Looking for something a little different to do this Christmas season? Channel your energy with tickets to Xtreme Painting, a series of cathartic art classes in South Kensington. These sessions will encourage you to create unique artwork using three original techniques, including splattering, graffiti and texture play, and bench the more traditional approaches. The sessions will be available for one weekend only – December 15–17 – so you’ll want to secure your tickets, pronto.
Diasporic Women’s Writing of the Black Atlantic : (En)Gendering Literature and Performance
This book brings together a complete set of approaches to works by female authors that articulate the black Atlantic in relation to the interplay of race, class, and gender. The chapters provide the grounds to (en)gender a more complex understanding of the scattered geographies of the African diaspora in the Atlantic basin. The variety of approaches displayed bears witness to the vitality of a field that, over the years, has become a diasporic formation itself as it incorporates critical insights and theoretical frameworks from multiple disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, thus exposing the manifold character of (black) diasporic interconnections within and beyond the Atlantic. Focusing on a wide array of contemporary literary and performance texts by women writers and performers from diverse locations including the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, the US, and the UK, chapters visit genres such as performance art, the novel, science fiction, short stories, and music. For these purposes, the volume is organized around two significant dimensions of diasporas: on the one hand, the material—corporeal and spatial—locations where those displacements associated with travel and exile occur, and, on the other, the fluid environments and networks that connect distant places, cultures, and times. This collection explores the ways in which women of African descent shape the cultures and histories in the modern, colonial, and postcolonial Atlantic worlds.
FO WILSON
Bodies and Memories in Sharon Bridgforths Delta Dandi
Black British Womens Literature and the Politics of Hair
Lyrical Cartographies Redrawing the Boundaries of the Black
Diasporic Caribbean Women Transcending Dystopian Spaces
The Black Atlantic and Home Women and Migrations in Lauretta
Roots and Rootedness Unearthing EnGendered Identities
The Dancing Couple in Black Atlantic Space
Atlantic Cinema
Negotiating Belonging Yvonne Veras Politics of Location
in the Novels of Maryse Condé Edwidge Danticat and Elizabeth
The SeaPeople of Nalo Hopkinsons The New Moons Arms
Painting: Kehinde Wiley
For most of Kehinde Wiley’s very successful career, he has created large, vibrant, highly patterned paintings of young African American men wearing the latest in hip hop street fashion. The theatrical poses and objects in the portraits are based on well-known images of powerful figures drawn from seventeenth- through nineteenth-century Western art. Pictorially, Wiley gives the authority of those historical sitters to his twenty-first-century subjects. In 2005, VH1 commissioned Wiley to paint portraits of the honorees for that year’s Hip Hop Honors program. Turning his aesthetic on end, he used his trademark references to older portraits to add legitimacy to paintings of this generation’s already powerful musical talents. In Wiley’s hands, Ice T channels Napoleon, and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five take on a seventeenth-century Dutch civic guard company.
Arist’s Statement: Kehinde Wiley
Kehinde Wiley’s portraits of African American men collate modern culture with the influence of Old Masters. Incorporating a range of vernaculars culled from art historical references, Wiley’s work melds a fluid concept of modern culture, ranging from French Rococo to today’s urban landscape. By collapsing history and style into a unique contemporary vision, Wiley interrogates the notion of master painter, “making it at once critical and complicit.” Vividly colorful and often adorned with ornate gilded frames, Wiley’s large-scale figurative paintings, which are illuminated with a barrage of baroque or rococo decorative patterns, posit young black men, fashioned in urban attire, within the field of power reminiscent of Renaissance artists such as Tiepolo and Titian.
For “RECOGNIZE!” Wiley has included paintings from his body of work, Hip Hop Honors, depicting some of the foot soldiers of the hip hop movement. The artists chose poses—taken from Wiley’s personal art book collection—that best suited the performative and personal aspects of their character. The coalition of the anonymous subject with the allure of personality allows this body of work to engage celebrity and status directly.
Value, in all its meanings, has always played a role in culture. Unlike its precursors—classical, jazz, rock—which have since been canonized and given an art-historical time frame and construct, hip hop continues to be seen merely as entertainment; a cultural hindrance. This series of Wiley’s portraits speaks specifically to that juxtaposition and the retooling of importance and to whom and when it is deemed.
What is Xtreme Painting?
Xtreme Painting takes the concept of classic art classes, and spins it on its head. Instead of sitting perfectly and pretty at an easel, you’ll be guided by a professional to experiment with more joyous techniques. Forget colour matching and still-life replication; here, your masterpiece will be bourne out as many colours as you wish, splatters, graffiti, and more.
Rest assured, at Xtreme Painting, you will be provided with all the necessary equipment to protect your clothes and shoes, so just the canvas is left covered in colour at the end.
Xtreme Painting sessions last an hour and 15 minutes, and at the end of the session, you’ll be able to take your masterpiece home. Sessions are suitable for those 16+ only, so be sure to leave the little ones at home.
Please note that the images in this article were created using artificial intelligence. While the experience hopes to replicate this imagery, it may not be a perfect likeness.
