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wildtrain444.bsky.social
👽💙

#blacksky #artsky #blackartsky #blackskyart #art #timelapse #wip #alien #scifi #creativewildtrain444 #blackart #digitalart #drawingwhileblack #blackartist #digitaldrawing
November 4, 2026 at 3:50 AM
wildtrain444.bsky.social
Another vampire, because I'm not ready for the long, drawn-out Christmas commercialism. 🧛🏾‍♀️

#blacksky #artsky #blackartsky #blackskyart #art #wip #vampire #halloween #blackart #creativewildtrain444 #digitalart #digitaldrawing #drawingwhileblack #blackvampire
November 2, 2026 at 10:29 PM
wildtrain444.bsky.social
Happy Halloween! 🎃🧛🏾‍♀️

#blacksky #artsky #blackartsky #blackskyart #art #halloween #vampire #blackart #bantuknots #creativewildtrain444 #digitalart #digitaldrawing #drawingwhileblack #blackvampire
October 31, 2026 at 1:42 AM
wildtrain444.bsky.social
Another vampire wip. 🧛🏾‍♀️ Stay tuned!

#blacksky #artsky #blackskyart #blackartsky #art #wip #vampire #timelapse #blackart #creativewildtrain444 #drawingwhileblack #blackartist #digitalart #digitaldrawing
October 29, 2026 at 3:03 AM
jouejoue.digital
I’m tryna figure out these feeds and I’m confused.

so I gotta add #blackskyart or #blackartist #blackart to each of my posts for it to show up in the feed?

how am I seeing people‘s posts in the blacksky art feed who don’t have hashtags at all?
November 3, 2026 at 9:59 PM
jouejoue.digital
I’ve always got boos in the queue, but I’m still swooning rn 🙂‍↕️

#blackskyart
A 2d digital portrait doodle of the latest doll for my Pocket Boo collection. Their hair is slicked into an orange high ponytail, their hoops are golden and big, and the top of their green, sleeveless sports bra is shown. Their unimpressed gaze drifts off to the right of the canvas. A 2d digital portrait doodle of the latest doll for my Pocket Boo collection. Their hair is slicked into an orange high ponytail, their hoops are golden and big, and the top of their green, sleeveless sports bra is shown. Their unimpressed gaze drifts off to the right of the canvas. The background is a purple and pink grid.
November 4, 2026 at 3:35 PM
iduhouse.bsky.social
🖋️ Artist of the Day: Toyin Ojih Odutola

Toyin Ojih Odutola draws worlds into existence, one layered mark at a time. Her portraits open onto imagined histories, giving Black characters power, privacy and fully realized lives beyond the frame.

#CreatorsAtWork #Skystorians #BlackSky #BlackSkyArt #Art
Toyin Ojih Odutola faces the camera, arms crossed, in a navy turtleneck before pale painted figures. This portrait is credited to Todd Eberle (2014) by Miami MoCAAD. It shows the Nigerian-born artist with a rounded natural Afro, a small septum ring and a calm, unwavering gaze. Behind her, pale blue-gray bodies seem to twist through an abstract composition, but the photograph does not securely identify that background artwork or its maker. The juxtaposition is striking: a real person stands before rendered bodies, challenging the impulse to treat a visible surface as a complete account of a life. By 2014, Ojih Odutola had developed an intricate language of ballpoint-pen lines that made Black skin appear almost topographical. Born in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, in 1985, she moved to the United States as a child and later grew up in Alabama. She has described how arriving there changed the way others interpreted her: skin became a category imposed before she could speak. In response, drawing offered a place to examine how that category is constructed, and how much individuality it can obscure. She called skin a geography to travel through. Repeated marks create ridges, shadows and changing light rather than one flat field of black. The labor is deliberate: each stroke builds an inner life that a quick glance cannot contain. Even then she resisted being confined to autobiography or simple identity portraiture. Her later pastel and charcoal drawings grew into fictional histories of Nigerian families, while A Countervailing Theory (2020) unfolded across an entire exhibition as an invented epic. The 2014 image catches an artist at a threshold, before those enormous narrative worlds took shape. Its strongest statement is not that she represents Black identity for us, but that she will decide how to draw the questions herself. Four Black women pose before a blue arched window; one wears a white dress and orange boots. This is Toyin Ojih Odutola's Representatives of State (2016–17), a nearly life-size drawing made with pastel, charcoal and pencil on paper, measuring 75½ by 50 inches. The figure at left turns in a rust-colored headwrap, pale blouse, embroidered skirt and high-heeled boots; beside her, a woman with short textured hair meets our gaze in a white dress and gleaming orange knee-high boots. A third wears pale trousers, a patterned waistcoat and green-tinted glasses. The fourth, with long locks, stands in a roomy striped coat and reddish shoes. The clean blue window makes their clothing and self-possession feel almost theatrical. The four are not named contemporary politicians photographed from life. The Whitney Museum