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INTO THE SPOTLIGHT

© Gretchen Wms. Jurek

In celebration of Black History month in the U.S., which is during the month of February, I have found many links which will please and enlighten you, hopefully, as much as they have me.

With only a short tradition in the U.S. of artists of color being recognized and their work exhibited, I have been able to find quite a good number of links. This pleasantly surprised me.

Deviating from my usual format, I must give you the link to A Libris, a bookstore, which has a nice spread on the writing on and of some of the most famous Black Americans. (I get nothing from this, except knowing that I have offered you some excellent links.) A Libris Books, these chosen especially for Black History Month:

http://www.alibris.com/articles_features...

Then some links to take you to see the wonderful and consistently informative paintings by Jacob Lawrence, probably the most famous of American Black artists. Maybe I should better describe them as narrative works. Lawrence was primarily a painter but he also tried other media. Take time now to read this, or print it out for later -the biographical notes provided in this article. They will help you to understand the context in which Lawrence created his works. As so often happens, this biography came about in conjunction with the announcement of Lawrence's death. This and the other biographical article also provide a time-line of Black migration northward, the beginnings of the Harlem Renaissance, and go right up to the years of marches, sit-ins, integration, Black Pride, and the decades of the 20th century which have been essential to helping us all to get this far. Jacob Lawrence lived through all of it! Right up until he died in 2000, in Seattle, where he had been a professor of art at the University of Washington for many, many years before retiring there.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/jun200...

Here is just one example of his painting in a collection in at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln:

http://sheldon.unl.edu/HTML/ARTIST/Lawre...

The Lawrence Foundation is something else I didn't know about: http://www.jacoblawrence.org/ You will be able to find many, many more of his paintings there. Put the cursor over the words, and they will pop into artworks.

Here is another very famous artist, Romare Bearden, again, via the Sheldon Collection at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln:

http://sheldon.unl.edu/HTML/ARTIST/Beard...

There is a good biographical article about Bearden on the site, too.

Faith Ringgold is an art professor at the University of California, San Diego. She has an extensive website which you can visit by clicking on: http://www.faithringgold.com