Bright Ribbon-Grass

Black Girl (1966)

Director: Ousmane Sembène

The images are small, because I zoomed way out, so I could scroll quicker on my dashboard. So I’ll give you their titles and artists below. 

Top Right: Mrs. Waldorf Astor, Kehinde Wiley, Top Middle: Atsushi Suwa, Top Left: Rosa Rolanda Covarrubias, Bottom Right: John Duncan, Bottom Left: Illustration for La Vie Parisienne Cherí Hérouard. 

   for Keith and Jen

Friends I am here to modestly report seeing in an orchard in my town a goldfinch kissing a sunflower again and again dangling upside down by its tiny claws steadying itself by snapping open like an old-timey fan its wings again and again, until, swooning, it tumbled off and swooped back to the very same perch, where the sunflower curled its giant swirling of seeds around the bird and leaned back to admire the soft wind nudging the bird’s plumage, and friends I could see the points on the flower’s stately crown soften and curl inward as it almost indiscernibly lifted the food of its body to the bird’s nuzzling mouth whose fervor I could hear from oh 20 or 30 feet away and see from the tiny hulls that sailed from their good racket, which good racket, I have to say was making me blush, and rock up on my tippy-toes, and just barely purse my lips with what I realize now was being, simply, glad, which such love, if we let it, makes us feel.

Have you popped into the Black artists on Tumblr tag yet? It’s an endless scroll of GIFs, photography, paintings, illustrations, and more, more, more. Here’s a small collection of Tumblrs you can follow to get you started:

The Artist Akuji (@theartistakuji​)

Beautiful digital art that just feels clean, fresh, and pleasing to look at. The artist’s Jamaican-American background shines through in a lot of her work, like this “West Indie” piece.

Maya Ajani (@mayaajani​)

Gritty, detailed, cool as hell marker art. Everything is a little bit gnarled up and raw and, just to repeat with deserved emphasis, cool as hell.

Liam Gavyn Salt (@liamgavynsalt​)

Liam Salt dabbles in seemingly all things visual art: painting, digital, photography, illustration. He does it all well, but It’s his GIFed up self-portraits that we wanted to showcase. Those are some finely tuned, well-thought-out scribbles up there.

Into this stuff? Want more of it? Right over here. 

Don’t miss our upcoming BHM Answer Times. Next week we’ll have:

2/6—The activists behind the TheBlackout movement (@theblackoutofficial) are already taking your questions. Ask them about the second anniversary of #blackout, the current goals and future of their mission, or anything else you find relevant. 

2/7—Fashion designer Jerome Lamaar (@531jerome).

on my street

Taxi- one of the many kinds

far from @uber

This is the sankofa symbol in the grill work at my house. Before I started to attend public lectures and such I thought it, and similar shapes, were just cool, decorative art work.