P.S. on Young + Bare & Bitter Sleep's Art Blogger meeting

P.S. on Kevin Young
j's theater was kind enough to mention my Kevin Young and Natasha Trethewey post in a recent blog entry. I'm not a poet as j imagined (well at least not at this moment, but my first publication credit was in that medium), but I enjoy hearing and reading those who are. I forgot to mention that Kevin Young, with his many accolades (Jazz Poems anthology pictured, right), is quite approachable and friendly, and has an understatedly playful sense of humor. He even hung out afterwards to sign books when put on the spot--they had set up a table with his various collections and anthologies, but forgotten to ask if he could stay.


Bare & Bitter Sleep (aka Cinqué Hicks) and the ATL art blogger meeting
I'd heard about the art blogger meeting from Cinqué Hicks on the afrofuturistart list, and I was interested in what a community of art bloggers would be. Multi-media visual artist/writer (and self-proclaimed pot-stirrer) Cinqué Hicks supplies a small taste of the gathering on his blog, Bare & Bitter Sleep. Along with introducing us to area arts bloggers, Hicks offered a recipe for invigorating the local art blogging community. Among those present with a

("Joe" Drawing by Cinqué Hicks, Electricity and Me MD, Gallery Lombardi, Austin, TX)

listed site was curator Ingrid LaFleur, the creator of Promiscuous Eye and Amrita Arts, an art advisory firm. LaFleur is also committed to promulgating the cause of art patronage by teaching those who think buying art is for "other people" how to initiate their own collection. She even has a step-by-step guide on her site. LaFleur's blog, Voyeur, has writing on her international art travels as well as a number of audio interviews with emerging and recognized artists such as Torkwase Dyson (full website coming July 2006), Derrick Adams, and poet/writer/artist Marco Villalobos who recently collaborated with photographer Ayanna V. Jackson on the project, African by Legacy, Mexican by Birth (exhibition image, below right).

I'm glad that LaFleur isn't waiting for someone else to create an interview archive of the artists she that loves and interest her, she's just going about creating one and sharing it with the rest of us.

Hicks, who also authors the black arts and techno-culture website Electric Skin (on hiatus until June 2006), writes on the arts on numerous sites throughout the internet including the Philly-based artblog (named one of the top art blogs by Art in America). From what I can tell, he's working to carve a peripatetic online space for African American critical thought on visual art inclusive of writing on art practice outside and within traditional African American idioms and visual practices. This shift is indicative of where we are now: African American art scribes in greater numbers penning outside of the subject-box. For news on the international and U.S. art scenes, particularly the auction market, as well as the local ATL scene, check out arts-advocate-CPA-turned-art collector Erik Schneider's The View from the Edge of the Universe, as well as his ATL-based Context Art Projects which stages events and collaborates "with galleries, artists and institutions to raise awareness of current and developing trends in the visual arts."