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mdstamper.bsky.social
“Crown Jewels” by Crystal Miller (American) - Mixed media on canvas / 2023 - Discover the Promise: Impact, Legacy & Perspective, Cleveland City Hall (Ohio) #WomenInArt #Afrofuturism #BlackArt #CrystalMiller #MixedMedia #art #artText #BlueskyArt #MixedMediaArt #WomanArtist #WomensArt #WomanArtist
Created in 2023 as African American artist Crystal Miller completed her BFA at the Cleveland Institute of Art, “Crown Jewels” crystallizes her Afrofuturist practice of imagining Black life forward through materials associated with beauty, craft, and communal celebration. Elevating glitter, beads, and rhinestones to the status of paint, she reframes “glamour” as a technology of survival and self-definition. The title asserts sovereignty because jewels are not merely worn; they emanate from the self. This portrait-scale mixed-media canvas layers beadwork, glitter, rhinestones, and foam over painted forms to stage a luminous crown near the work’s center. A dark-skinned figure emerges from a pink surface like low relief, edges catching light as textures sparkle and scatter. Points of the crown radiate above the brow as patterned strips, sequins, and faceted marks travel across hair and garment, suggesting braids, textiles, and jewelry without fixing a single tradition. Saturated fields and crisp outlines hold the composition steady, while reflective accents like full jeweled lips invite eye-level drift. The surface is tactile and celebratory, yet grounded through adornment rendered as presence, protection, and self-possession. Miller has described dreaming of “a world that accepts me…protects the lives of Black people…where my Black sisters…feel empowered,” a vision that animates the work’s radiant surfaces and regal bearing. Installed as part of an exhibition at Cleveland City Hall, “Crown Jewels” functions as a civic proclamation that brilliance belongs in public space, and the aesthetics of adornment, often coded feminine, become instruments of memory, dignity, and futurity rooted in Black womanhood.
October 29, 2025 at 1:12 AM
laurajg.bsky.social
By African-American artist Hughie Lee-Smith (1915-1999), Untitled (Stage 95), ca. 1991-95, oil on linen canvas, 36x32 in (914x813 mm), photo: Swann Auction Galleries, Apr 04, 2019. More in ALT. #arthistory #blackart #blackartist #art #oilpainting
From the website: “This striking canvas epitomizes the theater found in Hughie Lee-Smith's late-career painting. Lee-Smith's enigmatic and isolated figues are depicted as actors or perfomers on a stage with various elements of cultural symbolism. Here an African-American young woman stands proudly before the viewer on a bare stage. The wall behind her is decorated with a torn poster bill with an image of herself, a well-known Japanese ukiyo-e print image by Sharaku of a kabuki actor (now breathing fire) and a variety of graffiti. This evocative image displays Lee-Smith's exploration of how identity is constructed in the staging of his 1990s paintings. These imagined scenes recall Lee-Smith's early experiences of dance and theater while working at the Playhouse Settlement (named Karamu House in 1941) during the WPA period in Cleveland. Lee-Smith taught art at Karamu House in the late 1930s in return for the full scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art (now the Art Institute of Cleveland) that the Gilpin Players awarded him in 1935. Inspired by the Gilpin Players, a black acting troupe, Lee-Smith also founded an inter-racial modern dance troupe there.”
May 30, 2025 at 9:08 PM
jobekins72.bsky.social
Art show at Doubting Thomas Gallery in Cleveland. My latest painting "Stays Within" and people looking at art

#selfie #blackart #clevelandart #doubtingthomasgallery #painting #drawing #gallery #blyskyart #nudity #figureart #maleart #artwork #figurative #art
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December 15, 2024 at 9:01 PM
jobekins72.bsky.social
"Veronica's Side Pieces" by Johnny B Perkins, Jr

Woman's Secret of (men and women) coming out of her hair in front of her husband/boyfriend.
#fashion#style #Cleveland#blackart #bisexual #lgbt #afro #surrealism #imaginative #experimentalart #soul
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February 22, 2025 at 11:08 PM