identifies them as elected officials within Ojih Odutola's invented world, a prelude to To Wander Determined, her 2017–18 New York solo museum exhibition. Across that body of work, two fictional aristocratic Nigerian families, the UmuEze Amara and Obafemi houses, inhabit an alternate history not organized by European colonial conquest. The artist creates the documents, settings and portraits through which viewers encounter them, like illustrations from an unwritten novel. The poise is intentional. Formal portraiture has long been used to make power look natural, while Black figures were frequently excluded from its grandest traditions. Ojih Odutola gives these women that visual authority without turning them into symbols of virtue. The title raises questions as well as admiration: what does it mean to represent a state, who gains the right to govern, and how does privilege shape what we are allowed to see? All of this apparent paint is drawing. Layers of dry media construct skin, fabric and architecture through the artist's patient hand. This is not a record of a real cabinet; it is a speculative portrait of power on terms she invented. In a bright studio, Toyin Ojih Odutola bends over a large drawing, working a dark profile by hand. The artist leans over a broad, slanted pale work surface with a blue edge, holding a drawing tool in her right hand near the shoulder of an emerging black figure. Short twists frame her face; she wears a dark top and a silver hoop earring. Pinned to the wall are faint sketches of heads and hair, and a white door closes off the spare workspace. The photographed surface shows a densely marked head in profile, still surrounded by lighter, unfinished areas. The photographer, studio and exact artwork are unverified. It is a rare look at the physical effort behind portraits often mistaken for paintings. Ojih Odutola trained at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and California College of the Arts, and became known for constructing skin with repeated lines in black pen ink, later widening her tools to include pencil, charcoal, pastel and lithographic crayon. Instead of treating dark skin as a single tonal mass, she layers marks until light seems to travel across ridges, pores and folds. That process takes time, concentration and a willingness to discover a character while making it. Printmaking also became part of that exploration. In the 2010s she worked with Tamarind Institute's specialist printers on lithographs, including the 2014 Birmingham series based on photographs of her brother. Those editions are collaborative prints with distinct printer credits, not merely reproductions of drawings. Nothing in this image conclusively proves she is making one of them, so the work in front of her should not be labeled Birmingham or called a lithographic stone without confirmation. The photograph gives the artist back her labor. Later, she would invent whole families and imagined societies; here, the foundational story is simpler: a hand asking what one more line can reveal. A Black man's face emerges from green fronds and tiny pink blossoms above a white shirt and red tie. Toyin Ojih Odutola's Between the Margins (2017) is a charcoal, pastel and pencil drawing on paper, just 24 by 19 inches, shown in her Whitney Museum exhibition To Wander Determined. The figure has close-cropped hair, a small earring, full lips and a steady, guarded look. Luminous gray-blue highlights move over deep brown-black skin. His sharply outlined collar and textured red tie appear almost formal, while long green leaves cross his forehead, cheeks and neck. Pink flecks hover among the fronds and seem to settle into his hair, as though the landscape were refusing to remain in the background. The portrait belongs to Ojih Odutola's fictional world of privileged Nigerian families, whose interiors, clothes and landscapes borrow from many times and places. It is not a documentary photograph of a known man in a known garden. She builds her characters from composites, memory, research and images of people she knows, giving viewers clues without promising a complete explanation. This figure's name and precise place within the family saga are not confirmed by the museum's caption, and should not be invented. The botanical setting does more than decorate him. She has spoken of skin as geography, a territory crossed by fine marks to discover a character's reality. Here the direction reverses too: vegetation sweeps across his skin, so person and environment seem to occupy the same visual terrain. The crisp tie hints at social status; his unreadable expression refuses to let us turn that hint into a whole biography. The Whitney exhibited it in her first New York solo museum show in 2017–18. Its quiet intensity sums up her larger project: to create Black figures who can possess wealth, privacy, contradiction and complexity without being required to explain themselves to the viewer. We are invited closer, but never granted ownership of his story.
October 29, 2026 at 3:23 AM
wildtrain444.bsky.social
Vampire ink timelapse. 🧛🏾‍♀️ Stay tuned for the final piece!

