AfriCOBRA: Art and Impact - Gallery Talk with Arlene Crawford
In this gallery talk, Arlene “Arty” Crawford, the curator of AFRICOBRA: Art and Impact, highlights featured masterpieces in the exhibition and discusses the members of the AfriCOBRA collective in Chicago and the subsequent incarnations of the group as it began to move beyond Chicago to the rest of the United States. Arlene is a practicing visual artist with a commitment to community and activism. She is an Executive Board member of the African American Arts Alliance and a founding member of the Sutherland Community Arts Initiative and Sapphire & Crystals, a collective of African American women artists.
AFRICOBRA: Art and Impact explores works produced by the artist collective AFRICOBRA, formed in 1968 on the South Side of Chicago. Still in existence today, AFRICOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) worked to make African-American art something unique in society, using different techniques to display aspects of blackness in their artwork.
Arlene Turner-Crawford BIO
Arlene Turner-Crawford (b. 1949) is a Chicago-based artist committed to community and activism. She works in a range of media including painting, assemblage and collage, drawing, graphic design, and illustration. Her work informed by the works of AfriCOBRA artists and black classical music (jazz), as well as her own family, research, and meditation. Crawford earned her BS in education from Northern Illinois University and was the first African American to earn a MS in art education from Indiana University’s Herron School of Art. Crawford has served on the Executive Board of the African American Arts Alliance, and was a founding member of the Sutherland Community Arts Initiative and Sapphire & Crystals, a collective of African American women artists. Crawford’s work has been exhibited in Chicago at the Chicago Cultural Center, ARC Gallery, South Shore Cultural Center, African American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Creative Arts Foundation and Malcolm X Community College President’s Gallery, National Museum of Mexican Art, and at the Evanston Art Center, National Conference of Artist, Fundacao Cultural do Estoado de Bahia, Salvador, Brazil.
Robert L. Douglas Sr BIO
Robert L. Douglas Sr. is a painter and sculptor as well as a scholar. He received BS Degree from the University of Louisville 1963, Masters of Arts Degree 1981 and PhD from the University of Iowa 1983. As artist Professor, Douglas has a long history of productions of sculptures and paintings as well as an illustrator. His works are in numerous public and private collections. Public works include, his heroic portrait of Albert Mezeek installed at Mezeek Middle School, 1998 and a four-part Mural was installed on November 26, 2003 at the Park DuVall Resource Center. His illustrations and drawings for magazines and book cover designs date over three decades. Example of more recent ones are, Come On Up To Brightness, Middle Passage:105 Days, Libations and Mandela, Amandle. He has published numerous articles and essay on artists, art theory, criticism and philosophy. His books are Wadsworth Jarrell, The Artist as Revolutionary, published in 1996 by Pomegranate Press and Resistance, Insurgence and Identity: The Art of Mari Evans, Nelson Stevens and the Black Arts Movement, published in 2008 by African World Press all of which can be accessed via his website, bobdouglasart.com. He is currently writing the definitive biography about the art and life of G. C. Coxe.
This is a FREE event. For more information, call 773-947-0600 ext. 254.
AFRICOBRA Schedule
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