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Jazz, Church, and Black Life

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CHADDS FORD, Pa. (AP) — At first glance, it looks like an aerial photo of a war-ravaged cemetery, with charred coffins torn from shattered concrete vaults and arched marble headstones flattened by a bomb blast.

Then the viewer begins to note the main points: the coffins and vaults are literally parts of a keyboard. Instead of names and dates, words like “vibrato” and “third harmonic” are carved on the apparent gravestones.

“It looks like a graveyard,” said photographer Frank Stewart.

Stewart’s haunting photograph of a New Orleans church organ that was destroyed by floods brought on by Hurricane Katrina is a component of a retrospective of his profession, which spans a long time of documenting black life in America and exploring African and Caribbean cultures.

“Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer’s Journey, 1960s to the Present” is on view on the Brandywine Museum of Art through September 22. Brandywine is the fourth and final stop within the exhibition organized by The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia.

“I wanted to talk about the black church and the impact it had on the culture,” Stewart said of his work in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. “The organ, the music, everything else fits together. It all comes together. I just wanted to show the devastation of the churches, the music, the culture.”

This photo, courtesy of the Brandywine Conservancy and the Museum of Art, shows Frank Stewart’s 1997 photograph, “Stomping the Blues,” as a part of a retrospective of the photographer’s work that’s on view through Sept. 22, 2024, on the museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. (Rob Gibson Collection, Savannah, via AP)

Music is an integral a part of Stewart’s practice, and he was a longtime photographer for the Savannah Music Festival and for 30 years the senior photographer for the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, where he worked with artistic director and Grammy Award-winning musician Wynton Marsalis.

“He’s like a brother to me,” said Stewart, whose exhibit includes “Stomping the Blues,” a 1997 photograph of Marsalis leading his orchestra from the stage during a world tour of his Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz oratorio “Blood on the Fields.”

Stewart, who was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, and Chicago, has his own ties to jazz and blues. His stepfather, Phineas Newborn Jr., was a pianist who worked with musicians resembling Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus and B.B. King.

Describing himself as a toddler of the “apartheid South,” Stewart drew inspiration from photographers resembling Ernest Cole and Roy DeCarava, who was one in all Stewart’s instructors at New York’s Cooper Union, where Stewart earned a bachelor of nice arts degree. DeCarava’s photographs of Nineteen Fifties Harlem led to a collaboration with Langston Hughes on the 1955 book The Sweet Flypaper of Life.

Photographer Frank Stewart discusses a few of his early work during a press preview of his exhibition on the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, Friday, June 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Randall Chase)

Cole, a South African photographer, first gained recognition in 1967 with “House of Bondage,” Stewart’s first book, which chronicled the apartheid era using images smuggled in a foreign country. Cole never managed to copy his early success and fell on hard times before he died in New York at age 49. A documentary about him, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” premiered at this 12 months’s Cannes Film Festival.

“He came to New York and was homeless, so I would see him on the street and we would talk,” said Stewart, who’s quick to differentiate between his own work and Cole’s.

“I consider myself more of an artist than a documentarian,” explained Stewart, who attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before moving on to Cooper Union and was a longtime friend and collaborator with artist Romare Bearden.

That’s to not say Stewart doesn’t have journalistic instincts in his blood. He tells the story of a job that included the Chicago Defender, the biggest black-owned every day within the country on the time, and stints with Ebony, Essence and Black Enterprise magazines. He’s less keen on a temporary stint in large format, photographing art for brochures and catalogs, which he describes as “boring.”

This photo courtesy of the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art shows Frank Stewart’s 2007 work, “Katrina: Hammond B-3, 9th Ward, New Orleans,” which is a component of a retrospective celebrating the photographer’s work that’s on view through Sept. 22, 2024, on the museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. (Collection of The Medium Group, LLC, courtesy of Larry Ossei-Mensah, via AP)

Despite all this, Stewart has maintained a creative approach to his work, searching for to mix patterns, colors, tones and space in a visually appealing way while never leaving the viewer without discerning the message.

“It still has to be ‘X marks the spot,’” he explained. “It still has to be photographic. It can’t just be abstract.”

Or perhaps. How else to clarify the colour and texture seen in 2002’s “Blue Car, Havana”?

“It’s all about abstract painting,” Stewart wrote within the text accompanying the photo.

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The retrospective sheds light on how Stewart’s work has modified over time, from his early black-and-white photographs to his newer prints that feature more color.

“They are two different languages,” he said. “English would be black and white. French would be color.”

“I was still working in color, I just didn’t have the money to print them,” he added.

While photography can communicate information to people concerning the world around them, Stewart noted that there was a gulf between the actual world and photography.

“Reality is a fact, and photography is another fact,” he explained. “The map is not the territory. It is just a map of the territory.”

 

This article was originally published on : thegrio.com
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Houston’s Trills On Wheels Expands With Brunch Tour

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Houston, Trill on wheels, hip hop


A well-liked interactive Houston attraction that continues to attract visitors and showcase the town’s wealthy history and black business scene has expanded its offerings.