#blacksky #artsky #blackskyart #art #vampire #timelapse #wip #blackart #creativewildtrain444 #drawingwhileblack #blackartist #digitalart #digitaldrawing
October 21, 2026 at 2:57 AM
iduhouse.bsky.social
📽️ Artist of the Day: Wanuri Kahiu

Wanuri Kahiu makes room for joy in African cinema. Director of Rafiki and co-founder of Afrobubblegum, she champions love, wonder and imagination, refusing to let struggle define African stories.

#CreatorsAtWork #Skystorians #BlackSky #BlackSkyArt #Art
Portrait of Wanuri Kahiu against burnt orange, wearing a blue patterned dress and gold jewelry. The Kenyan filmmaker's portrait has no securely identified photographer, date or publication context, so it should not be attributed to a particular film festival. Its confident composition nevertheless makes a fitting introduction to the creative philosophy Kahiu has articulated in her own work: African people deserve stories of pleasure, possibility and ordinary human complexity, not only images of war, deprivation and trauma. Kahiu is a creative co-founder of AFROBUBBLEGUM, a collective and media platform championing African art that can be fun, fierce and frivolous. In her 2017 TED talk, she questioned the expectation that African creativity must always justify itself through suffering or social lessons. For her, making room for joy is also about who gets to imagine a full human life on screen. The warmth and exuberance of this portrait echo that refusal to limit how an African artist may appear, though the photographer's own intentions remain unknown. That vision does not require avoiding difficult history. Kahiu's first feature, From a Whisper (2008), addressed the aftermath of the 1998 US embassy bombing in Nairobi. Her short Pumzi (2009) imagined a water-starved East African future and a woman scientist who risks everything for the possibility of regrowth. Made before the international attention surrounding Rafiki, these films show Kahiu moving between historical drama and speculative cinema, testing how Kenyan stories could look, feel and unfold. She later described wanting to see African people fall in love in the films she grew up watching. That desire led her toward Rafiki and a wider argument for artistic freedom. This is not a film still or a character portrait. It gives the filmmaker a space of her own, as a creator whose imagination belongs to no single genre or approved narrative. Bright yellow Rafiki poster: two women leap before turquoise and pink, above bold black lettering. This is promotional artwork for Wanuri Kahiu's 2018 Kenyan romance, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, the first Kenyan feature selected for the festival's official lineup. Samantha Mugatsia plays Kena and Sheila Munyiva plays Ziki, daughters of rival political families in Nairobi. Against expectations about what “good Kenyan girls” should become, their relationship grows into a love story that must negotiate both delight and danger. Kahiu and Jenna Bass wrote the screenplay, adapting Ugandan writer Monica Arac de Nyeko's short story “Jambula Tree,” winner of the 2007 Caine Prize. Cinematographer Christopher Wessels and production designer Arya Lalloo helped shape the film's saturated, contemporary Nairobi. The camera follows young people through housing estates, streets, music and friendship. These choices resist the assumption that African cinema must make hardship its defining visual language. The poster's jump and paint-splash energy continue that deliberate approach. Kahiu has said that she grew up rarely seeing Africans fall in love on screen. Through her Afrobubblegum philosophy, she wanted romance, humor and vivid color to receive the same cinematic dignity routinely afforded to American or European characters. The women's happiness is the point, not a distraction from the film's politics. Before Cannes, Kenya's film classification board banned Rafiki over its depiction of same-sex love. Kahiu contested the ban in court and secured a temporary seven-day screening window in September 2018, allowing local audiences to see the film and enabling Oscar submission consideration. That decision did not permanently erase the ban. The artwork thus announces both the story she insisted on telling and the freedom to exhibit it that she was forced to defend. The specific poster designer could not be verified. Wanuri Kahiu sits in a cream armchair wearing a burgundy patterned dress and silver-braided bun. TIME published this portrait by photographer Caitlin Cronenberg for its inaugural 100 Next list in November 2019. Filmmaker and writer dream hampton contributed the accompanying tribute, celebrating Kahiu's ability to place Black women's lives at the heart of stories too often withheld from them. The recognition followed Rafiki's 2018 Cannes premiere and Kahiu's confrontation with censorship in Kenya, but hampton also singled out an earlier, very different work. Pumzi (2009), written and directed by Kahiu, imagines a future East Africa where devastating water wars have forced survivors into an enclosed community. Asha, a museum curator and scientist, receives a sample of living soil and risks leaving the settlement to pursue the possibility of regrowth. The film centers a Black African woman's scientific curiosity, rather than treating the continent as a place outside science or technological imagination. Its ecological stakes make the future an arena of responsibility as much as escape. Pumzi was shot by cinematographer Grant Appleton and produced through an international collaboration including Simon Hansen and Amira Quinlan. It screened at Sundance in 2010 and became a touchstone for discussions of Afrofuturism and African speculative cinema. The director's credit matters: these are worlds Kahiu intentionally wrote and staged, not simply roles she performed in front of a camera. By the time of this TIME portrait, Kahiu had helped develop AFROBUBBLEGUM, championing African stories of delight as well as gravity. The range from Pumzi to Rafiki is more revealing than any one genre label. Her creative project is to expand what Black women can be shown doing: imagining futures, falling in love, taking risks and deciding what happens next. This artwork promotes Washington Black, an eight-episode adventure series released on Hulu on July 23, 2025. At its center is George Washington “Wash” Black, played as an adult by Ernest Kingsley Jr. A former enslaved boy from a Barbados plantation, Wash possesses a gift for science and invention that launches him on a journey beyond the place where others expected his life to end. Sterling K. Brown plays Medwin Harris. The poster's airborne craft and curling sea imagery evoke the series' mixture of nineteenth-century history, speculative machinery and globe-spanning escape. The story comes from Ghanaian Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan's acclaimed 2018 book. Selwyn Seyfu Hinds created the television adaptation and co-ran it with Kimberly Ann Harrison. Wanuri Kahiu served as an executive producer and directed multiple episodes, including the premiere and finale. Other directors, performers, writers, designers and cinematographers built the series with them. Neither its creation nor this publicity design should be attributed solely to Kahiu; the individual poster artist is not securely identified. What makes this image relevant to her practice is the imaginative territory. In her own 2009 short Pumzi, Kahiu placed a woman scientist at the heart of a future East African ecological crisis. Washington Black looks instead to the nineteenth-century Atlantic world, where one Black inventor's curiosity becomes a route to movement and agency. These are distinct projects, developed through different collaborators, but both refuse to let historical suffering become the only imaginable story. The large title reads “WASHINGTON BLACK,” with the tagline “JOURNEY BEYOND YOUR WILDEST DREAMS.” That invitation captures an idea running through Kahiu's career: visual storytelling should not only bear witness to constraint. It can create room for people to pursue futures that others have refused to picture.
October 25, 2026 at 1:24 AM
jouejoue.digital
imbuing the feed with some Sticky Boo energy ✨

#AddToBlackskyArt
#blackskyart
a 2d digital portrait of Sticky Boo, an oc from my Pocket Boo collection, wearing a cheek-length two-toned sage green bob, big gold hoops and piercings, and periwinkle round glasses. Their expression is knowing, their skin dark brown, and their lips plump. The background is a cranberry and pink grid.
October 19, 2026 at 6:25 PM
iduhouse.bsky.social
🖤 Artist of the Day: Belkis Ayón

Belkis Ayón turned silence into a visual language. Through collagraphy and layered textures, she reimagined Abakuá mythology around Sikán, exploring gender, power, sacrifice, spiritual life, and memory.

