News — Black Artist

Lydia Fedorovna Arkhipova was a prolific painter who achieved fame in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and abroad. She also developed her original style which challenged the major trends in Soviet-era art.

Arkhipova’s father was Frederick Bruce Thomas, widely known before the Russian Revolution (1917) in bohemian circles in Russia, Europe, and the United States as a wealthy member of Moscow society because of his ownership of the Maxim Club, a major nightlife venue in pre-1917 Russia. Her mother, Arkhipova Lydia, came from a wealthy merchant family. Thomas had a business relationship with Vasiliy Arkhipov, the father of Arkhipova and introduced him to daughter, Lydia.

When Frederick Bruce Thomas had to flee Russia during the Revolution, Lydia Fedorovna Arkhipova was forced to grow up with her mother. She was quickly recognized as a gifted child. She painted, played the piano, and composed music. In her youth she studied at Moscow State University.

In 1941 mother and daughter left for Central Asia. Two years later in 1943, Lydia Arkhipova at age 29, became a student at the Surikov’s Art Institute, which was moved to Samarkand (Uzbekistan) at that time. There she studied with Director of Arts Sergey Gerasimov and painting professor Alexander Osmyorkin. Her long-term friendship with the artist Robert Falk and her acquaintance with a representative of the Russian avant-garde art, Nadezhda Udaltsova, as well as her love for the impressionists (especially Matisse) and the study of ancient Russian painting had a great influence on her artistic handwriting.

In 1950, after graduating from the art institute, Lydia Arkhipova began to take an active part in exhibitions of young artists across Soviet Russia under the pseudonym “Archi. LF.” In 1953 she became a member of the Union of Artists of the USSR. She has traveled around the country but she especially loved to visit Central Asia and small towns where she wrote numerous works that reflected her search for an awareness of her own identity. During this period her painting were noted for their portrayal of festivity and freedom.

By the early 1960s, notes of nonconformism began to play in her work. Her paintings increasingly became modernist in character and were based on idealistic philosophical theories and aesthetic trends of the twentieth century not always favored by the Soviet government or major Soviet artists.

In 1977, Lydia Arkhipova, then 63, gave her first personal exhibition at Moscow’s Hall of the Union of Artists, a belated recognition of her contribution to the world of Soviet Art. After the exhibit she continued to work producing different types of art including portraits, still life, landscapes, architectural sketches and everyday scenes of religious and symbolic subjects. Regardless of the type of art produced, her paintings were always distinguished by decorativeness, bright, hot, sunny colors in a range of red-yellow-orange strokes.

Few Soviet artists were allowed to travel abroad. Lydia Arkhipova, however, over her long career frequently visited India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and traveled to Italy, Spain, France, and North Africa, where was she awarded prestigious art diplomas. Her works today are displayed in many museums of the former USSR as well as in private collections in Western Europe, the United States, and India.

Lydia Arkhipova died in Moscow in 1997. She was 83 at the time of her death.

James Hunt is known as “The Celebrity Credit Guru.” The millionaire is a celebrity wealth management expert who is credited with helping some of America’s biggest athletes, entertainers, and scores of ordinary people with their credit cards and finances.

Originally from Chicago, Hunt was homeless when he was only eight years old. He would roam around the Buckhead community of Atlanta seeing luxury cars and dreaming of owning one in the future. The dream of driving a luxurious car urged him on to start his business.

Learning everything he could about credit, Hunt recalls starting his entrepreneurial journey with a ‘cheap laptop’ and operated in a Starbucks during the day and a local Fed Ex during the night. Things took off for Hunt when he got his first celebrity client and cleaned up that client’s entire family’s credit, he tells Global Millionaires. Today, some of his clients include Bruno Mars, Akon, Tank, Taraji P. Henson, Larenz Tate, Tichina Arnold, Tyrese, Usher, and Shaq.

Hunt has elevated himself from a homeless boy to becoming one of the most sought-after people in the credit repair industry. He has been able to do this through his credit and financial concierge company New Rich Productions, based in Atlanta, GA. His staff includes homeless or disadvantaged young Black men.

The wealth management expert is now focused on developing young Black entrepreneurs to become successful like him. He has established a new company called The Hunt to teach young Blacks about entrepreneurship. “I think that so often we are encouraging people to be entrepreneurs, but no one ever teaches you how to hunt and how to properly go after what you want,” he tells The Black Wall Street Times.

“Becoming a millionaire or becoming successful at all requires a certain mindset and unwavering focus. There are various techniques to hunting down success. I teach things like strategy, knowing how to approach clients, knowing when to pull the trigger, knowing when to lay and wait for your ‘prey’… knowing when to make your move and when to actually be silent. Many of our young black men aspire to live a luxury lifestyle, but no one teaches them how to actually achieve it. That is what I am doing with The Hunt.”

