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"Initiation, Liberia" by Loïs Mailou Jones (American) - Acrylic on canvas / 1983 - Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC) #WomenInArt #art #artText #WomanArtist #LoïsMailouJones ##LoisMailouJones #SAAM #SmithsonianAmericanArtMuseum #WomensArt #AfricanDiasporaArt #BlackArt #WomenArtists
A young woman’s head fills the frame as a crisp swath of opaque white paint crosses her eyes like a ritual mask, softening her gaze and signaling transition. Her features are stylized yet tender with full lips, a calm brow, and tightly rendered contours that read as both portrait and emblem. At the left edge, faint, receding profiles echo her silhouette, suggesting elders, ancestors, or fellow initiates. The palette leans into warm earths with saturated black and red accents; patterned passages hint at textile and beadwork without naming a specific motif. A flat, luminous background heightens her stillness, while the white band and layered heads create a quiet rhythm of concealment and emergence. A near-architectural clarity of edge, learned in Paris by the artist and refined over decades, lends the face a sign-like dignity even as the sitter’s poise feels ceremonial, her individuality veiled yet affirmed. American artist Loïs Mailou Jones engages the Sande (women’s) initiation practiced in Liberia and neighboring regions, where white kaolin markings can signify a liminal status and protected learning before public reentry. The band of white, placed over the eyes, speaks to knowledge withheld and about to be revealed. It is a screen the community recognizes and a mirror the initiate carries until she returns transformed. The echoed profiles propose continuity like knowledge moving from elder to novice, generation to generation while the frontal scale insists on the centrality of Black womanhood as bearer of memory. Jones’s color orchestration with earth, ember, and night summons the forest space of seclusion and the warm public of return; her crisp contouring keeps the image modern, resisting ethnographic fixation. Painted in 1983, the work distills two decades of research and travel across eleven African countries into a graphic, humane language that refuses stereotype: not an illustration of ritual but an homage to women’s agency, secrecy, and solidarity.
October 28, 2025 at 10:04 PM
feridundemir.org
Ìrìn Àjò Cartoon Exhibition: A Journey Through Identity, Migration, and Resilience by Samuel Ojo

feriIrinAjor.org/2025/08/01/i...

#SamuelOjo #IrinAjo #CartoonMuseumLondon #AfricanDiasporaArt #MigrationArt #CartoonExhibitionUK #BlackCartoonists #YorubaArtists #SocialJusticeArt #LondonArtEvents
Ìrìn Àjò Cartoon Exhibition: A Journey Through Identity Migration and Resilience by Samuel Ojo
📍 The Cartoon Museum, London 📅 July 31 – November 29, 2025 Samuel Ojo’s First Solo Exhibition in London Captures the Black Immigrant Experience Through Powerful Cartoons British-Nigerian cartoonist Sa...
feridundemir.org
August 1, 2025 at 7:04 PM