#CreatorsAtWork #Skystorians #BlackSky #BlackSkyArt #Art
Belkis Ayón stands with her arms folded before a section of her monumental color collagraph La cena (The Supper), made in 1988. She wears a sleeveless white T-shirt printed “CUBA 513,” small earrings, and short natural hair, looking slightly past the camera with a half-smile. Behind her, the artwork fills the frame: mouthless human figures in electric pink, blue, green, yellow, red and tan gather around a black table, their almond-shaped eyes floating in mask-like faces. One yellow figure bends over a bowl of blue fish while another raises a hand to its face. The photograph matters because artist and breakthrough work occupy the same frame. Ayón was still a young art student when she made La cena, one of her first monumental collagraphs. Collagraphy begins with a plate built like a collage: papers and textured materials are attached to cardboard, inked, and run through a press. To escape the press’s size limit, Ayón printed separate sections and joined them into an image large enough to confront the viewer almost bodily. She had begun researching Abakuá mythology as a student, despite being excluded from the all-male Afro-Cuban brotherhood whose stories fascinated her. Rather than illustrate its oral traditions literally, she invented a visual language for them and centered Sikán, the woman whose discovery of the sacred fish Tanze leads to her silencing and death. Ayón later described herself, like Sikán, as an “observer, intermediary and revealer.” La cena became a hinge in that project. Ayón was dissatisfied with this bright version and reworked the composition in black, white and gray by 1991, the palette that would define her mature work. Here, before that turn, we see the creator literally standing inside the world she was building. Belkis Ayón’s Nasakó inició (Nasakó Initiated), 1986, is a horizontal early collagraph dominated by three colors. A tall black, mouthless figure stands at the center with arms stretched wide and pale eyes turned slightly upward. White ritual markings sit on the torso and pelvis. Across the white ground behind him, rows of rough red fish swim laterally like a repeated current. Four squat yellow figures patterned with irregular black spots bend low on either side, their rounded heads dropped toward the ground; each has a dark circular opening near the base. The forms are flat, graphic and almost emblematic, yet the uneven printed textures keep every body from becoming a simple silhouette. This is Ayón near the beginning of the language that would occupy her career. Her first works on Abakuá date to the mid-1980s, while she was still a student. Nasakó is the diviner and principal religious figure in the origin story as Ayón studied it: when Sikán encounters Tanze, the sacred fish whose voice carries spiritual power, Nasakó binds her to secrecy. The fish repeated behind him therefore belongs to the story’s struggle over knowledge, authority and who is permitted to possess either. The palette also reveals an Ayón many viewers never meet. Before her famous blacks, whites and grays, she worked in strong blocks of color and geometric compositions; scholarship on this early period connects those planes of color to Cuba’s vigorous graphic-poster tradition. Even here, though, she is not simply illustrating ritual. She is designing an iconography for a tradition with little figurative imagery available to her, translating oral myth through printmaking and her own imagination. Six years before her mature monumental works, the essential questions are already present: secrecy, gender, power, sacrifice, and the right to tell a story from outside the room where its rules are made. Belkis Ayón’s La cena (The Supper), 1988, spreads a ceremonial meal across a brilliant pink field. Ten stylized, mouthless figures overlap in two rows around a long black table. Their bodies are fields of color and pattern: deep blue, burgundy, ochre, green, yellow, orange and black. White almond-shaped eyes puncture otherwise featureless faces. At lower left a tan figure hides part of the face behind one hand; a yellow figure bends intently over a dark bowl filled with bright blue fish; a green figure sits upright before a pale plate; and at right an orange figure leans across a dish holding a long fish. Small bowls, gourds, vessels and branches line the table like ritual objects. Fine incised marks and patterned surfaces complicate the flat, poster-bright color. Made while Ayón was still a student, La cena was first shown publicly in 1988 at Havana’s Galería Servando Cabrera. She built the huge scene from separately printed collagraph sections, pushing a print medium associated with the dimensions of a press toward mural scale. The composition brings different sacred languages to one table. Ayón connected the Abakuá initiation banquet, Iriampó, with the Christian Last Supper, but shifted authority inside both traditions. She explained that the dinner is populated chiefly by women, with only two men. Later scholarship identifies Sikán, the lone woman at the center of Abakuá’s founding myth, as taking the symbolic place occupied by Christ in the Christian model. The silence is visual as well as historical: these figures have eyes but no mouths, a device Ayón associated with women’s exclusion from Abakuá ritual speech. Ayón was not satisfied with this color version. For her 1991 graduation work she remade the composition in black, white and gray, finding those tones better suited to its existential drama. This radiant first version lets us see the moment before that decision, when her scale, mythology and visual rebellion were already fully underway. Belkis Ayón’s Nlloro (Weeping), 1991, is a monumental nine-sheet black-and-white collagraph shaped like a dark, irregular arch. A pale deceased body lies horizontally across the lower right, almost luminous against the black ground. Around it, a dense gathering of mouthless figures emerges through wildly different skins of gray: scales, dots, mottled grain, leopard-like spots and fine ritual markings. At far left a figure carries a drum. Near the body, a white cross cuts through the darkness. On the right, a towering black spirit raises white arms into a pointed shape above its head; its body is covered with linear symbols. Only eyes break many of the faces, making the crowd feel simultaneously watchful, mournful and unknowable. “Nlloro” means weeping and names an Abakuá funerary rite performed after the burial of an ekobio, a religious brother. Ayón did not document it as an ethnographer. She altered the ritual’s order, placing the dead man visibly at the center in a configuration scholars compare with a Cuban Catholic wake. Estate and museum research identifies the drum-bearing figure at the far left as Mpegó, priest of the signs, responsible for drawing anaforuanas, or sacred graphic marks, during ceremonies. The marked black figure at right is the spirit Anamangüi, charged with guiding the deceased spirit upward. That fusion is essential to Ayón’s method. Abakuá provided a structure, but Christian iconography, Cuban experience and her own imagination entered the image with it. By 1991 she had also abandoned her earlier bright color. Using cardboard matrices built from papers, sandpaper, carborundum, gesso and other humble materials, she produced an extraordinary range of blacks and grays, then aligned nine printed sheets into one 215-by-300-centimeter scene. The result is not a secret ritual “revealed.” It is Ayón’s authored mythology of grief, passage and power, made on a scale that turns printmaking into an environment the viewer must physically face.
October 18, 2026 at 2:04 AM
iduhouse.bsky.social
🎨 Artist of the Day: Ernest Mancoba

A pioneer of African modernism, Ernest Mancoba’s art blended spirituality, abstraction and identity. Working in exile, he sought freedom through form, creating pieces that spoke to human dignity and depth.