Hunt says his career as an entrepreneur has been motivated and driven by his knack for success and goal setting. “Taking on new ideas and accomplishing goals is something that I set out to do on a daily basis,” he says. “That daily challenge to get up and accomplish what you set out to accomplish for that day is literally what drives me that day.”

He also describes himself as relentless. For him, failure is not an option, and he has therefore been persistent in everything that he has accomplished. “For me, it is not enough to just be successful, and the goal is to reach the top. If there is one word to be described, it is being completely relentless in my pursuit of success.”

The mid-2000s were a great time for hip-hop. New sounds and artists sprang up and many of these artists became instant hitmakers. But while some sustained their success, others faded away just like the way they emerged onto the scene.

One of those who went away was Chamillionaire, fondly remembered for his 2005 hit song “Ridin”.

In 2005, “Ridin” was a global hit and was a favorite choice for everyone’s ringtone. The song was atop the Billboard Hot 100 for weeks. But interestingly, the social message of “Ridin” – essentially addressing the profiling of young Black men by the police – went over many heads. After that hit single, Chamillionaire, unsuccessfully, released a couple of others.

As his music career begun to take a downward trajectory, Chamillionaire, had a ‘Plan B.’ He quickly learned the ropes of becoming an entrepreneur. 15 years on, he has transitioned from a rapper to a big-time entrepreneur, investing in tech firms and early start-ups.

Born Hakeem Seriki in Washington D.C., the rapper actually began his entrepreneurial journey in 2004 when he founded his own record label called Chamillitary Entertainment. He later invested in Maker Studio, a multipurpose digital platform, which was sold to Disney for a reported $500 million in 2014.

Chamillionaire then joined Upfront Ventures as its “entrepreneur-in-residence” in 2015. The Santa Monica based venture capital firm invests in early-stage technology companies. It is the largest venture capital company in Los Angeles, with $2 billion in total raised funds. Some of its notable investment includes Ulta, Overture, PayPal Credit, TrueCar, Disney Digital Network, Kyriba, and Ring.

The Grammy-winning rapper also invested in Cruise which has been acquired by General Motors for $1 billion) and ride-sharing app, Lyft, according to Forbes. The rapper has also bought stakes in Ring, a doorbell technology that has been acquired by Amazon.

In 2018, he launched his own app named Convoz to rival Twitter which he believes has been hijacked by trolls. The video-centric app aims to be a “place where you go to talk to people,” he told TechCrunch. 

“I just wasn’t happy with the communication channels that are currently [exist] on social media,” he added. The app allows users to post a 15-second video to celebrities of their choice. They can watch and decide to respond or not.

According to CNBC, the bullish investor holds investments in more than 40 start-up companies. He recently announced a competition to invest $100,000 in a minority or woman founded start-up company. Haitian born Pierre Laguerre, who made an entry with his fleeting company, emerged as the winner. Fleeting is a mobile platform that connects commercial truck drivers with on-demand trucking jobs.

According to Celebrity Net Worth, the rapper and entrepreneur has a net worth of over $50 million. But there’s no betting against the 40-year-old rising up the millionaire ladder.

To counter the stereotypical nature of art history, Nigerian-American artist Adebunmi Gbadebo uses Black hair from people from the African Diaspora to create her art pieces.

She feels it is about time to make art pieces rooted in the Black culture so people who look like her would find their place in art history as well.

Gbadebo chose to use Black human hair instead of traditional art materials because of the history and ancestry that is embedded in a single strand. “…And that strand connects us back to the continent, to Africa,” she told BBC.

She said she wanted all to see Black human hair as something powerful that needs to be respected, as something that should take up space in ‘traditional’ art galleries.

Her journey began in the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where she decided to use Black human hair “as a medium to depict her art on canvas”, BBC reported.

Gbadebo, born in New Jersey and based in Newark, sourced Black human hair from her local community barbershops and those in Nigeria and Morocco as well. At times, people who had heard about her quest to utilize Black human hair in her works voluntarily mail her their hair, she said.

According to her, the local barbershops and people’s homes became her art store and they trusted her enough to give a piece of their hair to her to immortalize in her art pieces.

“Dada” was the first piece Gbadebo created with hair. “I have sewn hair to canvas, and I hand sew most of my work. The needle replaces my brush and instantly, the process became more involved allowing me to pierce through surfaces to insert “nappy” hair,” she said.

“The needle also slows the process and reflects that of a hairdresser or a mother working on her child’s head that rests in between her thighs. I am looking for ways to integrate genealogies of the diaspora with critical discourse through my use of hair!” she added.