Trill On Wheels is a national prime minister a hip-hop bike experience that celebrates Houston culture and contributions to hip-hop. Launched in 2021, the party bike offers a two-hour cruise around Houston with stops at various black-owned businesses while guests enjoy cocktails and shisha.

Designed to rejoice the Houston lifestyle, each bike is designed to spotlight the town’s automobile culture with a “Candy Paint” mural featuring hip-hop heroes and the neighborhoods they represent. The bikes also feature Swang’s rims wrapped in trendy tires and Houston’s signature bass pumping out of the speakers.

The exuberant experience has made Trill On Wheels a tourist attraction that visitors put at the highest of their lists. Now, the brand new EADO Hip-Hop Brunch Tour offers guests a fun-filled approach to experience popular brunch stops in Houston.

Trill On Wheels is currently based in Houston’s historic Third Ward neighborhood, EADO, and plans to expand to the Fourth Ward. The tour experience combines the talent of Houston-born artists with a splash of sunshine fitness. Featuring Beatking, Slim Thug, and Lil Keke.

What began as a single bike delivered in a shipping container to the resort “is a testament to our team’s commitment to meeting high expectations and delivering a world-class experience to our riders,” he said. business stated on its website.

“Team Trill” is run by a married couple with two babies.

“As true fans of hip-hop culture, hosting epic game nights and being ‘out there,’ we wanted to create an experience that we could enjoy ourselves and one day pass on to our son,” the couple said. “After a year of prayer, research and pure, unfiltered hustle, Trill On Wheels was born and we couldn’t be more proud!”

Trill On Wheels has served over 30,000 tourists who’ve donated over $700,000 to local black-owned businesses, helping to spice up Houston’s economy. Be sure to examine out Trill On Wheels in your next visit to Houston, and don’t forget to bring your personal booze!


This article was originally published on : www.blackenterprise.com
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Fear of sitting in crowded, black spaces

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There are two types of black people in the world: 1.) those that can walk right into a church on Easter Sunday, “sit” the highest five seats, and take a look at the ushers to just accept that those seats are taken; or 2.) me.

I’m the kind of person, and I represent the kind of black people, who hate being asked to sit down anywhere. I almost never feel anxious in public and I’m rarely nervous or concerned about who’s around me. But after I am in a public place and someone who just isn’t there and is not going to be there for some time asks me to sit down, I get anxious. I sweat. I stress. I fade quickly after which hand over. I don’t like to sit down for other people and I don’t ask people to sit down for me. I don’t prefer to put my burdens on the riverbank of the one who was on time.

But unfortunately, in the black community, “holding seats” is a thing—a sport, even. I’ve seen (and I mean this with dead seriousness; “without a hat,” as the children would say) an elderly black woman tell an usher in church that she was holding seats, and get mad on the ushers who suggested she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t consider they thought she couldn’t hold a row of seats, and so they couldn’t consider she couldn’t consider she couldn’t do it. Oh, what a tangled web we weave. My wife is one of those individuals who will hold all of the requested seats and risk a public demonstration of “Who’s going to break first, loudly?” over said seats. She’ll even be very mad at me after I can’t do it. Marriage, right?

If I’ll, I would really like to share with you all a recent experience I had attempting to get a seat that not only threw me out of the constructing, but threw me into an overcrowded room where I could now not see anything on account of the stress of attempting to get a seat for somebody. Also, as you may see, I failed this task with flying colours.

Just a few weeks ago, a famous friend of mine was giving a speak about books at a famous Washington landmark. I had been to that bookstore before—persistently—and had attended many of that friend’s talks. A math problem was about to pop into my head; there was absolutely no way that store could accommodate the number of individuals who would show up for that talk. Spoiler alert: I used to be right.

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Since I consider myself a forward-thinking person, I anticipated this math problem and got to the shop early enough to get a seat, but late enough to get one of, for example, three remaining seats. Many people should have been pondering the identical thing I used to be occupied with math, not math, given the space constraints of the shop. Anyway, I went in and sat down on a stool, then watched the parade of people, mostly black, who got here in after me, attempting to determine where to sit down. As an increasing number of people, especially older blacks, entered, I prepared to present up my seat and use my younger legs to face for your entire show.

And then I got a text from a friend asking me to avoid wasting a spot for her. Now that friend cannot stand for long, I had to avoid wasting her a spot (which I used to be already willing to present up) or we’d have to depart together; that wasn’t an option; we were there to see our friend be amazing and do her own thing.

But here’s the issue: My friend who asked for a seat was a minimum of quarter-hour away, and the stream of people coming in was growing. On top of that, my seat was in the aisle where people were coming in, which meant that everybody, including women who looked like my grandmother, could see that I used to be NOT giving up my seat. I looked like a young kid on a subway automotive not giving up her seat to seniors or pregnant women. The thing is, I knew why I wasn’t getting up, but they didn’t, and I couldn’t look my grandmother in the face and say, “Hey, I would give up my seat for you, but I would save it for a woman younger than you but older than me who potentially has a leg problem and wouldn’t care if you didn’t get it.” No one asked, they simply watched.