#CreatorsAtWork #Skystorians #BlackSky #BlackSkyArt #Art
Black-and-white portrait of Ernest Mancoba in later life, photographed by Peter Johansen in 1986. Mancoba sits indoors in a dark beret, herringbone tweed jacket, dark sweater vest, crisp white shirt and tie. Light enters from the left, catching the planes and deep lines of his face as he looks past the camera with a furrowed, searching expression. A doorway or window frame cuts through the shadowy background. At the bottom edge, his hands hold folded eyeglasses and part of a newspaper, giving the formal portrait the feeling of a quiet moment interrupted. Art historians Karen Kurczynski and Nicola Pezolet identify this as Johansen’s 1986 portrait, made in a period when Mancoba, long based in France, was visiting Denmark to work on lithographs with Johansen. The Ferlov Mancoba archive preserves correspondence from Atelier Litografisk inviting him to work there and suggests this stay may have marked his move into lithography after earlier woodcuts. There is another layer just beyond this crop. In the wider published photograph, Mancoba’s sideways glance falls toward Alberto Giacometti’s bronze Spoon Woman, a work shaped by Giacometti’s own encounter with West African carved forms. Mancoba had known Giacometti during his early Paris years, when his own thinking about African art and European modernism was changing rapidly. The visual encounter is powerful because Mancoba spent much of his career resisting a history that eagerly celebrated African influence while too often marginalizing African modernists themselves. Here he is simply present: composed, observant, intellectually alert and still making work nearly half a century after leaving South Africa. That quiet visibility feels different now: Mancoba has since become the subject of major institutional reassessments, and the Ferlov Mancoba Foundation launched a digital catalogue raisonné in 2025 to reconstruct the record of an oeuvre that history had only partially preserved. Black-and-white archival photograph of Ernest Mancoba’s Faith, carved in wood in 1936. The small sculpture stands alone on a rectangular base against a pale, nearly empty backdrop. Its surface is dark, rough and visibly worked rather than polished smooth. A larger human form rises vertically like a compact column, built from broad rounded masses. Nested against its front is a smaller childlike body and face, tilted upward toward the larger figure, so mother and child seem less like separate bodies than forms growing into and through one another. Simplified limbs, compressed anatomy and visible carving marks give the work both physical weight and tenderness. Faith survives through photographs, including this image first published in Johannesburg’s The Star on June 8, 1936; the sculpture’s current whereabouts and dimensions are unknown. It belongs to a pivotal turn in Mancoba’s South African practice. After learning woodcarving at Grace Dieu and becoming known for more naturalistic figurative sculpture, he encountered reproductions of West and Central African sculpture in a book recommended by Cape Town modernist Lippy Lipshitz. That encounter helped open a route toward geometric simplification and a modernism he could define for himself. The timing matters. In 1936 South Africa’s Department of Native Affairs also offered Mancoba work making saleable animal souvenirs for the Empire Exhibition. He ultimately refused. Faith was not made as an illustration of that refusal, but it comes from the same moment in which he was pushing against colonial ideas about what a Black artist should make and for whom. Here resemblance is no longer the whole point. Volume, rhythm, compression and the relationship between two bodies carry the feeling. Scholar Joshua I. Cohen calls Faith Mancoba’s first modernist sculpture. The surviving image lets us watch an artist beginning to claim formal freedom before Europe ever entered the story. Black-and-white photograph of Ernest Mancoba working in a studio in Gudhjem on the Danish island of Bornholm in summer 1951, photographed by Johnny Bonne. Mancoba stands slightly hunched over a crowded worktable, wearing a dark beret and sleeveless sweater over a white collared shirt. His eyes are lowered toward a small palette or board held carefully in both hands. Brushes, containers and working materials fill the table below him. At right, a rounded wooden sculpture by Mancoba rises close to the camera; behind him hangs one of his paintings, organized through broad geometric and block-like forms. The photograph places painting and sculpture in the same room, surrounding the artist as living parts of his practice. The image was made for a newspaper feature about artists working on Bornholm that summer. Ernest and his wife, Danish sculptor Sonja Ferlov Mancoba, were spending time in Gudhjem near the end of the five years they had lived in Denmark after World War II. Through friends including Asger Jorn and Ejler Bille, Mancoba had become involved with the Høst exhibition circle and the CoBrA milieu. CoBrA’s official life lasted only from 1948 to 1951, so this photograph catches him at the edge of both a place and an art-historical moment. That context is complicated. Mancoba later described feeling marginalized within those circles, where enthusiasm for non-Western art could coexist with resistance to a Black South African artist speaking as an equal modernist. Bonne’s photograph cuts through that abstraction. We see Mancoba doing the work: handling materials, studying a surface, surrounded by objects he made. After this Bornholm summer, the family returned to France. The image therefore reads almost like a threshold, but not an ending. It shows a creator whose language cannot be reduced to “African,” “European” or “CoBrA,” because all three labels are smaller than the practice happening in the room. Color image of Ernest Mancoba’s Komposition, also known as Composition, painted in Paris in 1940 in oil on canvas. The roughly vertical work is dense and symmetrical without becoming rigid. At the top, nested diamonds and polygonal bands read almost like a head or mask. Below, sharp red, blue, ochre, cream, green and brown chevrons stack and open outward around a central axis. Curved striped passages suggest eyes, arms, wings or ornament, while the lower half gathers into another diamond above dark triangular forms. Thick, direct brushwork keeps the geometry alive: edges wobble, colors overlap and the image seems to shift between a human presence and an abstract structure. The current Ernest Mancoba catalogue raisonné records the work as Komposition, 1940, oil on canvas, 59.5 by 49.5 centimeters, private collection. MoMA scholar Joshua I. Cohen identifies it as Mancoba’s first painting on canvas, following the nonobjective works on paper he made after arriving in Europe. Here he brings the human figure back, but reorganizes it through abstraction. Scholars have linked the painting’s frontal structure, diamonds and chevrons to Kuba masking traditions from the Congo region, particularly the Mbwoom helmet mask. Mancoba had studied African works and reproductions in South Africa and visited the British Museum’s African collections on his way to Paris; the precise model remains an art-historical interpretation rather than a documented one-to-one copy. That distinction matters. This is an African modernist authoring his own synthesis, not simply supplying “influence” to Europe. Composition predates CoBrA by eight years, challenging the habit of explaining Mancoba mainly through that later movement. The language is already here: figure becoming sign, symmetry disrupted by the hand, and African form participating from inside the making of modern art.
October 16, 2026 at 8:01 PM
iduhouse.bsky.social
📸 Artist of the Day: Trevor Stuurman

