The Fierce Pride and Passion of Rhinestone Fashion | We Spend Time With Mickalene Thomas

The Fierce Pride and Passion of Rhinestone Fashion | We Spend Time With Mickalene Thomas

Contemporary artist Mickalene Thomas is best known for her large-scale paintings of black women posed against boldly patterned backgrounds and adorned with rhinestones. Illustrative of the artist’s signature style, her 2010 Portrait of Mnonja depicts a striking female figure reclining on a couch.

Visitors, who find their way to the high-ceiling third floor gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, consistently gather round this painting, fascinated by its bright colors and drawn to its subject—an elegant and poised African-American woman.

“She is owning and claiming her space, which is very exciting,” reveals the artist in a 2017 SAAM interview. The woman’s crossed ankles are perched on the sofa’s armrest, and her fuchsia high heels dangle over the edge. Her right hand rests on her knee and her fingers evoke a dancer’s enviable combination of strength and grace. Exuding an air of power and sophistication, Mnonja literally sparkles from head to toe—her hair, makeup, jewelry, clothes, fingernails and shoes all glisten with rhinestones.

MacKenzie Bezos Joins Gates & Buffett 'The Giving Pledge', Sharing Half of Her New Fortune

MacKenzie Bezos Joins Gates & Buffett 'The Giving Pledge', Sharing Half of Her New Fortune

There aren’t many solo images of MacKenzie Bezos out there. Even though the mom of four is a successful writers and played her own roll in the formation of Amazon, almost all images of MacKenzie include her husband Jeff Bezos.

Vogue US interviewed one of the world’s richest women in 2013 in advance of her “gripping new novel Traps”. The interview by Rebecca Johnson describes MacKenzie as a “bookish and she” girl who spent hours in her bedroom writing elaborate stories. She attended first Hotchkiss and then Princeton, a very deliberate choice that gave her access to writer Toni Morrison. One of America’s most important voices became Bezos’ mentor and called her in 2013 “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative-writing classes . . . really one of the best.”

The Story of East Africa's Role In The Transatlantic Slave Trade

The Story of East Africa's Role In The Transatlantic Slave Trade

The recent discovery of the remains of the Portuguese slave ship São José off Cape Town has brought East Africa’s role in the transatlantic slave trade to public attention. But the São José was merely one of a large number of slave vessels that either rounded the Cape or put into Table Bay for refreshment.

The sinking of the São José two days after Christmas in 1794 marked the end of a bad year for the slave trade at the Cape of Good Hope. In April that year, a second vessel, the French ship Jardinière, had gone down off Cape Agulhas. Around 185 slaves had reached shore but many had then escaped or had died of their exertions. Only 125 were finally auctioned at Stellenbosch.

A New Civil War Museum Speaks Truths in the Former Capital of the Confederacy

A New Civil War Museum Speaks Truths in the Former Capital of the Confederacy

At the terminus of five railroads, Richmond, Virginia was more than just the nominal capital of the Confederate States of America. The city’s factories supplied the Confederacy with food, munitions, and cannons. After the war, its historians, writers, and sculptors manufactured “heroes” of the Confederacy as men who treated enslaved people with paternalistic affection, fighting for just causes and states’ rights.

Richmond, once the second-largest market for enslaved people and the capital of a state where more than half of all Civil War battles were fought, would, in peacetime, metamorphose into the site of a prolonged, contested engagement for the very memory of the war. The myths garlanding Confederate figures like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, who made Richmond their home for relatively brief spells of time, have long outshone the stories of generations of Richmonders who have lived in the contradictions of the city of the Lost Cause.

It’s with some fitting justice, then, that a museum opening this weekend in what was once the industrial heart of Richmond sits at the center of the nation’s modern-day struggles to understand the impact and devastation wrought by the Civil War.

Muslims Arrived In America 400 Years Ago As Part of the Slave Trade and Today Are Vastly Diverse

Muslims Arrived In America 400 Years Ago As Part of the Slave Trade and Today Are Vastly Diverse

Most Americans say they don’t know a Muslim and that much of what they understand about Islam is from the media.

It’s not surprising then to see the many misunderstandings that exist about Muslims. Some see them as outsiders and a threat to the American way of life and values. President Donald Trump’s controversial policy to impose a ban on Muslims from seven countries entering into the United States played into such fears.

What many don’t know, however, is that Muslims have been in America well before America became a nation. In fact, some of the earliest arrivals to this land were Muslim immigrants – forcibly transported as slaves in the transatlantic trade, whose 400th anniversary is being observed this year.

Trump Ignites High Tech Relocation To Canada, Determined To Make Canada Great Again

Canada moved immediately when Trump issued his immigration ban -- helping US companies to set up shop in Canada. Trump knows this fact, as it started in Feb/March when I first wrote about it. This asshat American president will create not only a tech brain drain but also our doctors. His day of reckoning is coming, and I expect his voters and also the Dems who supported him to explain to the country how they let this happen. Alas, being one of the elites they love to hate, I knew this would happen and began tracking the migration to Canada right after the inauguration.

Politico writes:

President Donald Trump has moved to cut legal immigration by half over the next decade, increase security along the border, build a wall with Mexico, ban travel indefinitely from several countries and overturn DACA, the Obama-era policy that grants work permits to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as minors. The Trump administration has also suggested limiting “startup visas” for high-tech entrepreneurs entering the United States, and massively cutting America’s funding for scientific research. Trump’s aggressive “America first” posture on trade and international diplomacy has transformed the United States into something of a pariah nation, out of touch with the basic norms and values of advanced democracies."

Nor only has Canada has opened centers for refugees streaming over the border in northern New York State from the United States, with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau personally welcoming some of them to the country. As AOC noted right after Trump's inauguration, Canada is specifically recruiting the skilled, ambitious talent that drives innovation and economic growth, with a particular target on top thinkers and workers in technology and industry, and also doctors. Canadian universities—ranked among the world’s best in fields like computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and artificial intelligence—are successively recruiting foreign students, who in turn are matriculating in Canada at higher levels than before Trump’s election. Canadian cities like Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal are attracting more venture capital to fund the nation's tech industry, on par with American tech hubs like Seattle and Austin, write Richard Florida and Joshua Gans for Politico.