I used to be sweating an increasing number of with every passing minute and an increasing number of people were observing me. I do not know if that truly happened or not but that is the way it felt and I felt uncomfortable and judged. I used to be texting my mate with my ETA and he kept saying “I’ll be there in 5 minutes” for over 5 minutes. I let her know I didn’t think I could sit any longer because I used to be beginning to seem like I hadn’t been raised properly.

Then the book event organizer took the microphone and identified that there have been issues with the seating and that those of us who could should hand over our seats to those that were older than us or might need to sit down down, and I felt like she was talking on to me when she said that. She mentioned the overflow situation outside on the back patio instead for all of us who either needed a seat or had to present up our seats. At this point, my stress and anxiety were at their peak; my heart was beating fast and my palms were sweaty. I could not take it anymore. I stood up from my seat and without anyone, said, “The seat is free,” and quickly ran to the overflow spot while texting my friend that I could not hold on to my seat any longer.

It’s been weeks since that night and I still remember how I felt attempting to keep the place going. I felt really uncomfortable and I knew my wife could be high quality. Oh, and concerning the overbooking situation – it was awful. The place had no idea what they were doing and arrange a projector TV during sunset so nobody could see what was happening. Cool idea, terrible execution, but a minimum of I wasn’t stressed anymore. I used to be briefly annoyed that the place hadn’t thought to order a bigger space for the lecture considering who that they had brought, but that is in the past now.

Now it’s OK; thanks for asking. But one thing is obviously, and two things are obviously: next time I’m going right into a place that I do know can be crowded, I’ll just skip the entire sitting thing and prepare to face in the front, back, or side. Sure, my back might hurt and my legs might ache, but a minimum of I won’t feel stressed or judged.

If you’ve gotten a friend who cannot hold seats, please don’t force them to. It’s an excessive amount of.

Thank you for coming to my talk in Panama.


This article was originally published on : thegrio.com
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White woman calls 911 about her racist and uncompromising mother for shaving her 3-year-old mixed-race child’s hair without permission

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In a now-viral Reddit post, a woman shared why she called the police on her mother after she shaved her biracial daughter’s curly hair.

This fastingWritten on the r/AITAH forum by user OrneryExchange8001, it has since been faraway from the platform’s moderator list, but received over 17,000 votes after being posted on September 8.

A Reddit user wrote about her 3-year-old mixed-race daughter, Zoe.

Stock photo
A well-liked Reddit post describes a grandma pushing her limits. (Stock photo/Pexels)

“Zoe is biracial – I am white and my husband Tyler is black,” she said. he wrotein response to the New York Post. “Zoe has the most stunning curly hair, and I’ve always taken great care of it. She absolutely loves her curls, and we’ve made it a fun, bonding activity to style her hair together.”

Unlike Zoe’s parents, the little girl’s grandmother was not a fan of the 3-year-old’s hair and made disparaging comments about it, similar to, “It looks so wild,” “That’s just too much hair for a little girl,” and “Wouldn’t it be easier if it was straight?”

Zoe’s mother said she all the time ignored the comments as “harmless” until a childcare incident involving Zoe’s grandmother led to disaster.

Zoe’s mother said she left the 3-year-old girl in her mother’s care for a couple of hours a couple of weeks ago as a consequence of a piece emergency.

“When I arrived to pick up Zoe, I was horrified – Zoe’s beautiful curls were completely gone,” Zoe’s mother wrote. “My mum cut my daughter’s hair without my consent – ​​she did it halfway through.”

Zoe’s head was “shaved bald.” When her mother asked her grandmother what had happened, her grandmother “just shrugged and said, ‘I did her a favor. Now she looks neat and tidy. And her hair will grow back straight.'”

The child’s mother said she was “angry” and near tears, adding that she felt her mother had “violated my daughter’s self-esteem” and “did not respect my boundaries as a parent.”

The incident prompted Zoe’s mother to call police and report the hair cutting as an assault.

“They came and gave statements to both me and my mum and she was later brought in for questioning. Then my dad, who I have always loved and respected, called me and was furious,” Zoe’s mother wrote. “He said I had gone too far, that my mum was just trying to help and that calling the police was a huge overreaction.”

Thousands of Reddit users sided with the child’s mother, expressing similar contempt and disgust on the grandmother’s behavior, noting the racist connotations surrounding the incident.

“This is terrifying,” one other commenter added. “There is a long, racist history against black women wearing their hair natural, I can’t help but feel like this is somehow stemming from that. Not to mention her ignorance that her hair will ‘grow back straight.’”

“NTA your mom attacked your child because he’s black. That’s a hate crime,” one person added.

“Her comments and inflicting physical harm on a minor are more reminiscent of a hate crime than a haircut,” one other comment echoed.

This article was originally published on : atlantablackstar.com
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