Trevor Stuurman captures the modern African identity through vibrant color and intimate storytelling. His images celebrate style, culture, and self-expression, turning everyday life into fine art.

#CreatorsAtWork #Skystorians #BlackSky #BlackSkyArt #Art
A tightly framed color portrait of a Black man posed frontally against a bold black-and-white backdrop whose sweeping stripes resemble zebra markings. He wears round dark sunglasses, a black cylindrical hat decorated with small metallic figures, a crisp white shirt, and a silvery gray outer garment densely covered with embroidered patches. Both hands hold a small silver-and-black camera at the center of his chest. The pose is calm and deliberate: photographer, camera and patterned background are stacked almost symmetrically, turning the act of looking into part of the picture. This photograph was published as “Self-Portrait (1)” in connection with Trevor Stuurman’s 2022 exhibition Life Through the Lens at Doyle Wham in Shoreditch, London, his first solo exhibition outside South Africa. The show, open May 13 to July 2, gathered carefully styled and staged self-portraits made across his career, with each image tied to a personal or professional milestone. Stuurman used clothing, props and constructed backdrops not as decoration alone, but as tools for deciding how a Black African subject would be seen. That approach also places the work in conversation with African studio portrait traditions. The exhibition explicitly cited Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, whose portraits made patterned interiors, clothing, stance and self-presentation central to authorship. Stuurman carries that lineage into a contemporary image saturated with fashion and self-fashioning. The camera is especially important: it makes image-making visible inside the image itself, placing authorship in plain sight. Rather than disappearing behind the lens, the creator places the apparatus in front of us and turns self-portraiture into a statement about who gets to frame, style, archive and celebrate Black life. Two Black women sit side by side on grass in a dark, leafy garden, posed with the stillness and ceremony of a formal portrait. At left, one wears a towering black-and-white striped headwrap, narrow white sunglasses, layered beadwork and metal adornment across her neck and partly exposed torso, and a vivid red plaid textile wrapped around her lower body. At right, the second figure wears dark sunglasses, red lipstick, an angular printed headpiece and a dramatic full-length ensemble in saturated blue, red, orange and white. Its fitted patterned bodice opens into a huge circular skirt that spreads across the foreground like a textile landscape. Dense green foliage behind them makes the colors appear even brighter. Style Rave included this image in a May 2018 portfolio drawn from Trevor Stuurman’s Instagram presence, but the surviving article does not supply an individual title, date, location, sitter names, designer credits or a separate photographer credit for this frame. That absence matters. Stuurman works across photography, styling and creative direction, often in collaboration, so an Instagram-source credit is not enough to assign every role with confidence. What can be read securely is the visual language. The image treats dress, adornment, pattern and pose as architecture for identity rather than accessories around it. It belongs to the period when Stuurman’s practice was increasingly moving beyond street-style documentation into highly constructed fashion imagery and art photography. He has described his larger aim as showing contemporary Africa in the present tense and placing Black subjects in elevated, highly stylized spaces that older image archives often denied them. This frame does that: two subjects occupy the center with composure and scale, while clothing becomes a means of world-building. Because the original credits remain unresolved, the specific cultural origins of the beadwork, textiles and headwraps should not be guessed from appearance alone. Low-angle fashion portrait against a cloudless blue sky. A Black figure leans slightly forward with eyes lowered behind narrow white visor-like sunglasses. On the head are two stacked felt cylindrical hats, mint green below and soft pink above, with a large cobalt-blue hoop earring visible at one side. The body is wrapped in pale and hot pink: a tailored jacket is almost overtaken by sculptural folds, pleats and fan-shaped ruffles that bloom across the chest and shoulders. The strong blocks of pink, mint, blue and white make the figure read almost like a piece of graphic design suspended against the sky. This image comes from Ses’fikile, the 2017 lookbook for Johannesburg millinery label Simon and Mary’s FEZ collection. Crucially, the photography was credited to Simphiwe Mkhwanazi, not Trevor Stuurman. Stuurman served as assistant and co-creative director with Dear Ribane. That distinction is part of the story: his practice has never been limited to pressing the shutter. He builds images through styling, location, casting, collaboration and visual direction. The collection emerged after Stuurman visited the Simon and Mary factory and noticed a fez sample made from blocks the family business had owned since the late 1980s. The brand developed the release around vivid red, mint, yellow, pink, blue and black, drawing inspiration from the color and beadwork of Northern Ndebele visual culture. Stuurman said the silhouette of Ndebele bracelets reminded him of the fez and felt like a route toward a new translation rather than a literal reproduction. The lookbook itself was intentionally improvised. Stuurman recalled sending references to the team, meeting early the next day, driving around Johannesburg and finding a location together. The result makes collaboration visible: inherited millinery tools, contemporary styling and South African design language recombined into an image that feels futuristic without severing itself from lineage. A theatrical fashion tableau staged outdoors among trees. At left, a Black man stands beneath a large orange parasol printed with dark branching motifs. He wears a sharply tailored suit in the same fiery orange-and-black textile, a patterned cap and a narrow white futuristic eye covering. At right, a Black woman stands taller in a monumental high-neck gown made from matching fabric. The dress expands into enormous sculptural forms at the hips and sleeves before cascading to the ground; white gloves and another angular white eye piece sharpen the futuristic effect. A silvery gray cloth backdrop has been hung behind them, deliberately inserting the language of the photo studio into the woods. The image belongs to Trevor Stuurman’s 2018 visual response to Marvel Studios’ Black Panther, published by i-D as part of a project asking five artists to interpret the film and its Afrofuturist themes. i-D credits the photography jointly to Trevor Stuurman and Obakeng Molepe, costume design to Stuurman and Manthe Ribane, and creative direction to Stuurman. Rather than simply reproducing Wakanda, Stuurman built his own future-facing Africa through fashion. He said the project was inspired by the power of women in African history and described the continent as a “creative furnace.” In a longer project statement circulated at the time, the orange batik represented the fire of Africa and Africans, while the principal gown’s expanding silhouette was conceived as a volcano. That symbolism changes how the scene reads: the figures are not dressed for a fictional future imposed from elsewhere. Fabric, silhouette, landscape and posture imagine futurity as something authored from within Africa. The photograph also captures a key expansion in Stuurman’s practice. Fashion photography becomes set design, costume language and cultural argument at once, with collaboration kept visible in the credits.
October 17, 2026 at 12:10 AM
gregjonesart.bsky.social
Wussup everyone! I'll be vending at Toon Con at the Burbank Marriot on 10/25 and LA Comic Con from 10/30 - 11/1 at the LA Convention Center! More details to come.

