Colored Criticism

A fresh take on art.

Tiffany Bradley

Curating the Contemporary at Amherst College

On September 10, the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College opened its latest exhibition, Starting Something New: Recent Contemporary Acquisitions. To kick-off the night, we hosted a conversation on what it means to curate contemporary art. Tiffany Bradley, founder of Colored Criticism, a company for cultural heritage stories, moderated a panel of contemporary art curators, featuring David E. Little, John Wieland 1958 Director and Chief Curator of the Mead; Horace D. Ballard, curator of American art at the Williams College Museum of Art; and Emma Chubb, Charlotte Feng Ford ’83 Curator of Contemporary Art at the Smith College Museum of Art.

Image by Jiayi Liu.

Mead Art Museum receives gift of more than 170 contemporary artworks

“Starting Something New” exhibition and symposium featured in the Boston Globe.

The Mead Art Museum at Amherst College has received an anonymous donation of more than 170 works of contemporary art, including pieces by such well-known artists as David Hockney, Mona Hatoum, Cindy Sherman, Mark Bradford, and Christian Marclay.

Visitors will be able to view many of the recently donated works in a celebratory exhibition, “Starting Something New: Recent Contemporary Art Acquisitions and Gifts,” which opens Sept. 10 and runs through May 31.

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Florals & Frida Kahlo

Spring is creeping forward slowly on the East Coast. A stealthy seasonal cold took most of my household down. Laid out for weeks, I thought about the image of wellness. On Instagram, we recognize it as a slender white woman doing headstands on a beach, or a perfectly framed matcha latte. In real life, it feels like avoiding a steady diet of coffee and candy is enough.

This month, my vision of radical healing tends toward the Brooklyn Museum. Frida Kahlo’s iconic portraiture is on display, but the show’s real value is in her composite strength. Her braces, liniments, and clothing show all of the supports that made her studio practice possible. Her life was visited by pain, illness, and trauma. But her work reveals the courage evolving from her circumstances. Spring is a time when growth peeks out from every crack in the pavement. We celebrate renewal with religious observances like Easter or Passover. The more secular ring in the season with the return of brunch.

It’s a comfort to remember that wellness is not the absence of trauma, but the embrace of resilience. I asked Catherine Morris, Sackler Senior Curator at the Brooklyn Museum, how Kahlo’s physicality framed this exhibition:

“Kahlo’s own lived experience with disability is fully present in her art. One of the most remarkable things about her, to me, is the way that she was who she was. And I think it’s a really important conversation to reframe disability in relationship to Kahlo away from the narratives that you primarily see about brokenness, about fragility. I think that Frida Kahlo must certainly have been one of the strongest people going to do what she did.

This current disability theorizing frames disability in relationship to the problems that normative people have with disabled bodies. I do not think, as is often portrayed, that Kahlo was trying to hide her disability with the clothing she wore. She was clearly very intent on making her presence known, her physical self part of the world, taking up space.”

Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving is on view from February 8–May 12, 2019 at the Brooklyn Museum.

Photo credit: Nickolas Muray, Frida with Idol, 1939. Courtesy of Nickolas Muray Photo Archives.

Congress Brings Palestinian Realness

It’s been four years since we started Colored Criticism on Museum Mile. We’ve reached 4,000+ participants so far, and are ready for much, much more. I’ll keep y’all updated on the special projects and surprises coming this year! 

I can’t lie, Rashida Tlaib melted my heart. She made Palestinian culture a trending topic with 4,000+ posts on Instagram. While media outlets from Elle to the New York Times noted the hashtag #TweetYourThobe, it was all coverage and no context. There was little discussion of why this was the ultimate heritage flex, resonating with fashion, art, and Palestinian pride. The 116th Congress brought the most racial and ethnic diversity, and the most cultural heritage our country has ever seen! 

Cliff notes history: a thobe is an ankle-length gown, usually hand-embroidered in vibrant colors across the chest, sleeves, and neck. The embroidery patterns, called tatriz in Arabic, are as regional as can be. The different patterns represent different locations, in this case Palestinian villages before 1948. With this Instacall to action, Tlaib illustrated the art that generations of aunties have carried throughout the diaspora, from Dubai to Detroit. From refugee camps to posh mansions, this needlework pops up in the darnedest places.  

Fabric art is portable, private, and often female (although the Resistance Museum in Abu Dis highlights embroidery from men incarcerated in Israeli prisons.) No wonder it gets no love in the art world. But from Emily Jacir’s refugee tents at Documenta 14, to the traditional thobes displayed at the Birzeit Museum, to the floor of United States Congress, the Palestinian diaspora keeps on moving, one stitch at a time.

Photo credit: The late Elia Kahvedjian captured this portrait of a girl embroidering. His studio, Elia Photo Service in Jerusalem, contains archives of Palestinian life before and during the British Mandate (1923-1948.) See more vintage images in their photographic history “Jerusalem Through My Father’s Eyes”, or during a studio visit (get those frequent flier miles ready!)