Gbadebo recently deliberately combined Black hair, cotton, rice paper, and different shades of blue for her exhibition at Claire Oliver Gallery in New York. A Dilemma of Inheritance focuses on her True Blue portraits which were inspired by the testimony of journalist and author Ta-Neshi Coates at a reparations hearing. “We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance, and the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance. It is impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.”

Coates’ words inspired Gbadebo’s exhibition. She said of the origins of the works: “As an artist, I’m confronting my relationship with the Gbadebocolor blue, Indigo, and materials cotton and rice in the context of their origins as commodities born of violence and enslavement,” said Gbadebo. “I’m interested in the whole system that produced these materials and how its memory has been treated.”

A 1982 painting by deceased Haitian-Puerto Rican artist Jean-Michel Basquiat on Tuesday sold for $41.9 million at Christie’s auction house in Hong Kong, The New York Times reported. Titled “Warrior”, the auctioned painting depicts the struggles Black men have to endure in a world dominated by White people.

Though the British auction house said the amount paid for the painting was the highest for an artwork by a Western artist in Asia, that is actually not Basquiat’s most valuable piece of work. In 2017, his “Untitled” painting was purchased for $110 million by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa at a Sotheby’s auction in New York.

With sales in the art industry significantly taking a slump over the year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Christie’s was reportedly hopeful the inclusion of Basquiat’s artwork in the auction would help revitalize the market.

“Basquiat is one of the strongest markets coming out of the pandemic,” Christophe van de Weghe, a dealer who specializes in Basquiat’s works, told The New York Times. “It’s worldwide. You can sell Basquiat, like Picasso, to someone in India or Kazakhstan or Mexico. You can have a 28-year-old spending millions on Basquiat and you can have a guy who is 85. He appeals to all kinds of people, from rappers to hedge-fund guys.’’

Though deceased, Basquiat is an important and rising figure in popular global arts and culture. He was born on December 22, 1960, to a Haitian father and a mother of Puerto-Rican descent in Brooklyn.

Basquiat experienced a great deal at a young age; he was in a car accident that resulted in a splenectomy at age seven, his parents divorced at the same age; his mother, who first introduced him to art, was committed into a mental institution, and he dropped out of school by the age of 15. But within a few years, he went from being homeless and unemployed to selling his paintings for $25,000.

Although many people know him for his celebrity status, as he was friends with pop artiste Andy Warhol, wore Armani suits splattered with paint from his work, and dated Madonna, the painter’s work was politic and deserves its own fanfare.

Basquiat was intentional and well versed in the social issues of his time. He once said, “the black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn’t see many paintings with black people in them.”

Basquiat died at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose but he lives forever through his art and the impact of his work and influence on American movements and pop culture.

“Art is all I’ve ever known” are the words of the new record holder for the world’s largest drawing by an individual. Dyymond Whipper-Young’s artwork covers 6,507 square feet, beating the previous record held by Italy’s FRA! by 400 square feet.

The Philadelphia-based artist told RNBPhilly that she was recommended by a substitute art teacher in her school for the Crayola-sponsored art project. This project was meant to hype and be a prelude to the company’s new installment titled, “Crayola IDEAworks: The Creativity Exhibition” housed at the Mandell Center at The Franklin Institute. The organizers specifically looked for a Philadelphia based artist to work with.

It took five days, a whopping 63 hours, and only one type of marker; Whipper-Young started with the black Crayola Project XL Markers and used 57 of them to create the giant-sized doodle art piece.

“I believe that creativity is in all of us and with this exhibition and the drawing, the purpose is to inspire people to find their creative pulse,” Whipper-Young said in a video sent to the press.

FRA!’s drawing was in 2020 and it covered 6,100 square feet. Whipper-Young’s work covering the floor of the Franklin Institute has now made history covering 6,507 square feet.

“Everything you see in this drawing is a reflection of what’s in Crayola IDEAworks,” Whipper-Young said in the video. “It has sea, it has land, it has space. You’ll really get to experience those things once you’re in IDEAworks.”

The immersive exhibition, which originally covers 17,000 square feet, allows visitors to do “interactive challenges that hone their skills,” Crayola IDEAworks writes on its website. “The four sections in this area, I, D, E, and A, will feature questions and puzzles that will determine creative strengths.”

Crayola collaborated with the Franklin Institute as the latter aims to “inspire and empower” everyone no matter their age to get in tune with their creativity and feed their curiosity.

On how she got the gig, Whipper-Young said it all started with a direct message from one of the organizers of the exhibition. After a conference call with the Franklin Institute and Crayola executives, the young artist got the gig. She admits she would not have otherwise tried out for such a project if she had to audition for it because she thought “it was too big” for her.

“I always told everybody that if I saw that opportunity, I would never have applied, God dropped that thing right in my lap because I would have thought it was too big.”

According to Whipper-Young, she later realized the size was not even an issue because everything worked out perfectly.