See you there!

#anime #blerdsky #blackanimesky #otakunoir #blacksky #blerd #blackskyart #artistsofblacksky
October 14, 2026 at 10:19 PM
blackskhaiku.blacksky.app
love
us
out
loud

not for an instant
have we desired to be
any but ourselves

#Blackskhaiku #creatorsofblacksky #BlackskyZen
#blackskywrites ##blackskyart #loudandproud
October 8, 2026 at 10:08 AM
blackskhaiku.blacksky.app
own one.
gift one.

#blackskycreatives #creatorsofblacksky
#blackskyart #locsky #blackskyzen
#AllWeWantIsToBeOurselves

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Love Us Out Loud Twist Tote with cream handles (front & back) images pictured on a red black & green background. Totes feature the image of a full head of henna'd hair in a twist out style filling four quadrants each on the front and back. Centered on the front in bold black lettering with gold and red outline are the words: LOVE US OUT LOUD THE SECOND image is the reverse Side of the tote featuring the same image layout but the haiku which reads: not for an instant have we desired to be any but ourselves blackskhaiku
October 8, 2026 at 10:08 AM
origindirectory.bsky.social
Beautiful spotlight on Cauleen Smith 🖤 Black creators like her deserve global visibility. If you or artists you spotlight are looking to get found worldwide — Origin Directory is the FREE global directory for the African diaspora. List FREE today 👉 origindirectory.com #BlackSkyArt #BlackSky
Home - Origin Directory
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origindirectory.com
October 7, 2026 at 3:03 AM
sillygenius.blacksky.app
putting the feelers out there for more Black artists to interact with on here. plug me in, y’all.
these street signs are an ongoing thing I started in ‘22 for my first solo show, Streets is Swatchin
#BlackskyArt
October 5, 2026 at 1:34 AM
iduhouse.bsky.social
📽️ Artist of the Day: Cauleen Smith

Cauleen Smith works across film, installation, and community practice to imagine Black futures shaped by care, joy, and collective vision. Her art asks what liberation looks like when we design it together.

