Author: onajide

Art Miami opened with it’s widely attended preview tonight. The fair was smaller than the recently held Art Basel Miami Beach, and more focused on Latin American artists. As usual, I saw lots of friends and took note of some interesting works. Again, quality photography was in evidence. Most of this work was by the masters, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Leo Matiz. Matiz is being shown at the new local gallery in the Miami Design District, Chelsea Galleria. This body of work focuses on Frida Kahlo and other images from Mexico. I thought the work was really exciting to see, not just because of its historical value but because of the quality of the prints and the warmth of the image making. My favorite was a pair of man’s hands gently holding a tiny sapling for a reforestation project. Powerful hands, gentle and sensitively expressed.

Right next door to their Art Miami space was someone I need to contact, 21st Publishers of Fine Art Photography (Rochester, NY). Their books are hand-printed with a variety of processes: photogravure, tritone plate, and platinum prints are some. These books are awesome.

Further updates over the next few days…

Web users entering the words “miserable failure” into the popular search engine are directed to the biography of the president on the White House website. (I can’t believe I’d put that face on my blog!)

I am The Chariot The Chariot often appears when hard control is or could be in evidence. At its best, hard control is not brutal, but firm and direct. It is backed up by a strong will and great confidence. The Chariot can mean self-control or control of the environment. This card also represents victory. There are many types of wins; the Chariot’s is of the win-lose type. Your success comes from beating the competition to become number one. Such moments are glorious in the right circumstances. For a full description of your card and other goodies, please visit LearnTarot.com

What tarot card are you? Enter your birthdate. Month: Day: Year:

I don’t know much about tarot but, as in astrology, do the cards meaning change as time passes or are they fixed in meaning?

Here’s my trip to Cincy’s Contemporary Arts Center from this past Sunday. (links to dead site removed)

Okay, let me backtrack for the past few days since I haven’t been online… I went mainly to visit my aunt who lost both of her daughters, one to lupus, the other choked to death on food. I love her dearly and we have always been close so, it made sense to spend the holiday with her.

On my drive up I stopped overnight and spent the day with my niece living in Atlanta. I cooked them dinner before leaving for Ohio. She’s doing great, working on new drawings, completing a book, and her husband is also working on some new drawings and a comic book. Two artists they are.

I decorated the tree and cooked Christmas dinner. We spent the days before and after Christmas talking, watching TV, having a good time in each other’s company. It was a perfect Christmas!

I left to stop and visit cousins, also in Ohio, and see as many family members as possible. I did. It was also a great time. My cousin made two fresh apple pies and then we ate just about all of them. We left nothing but crumbs from her fantastic pound cake.

My cousin’s two girls wanted to do some Gap outlet shopping down in KY so, I went along and bought a couple polo shirts. We stopped, at my suggestion, at the Contemporary Art Center (Cincinnati) and ran into the handsome chrisglass coming down the stairs. We talked a bit and I felt good to have met him in person although it couldn’t have been planned better.

After breakfast with another aunt and cousins, we all headed off to home. Those cousins live in Alabama. I stopped in rural Georgia for the night with a friend of my aunt. She is a sweet lady. After another breakfast, I headed home.

I had the best Christmas in years. I called my dad when I got home because he wasn’t home for Christmas, he went to Calif. New Years should be quiet unless I get invited out tonight. Be safe and well everybody!

(p.s. I took some pic in the CAC and will have a little write up about it in Miamiartexchange.com later today, if you care to read it.)

Well, I’m finally home from the best Christmas I’ve had in many years. I spent the full time with family in Atlanta and Ohio. I’m so blessed! Love to all and have a great new year celebration! (I’ll post more tomorrow)

Greetings everyone. I’m visiting relatives in Ohio and having a wonderful time. I’ll do more filling in when I get back home in a few days. Have a blessed New Years!

“The miracle of photography, of its so-called objective image, is that it reveals a radically non-objective world. It is a paradox that the lack of objectivity of the world is disclosed by the photographic lens.” (Jean Baudrillard)

“Hussein, having his mouth swabbed and his hair inspected for lice, yielded an image of perfect and abject medical humiliation. Shaving, on the other hand, is done by servants. And so we saw Hussein unshorn, shaggy and haggard, and then, through the miracle of not showing, we saw him clean, looking like our old, familiar adversary, just a bit more tired and gaunt. In The Washington Post, [the] two images, played side by side, suggested a deeper symbolic power, a Samson effect, in the shaving. Hussein, with a beard, kept his head raised and stared slightly upward, like an inwardly dazzled mystic looking to the horizon. Hussein shorn had his head down, and looked not so much faraway and all-seeing but glassy and drunk.”

“Negro President”: Jefferson and the Slave Power, by Garry Wills (Houghton Mifflin); An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America, by Henry Wiencek (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). “The overwhelming presence of slavery in early America,” according to the New York Times’ Gordon S. Wood, is “driving a huge rethinking of our history.” Slate

I say, it’s about time.

“If anything can take founders like Washington and Jefferson out of our present and place them back into the particular context of their time, it is this fact that they were slaveholders. Slavery is virtually inconceivable to us. We can scarcely imagine one person owning another for life. Seeing Washington and Jefferson as slaveholders, men who bought, sold and flogged slaves, [and fathered children by their slaves] has to change our conception of them. They don’t belong to us today; they belong to the 18th century, to that coarse and brutal world that is so remote from our own.”

We’re moving, as a nation, toward the right location to solve, and finally resolve the issues of our past. Just because I never met my great-grandfather, was born into slavery, doesn’t mean I am not affected by it. On the other side of my family the aunt of my grandmother who I did know, was also born into slavery. Mixed race people, like part of my family, lead to some issues that still affect my family. Part of my family in Georgia deny any blood relationship, even though it could be proven otherwise by DNA. That legacy, the legacy of this nation, needs to be understood but, not lingered over needlessly so that we can move on.

“You are a Theory Slut. The true elite of the postmodernists, you collect avant-garde Indonesian hiphop compilations and eat journal articles for breakfast. You positively live for theory. It really doesn’t matter what kind, as long as the words are big and the paragraph breaks few and far between.”

What kind of postmodernist are you!?
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