Saturday, December 18th at NYC’s Gladstone Gallery for an Artist Talk about Black female body politics, beauty, being “Exotic” and racism.
Wangechi Mutu’s art is much more than cuttin’ & pasting. Her collage summons up ancestral ghosts of dismembered African bodies and futuristic alien goddesses that can leap and bound over breast implants and traditional ideas of beauty. “Females carry the marks, Read more...
Scratch & Kiss
“The art of living (and loving) is more like wrestling than dancing, insofar as it stands ready against the accidental and unforeseen, and is not apt to fall.” – Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
When I think of love I think of a force that is all consuming. Beyond all our natural and unnatural senses, LOVE at its best (and worst) strips us, whips us, rocks, knocks and locks us in a powerful space that defines and Read more...
High Fashion or Low Class?
For some reason Venus’s provocative tennis outfit at the French Open got me thinking about Sofia Maldonado’s mural on 42nd Street and the uproar it created over whether it was a bold expression of art and culture or a simple promotion of stereotypical images of Black and Latina women. Why and when does art’s imitation of life become so problematic? High art or a low down dirty shame? Clearly it’s not just girls in the Read more...