#CreatorsAtWork #Skystorians #BlackSky #BlackSkyArt #Art
Portrait of Cauleen Smith in her studio, photographed by Joshua Franzos for the 2022 Heinz Awards. Smith stands at a worktable covered in white paper, one hand resting on it and the other at her hip. She wears dark green trousers, a pale pink sheer blouse with a ruffled placket and blue-framed glasses. Behind her, painted panels fill the room with washed bands of blue, pink, yellow, green, and rust; fragments of handwritten words hover through the color. The portrait places Smith inside the layered environment her practice has become known for. She trained as a filmmaker, earning her BA at San Francisco State and MFA at UCLA, but her work expanded beyond a single screen into banners, textiles, sculpture, sound, projection, procession, and room-sized installation. Experimental cinema still provides the grammar. Structural film, Third World Cinema, science fiction, Black feminist thought, and histories of Black music become tools for asking how images shape us and how communities might imagine themselves otherwise. By the time this photograph was made, the Heinz Foundation was honoring Smith for a practice that keeps changing form. Her 2017 Whitney Biennial presentation included hand-sewn banners carried through New York in a musical procession; Give It or Leave It later joined film, light, disco balls, objects, and architecture into environments about Alice Coltrane, Noah Purifoy, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and radical generosity. Smith has described her work as an offering to Black diasporic invention, survival, and generativity. That idea helps explain the studio behind her. Painting leaks into text; cinema leaves the screen; research becomes atmosphere. In 2026, the same method has reached the Venice Biennale through The Wanda Coleman Songbook, a multisensory portrait of Los Angeles. The forms keep moving, but the question remains: what worlds become possible when Black imagination is treated not as escape, but as a way of building reality? Production still from Cauleen Smith’s 2018 film Sojourner. Under the desert sun at Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Desert Art Museum in Joshua Tree, an ensemble of women pose across a concrete platform beneath exposed roof beams. Their clothes turn the group into visual rhythm: lime yellow, green plaid, red satin, black-and-white geometric print, purple, denim, florals, headwraps, jewelry, visors, and bright socks. At center, a woman in a fitted black-and-white jumpsuit steps forward while others sit, stand, lean into one another, or gaze upward. Smith built this scene as a reimagining of a 1966 photograph by Life photographer Bill Ray showing nine Black men near Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers. She changes the gendered center of gravity and relocates the gathering to Purifoy’s desert environment, where discarded material had already become art and social thought. Purifoy helped found the Watts Towers Art Center, made assemblages from debris after the 1965 Watts Rebellion, and later turned ten acres of Joshua Tree desert into an museum. Sojourner brings that history into conversation with other Black experiments in community: Alice Coltrane’s Vedantic ashram, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Sojourner Truth, and the Combahee River Collective. Their words and ideas move through the film like messages across time. Smithsonian curator Saisha Grayson describes the young women as liberation messengers, carrying radios and listening for what earlier generations transmit. Smith is less interested in utopia as fantasy than in people who practiced pieces of it through collective life, spiritual discipline, art, feminism, and mutual responsibility. The cast’s futuristic styling does not ask us to abandon history. It asks what happens when history becomes usable material for another future. In this frame, community itself is the image: many bodies, many styles, one temporary constellation. Smith replaces the heroic lone visionary with something more demanding and more hopeful, a world built together. Portrait of Cauleen Smith photographed by G L Askew II for the Los Angeles Times in 2023. Smith stands against a beige wall with her hands clasped, wearing a black button-front blouse scattered with tiny white specks, a chunky silver chain, and a pleated black skirt whose lower edge erupts into a multicolored printed image. Her locs frame her face and she looks slightly upward with a small smile. The photograph accompanied an unusual project: Smith interviewed Los Angeles artist George Evans, brother of poet Wanda Coleman, while following the cultural routes that shaped them both. Smith had returned to Los Angeles after years away and was using Coleman’s writing as a guide through what Coleman called the city’s “Deep West,” where glamour, racism, Black invention, labor, migration, and myth coexist. Evans opened doors into that history. He spoke about his family’s advertising business, Black-owned Golden State Mutual Life Insurance and its art collection, Beat poets in Echo Park, the Watts Rebellion, and meeting Noah Purifoy while Purifoy gathered fire-scarred debris from the streets. For Smith, the conversation deepened a lineage she already felt as a Northern California-born Black artist shaped by West Coast experimental culture. She was researching Coleman because she heard music inside her poetry. That research grew into The Wanda Coleman Songbook, first presented in New York in 2024 and now part of the 2026 Venice Biennale. There, four channels surround visitors with lowriders, flower stalls, liquor stores, the Hollywood Hills, Baldwin Hills oil wells, and Coleman’s books, while seven Black composers respond to lines. The installation turns Los Angeles into sound, image, scent, memory, and argument. Seen from that later chapter, this portrait records Smith not only as an artist but as a listener. Her practice often begins by finding a person, place, archive, or artwork whose signal is still alive, then building a form generous enough for others to hear it too. Installation view of Cauleen Smith’s Epistrophy, 2018, inside the darkened exhibition Give It or Leave It. A taxidermied black raven bends over a rock at left; potted snake plants rise under magenta light; shells, stones, vessels, a radio, books, trays, and found things sit among four video monitors. One screen shows a sunlit landscape, while large projections spill fragments of sky, terrain, and figures onto the walls. Closed-circuit cameras aim at the tabletop, combining these intimate objects with moving backgrounds so that a small sculpture can suddenly inhabit a desert, a cosmic horizon, or some invented elsewhere. Smith calls the objects an archive of associations, travels, affections, desires, questions, and longings. The title comes from Thelonious Monk’s composition “Epistrophy,” and improvisation is central to the work. Smith also connects the piece to the Art Ensemble of Chicago and its use of “little instruments,” bells, toys, gongs, bird calls, whistles, and other sound-makers that widened what Black experimental music could contain. Epistrophy asks what an equivalent might look like in expanded cinema. Instead of treating filmmaking as camera plus screen, Smith lets plants, minerals, figurines, surveillance technology, NASA imagery, National Geographic landscapes, memory, and chance become instruments. Cameras watch the objects, but the objects escape ordinary meanings as projections enlarge and relocate them. First shown at ICA Philadelphia in 2018, Epistrophy became part of Smith’s traveling Give It or Leave It exhibition and entered LACMA’s collection. The work reveals why Smith’s installations are not simply films displayed in galleries. She builds conditions for perception. A raven, plant, cheap figurine, or glass vessel may be mundane alone; beside an unfamiliar object and projected into another world, it becomes a portal. The audience completes the circuit by making associations of its own.
October 7, 2026 at 1:33 AM
iduhouse.bsky.social
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September 24, 2026 at 5:16 PM
blackskynews.blacksky.app
Marking the 20th anniversary of The Gordon Parks Foundation, Voices in the Mirror will be on view at New York's Jack Shainman Gallery through November 7, 2026. | Sage Helene

mymodernmet.com/gordon-parks... #BlackskyNews #BlackskyArt
Exhibition Honoring Gordon Parks Offers Unique Tribute to His Pioneering Photographs
If you're a photography fan, this is one exhibition you'll want to see.
mymodernmet.com
September 21, 2026 at 1:13 AM
blackskhaiku.blacksky.app
to converse with fools
degrades quality discourse
marring true exchange

#blackskhaiku #blackskyart #blackskycreatives
#writingcommunity
September 19, 2026 at 10:05 PM
kwt0420928.blacksky.app
JULY‼️
#WeeklySketches #Art #BlackArt #BlackskyArt #OcSky
September 19, 2026 at 5:47 PM
kwt0420928.blacksky.app
throwing this in the void
#OcSky #BlackskyArt #Doodle
September 15, 2026 at 1:41 AM
kwt0420928.blacksky.app
JUNE‼️
#WeeklySketches #Art #BlackArt #BlackskyArt #OcSky
September 8, 2026 at 11:47 AM