The Temple alum who is originally from Baltimore went straight to art school after elementary school. She was 11 years old at the time. She trained in fine arts in high school and studied all forms of art and now works as an art teacher and freelance artist.

The art teacher is currently working on a sculpture that will feature her famous ‘twerking sculpture’ which she made when she was in high school. She is all for making museum-worthy art but according to her, hers is a cross-section between fine art and Black culture.

Art pieces created by Kanye West when he was a high school student have been bought by entrepreneur Vinoda Basnayake, Page Six reported. Basnayake reportedly bought West’s drawings after seeing the pieces on an episode of PBS’s “Antiques Roadshow.”

“Kanye’s cousin owned the trove, which was created by Kanye during his days as a student at Polaris School [in Chicago],” Page Six quoted a source as saying. The source did not reveal how much the paintings cost but the collections originally appraised on the PBS show were valued at between 16,000 and $23,000.

The drawings, reportedly first created in 1995 when West was 17 years old, include works he did in graphite, gouache on board, and scratchboard. “By age 17, he’s already been studying at these extraordinary artistic institutions,” the Antiques Roadshow appraiser Laura Woolley said, according to Page Six.

Kanye West attended the Hyde Park Art Academy, Art Institute of Chicago, Nanjing University in China and the Polaris School for Individual Education. 

West’s wife Kim Kardashian, it will be recalled, posted on Instagram reminding her followers how good her husband was when it comes to artwork after some fans expressed doubt over the authenticity of a painting she claims was done by their seven-year-old daughter North. The post came with DNA emojis, insinuating that painting runs in the blood.

According to the Independent, the man who first brought West’s artwork to the Antiques Roadshow said he’s married to West’s first cousin, who received the artwork after West’s mother died in 2007. The portfolio is dated circa 1995, the year West turned 18, the report added.

Nigerian superstar Burna Boy seems to be a favorite in the White House. In 2019, he made the playlist of former U.S. President Barack Obama and then that of Michelle Obama in 2020. Now, the musician’s hit track ‘Destiny’ has been featured on the official inauguration playlist of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

This makes Burna Boy the only Nigerian and African artiste on the playlist. ‘Destiny’ is the 13th track on the music star’s Grammy-nominated ‘African Giant’ album.

The inauguration playlist, which includes 46 songs from various artistes, will give Americans the opportunity to participate in the ceremony from home amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the Presidential Inaugural Committee said. Tony Allen, CEO of the Presidential Inaugural Committee, said the playlist’s objective is to “honor music as a consistent vehicle that has kept us connected through a challenging year”.

“These songs and artistes reflect the relentless spirit and rich diversity of America. They are the score to a new chapter and will help bring people together as the Biden-Harris Administration begins its important work to unite our country,’’ he said.

Issa Rae’s Raedio and DJ D-Nice worked with the inaugural committee to curate the collection of songs. “We know that music has the power to bring people together, and after a year of national challenges and division, we hope this collection serves as an indication of a new beginning, positive change and a reminder that music of all types is a common language,” Raedio president, Benoni Tagoe, said.

Apart from Burna Boy’s ‘Destiny’, other songs from top artistes that made the playlist include Beyoncé’s ‘Find Your Way Back’, Bob Marley and Di Wailers’ ‘Could You Be Loved’, Kendrick Lamar and Mary J. Blige’s ‘Now Or Never’, and Biden-Harris campaign’s celebratory theme song, ‘Higher Love’ by Kygo and Whitney Houston.

The playlist is now available on Soundcloud, Apple Music, Spotify, and TIDAL.

Here are all the songs on the playlist:

KOTA the Friend- Lupita’s interlude

The Beatles – Come together

Jason Derulo – Pick up the pieces

Bruce Springsteen – We take care of our won

Daryl Hall and John Oates- You make my dreams come true

The Weeknd- What you need

Mac Miller- Blue World

Heatwave- The Groove line

A Tribe Called Quest -Award Tour

MF Doom – Coffin Nails

Free Nationals- Eternal light

Burna Boy- Destiny

Led Zeppelin- Fool in the rain

Bob Marley & The Wailers – Could You Be Loved

Curtis Mayfield -Move on Up

Jill Scott- Golden

The Impressions -We’re a Winner

Dua Lipa – Levitating

The Doobie Brothers- What a Fool Believes

Bill Withers- Lovely Day

Chris Brown- Mirage

Shania Twain- Still the One

Oddisee- That’s Love

Anitta, Major Lazer- Make It Hot

Whitney Houston, Kygo- Higher Love

Earth, Wind & Fire- That’s the Way of the World

Vampire Weekend- Unbelievers

Beyonce- FIND YOUR WAY BACK

Jackie Wilson – (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher & Higher

SZA- Good Days

Vampire Weekend- Step