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TERRENCE SANDERS-SMITH: 50 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS

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Artvoices Art Books

50 Contemporary Artists is my response to publishers, critics and curators who systematically regurgitate the same list of contemporary artists every season. Arguably, countless artists are intentionally left out of the conversation because of geography, race, religion and or sexual preference. Art and its function and or appeal to the public-at-large should remain subjective.

SMITH & WISZNIA COLLECTION

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Artvoices Art Books

“The Smith & Wisznia collection’s curatorial focus: artists living, working and exhibiting in Louisiana post Hurricane Katrina. Louisiana during this period of renewal, rebirth, and rebuilding experienced an art renaissance. There was a migration of creatives from all areas of life to Louisiana. Musicians, fashion designers, architects, writers, poets and visual artists congregated, forming a vibrant foundation of cultural declaration and inspiration. The artists featured in the Smith & Wisznia collection were on the front lines when ‘all hope was abandoned’. A majority of Louisiana and its inhabitants were in a state of turmoil, hopelessness and uncertainty. The artists featured in the Smith & Wisznia collection articulated our State’s collective consciousness, undoubtedly spearheading a catalyst for catharsis.”  

“The Smith & Wisznia collection’s singular focus: artists living, working and exhibiting in Louisiana post Hurricane Katrina. Louisiana during this period of renewal, rebirth, and rebuilding experienced an art renaissance. There was a migration of creatives from all areas of life to Louisiana. Musicians, Fashion Designers, Architects, Writers and Visual Artists congregated, forming a vibrant foundation of cultural declaration and inspiration. The artists in the Smith & Wisznia collection were on the front lines when ‘all hope was abandoned’. Louisiana and its inhabitants were in a state of turmoil, hopelessness and uncertainty. We needed honest, fearless and visionary artists to articulate our collective consciousness which would undoubtedly spearhead a catalyst for catharsis.” – Terrence Sanders-Smith

JAMES SMITH: THE LOWLY NEGRO

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Revolutionary Books

“Life is about the journey. Weather the lows, as you weather the highs. You are the sum of your experiences.” – James Smith

“The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.” – James Baldwin

VALERIE STOKES-BRYANT: SMOOTHING OVER THE PUDDING

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Kinder Care Books

We all have made mistakes, but we must forgive ourselves and others as true Christians. This is the valuable life lesson learned in the Family/Children’s Book “Smoothing Over the Pudding”. This endearing book is about a Christian 'cat' family and telling the truth no matter the consequences. Joyce, the mother cat shows her family the delicious pudding she made for Sunday dessert. She politely asks them not to touch it, and they all agree.  But that night Joyce’s daughter Jane sneaks into the kitchen while everyone is asleep and eats 3 spoonfuls of the pudding and smooths it over so no one would notice. This thoughtful and inspiring picture book is essential for children understanding the purpose of telling the truth and being forgiven. 

MICHELLE L. ELMORE: LET’S GO GET EM

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“I’ll never forget that first time I saw them. I was driving along and the sun was setting and there was a flash of orange feathers. My heart jumped. I stopped and got out. I didn’t take many photos, just three. Then, I handed my camera to some people with the Indians to take my picture with them. It was just a silly moment, but I suppose that eventually I became part of the picture for real. I was just enamored from the start. A lot of the pictures that I saw of the Indians focused on the suits and they’d end up blocking out the faces. With the incredible amount of work and art that went into these suits, I felt it was important to include the faces of these artists. It felt like it was no longer my art that I was doing separately. It felt more like an extension of what they were doing, and a way to honor what they had created. Their art is expensive and hard to do, and it isn’t done for monetary gain. I admire that, and I relate to that. And these people got to know me. The Indians began asking me to come out with them to take pictures. The Black Feathers had me document one St. Joseph’s Night, when the Indians come out after sunset.”

“One common belief is that local Native American tribes sheltered runaway slaves, and the two cultures merged. Some Mardi Gras Indians claim direct Native American ancestry. Other people believe the intermingling of Native Americans with Creoles, slaves and free people of color in Congo Square brought about the merge. There are also accounts of blacks participating in the Buffalo Bill Wild West shows that traveled through major cities in the late 1800s and being influenced by the costumes. Later, Jim Crow laws barred the Mardi Gras Indian tribes from parading with mainstream Carnival krewes on Canal Street or St. Charles Avenue, so they stayed within their neighborhoods and became solidified.”

MICHELLE L. ELMORE: YA HEARD ME

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Artvoices Art Books

Excerpts from the upcoming release Michelle L. Elmore’s ‘Come See About Me’ by Larry Blumenfeld who writes about jazz and culture for The Wall Street Journal. His path first crossed Elmore’s while working as a Hurricane Katrina Media Fellow for the Open Society Institute, following the flood resulting from the levee failures.

Larry Blumenfeld: The last piece of your trilogy is “Ya Heard Me.” What’s with all those gold teeth?

Michelle L. Elmore: “At a certain point, I got fascinated with doing close-ups of people’s gold teeth, the ones you see all the time in the bounce and rap scene in New Orleans. There’s one I love here, of a guy called Money Mike. He told me that he worked for Cash Money. Of course, a lot of guys make that claim. Anyway, I ran into him on the street, and he let me photograph him. I knew there was something special about these teeth. But I didn’t figure it out until I was living in Brooklyn, New York for a few months. My good friend Buster from New Orleans came to visit me, and he had a full set of gold teeth. We were in a McDonald’s and, after he smiled, the girl behind the counter asked him to smile again. “Where are you from?” she asked. He told her “I’m from New Orleans,” and he said it as if she should have known. Then Buster explained to me: In New Orleans, they file off the original teeth and replace them with gold, instead of these fake things, just covers. And you can really see the difference. In the old days, I guess when you flashed a smile with solid gold on the street it meant that you had real money, could do real business. And it still means something. So that’s what these pictures are about. Whatever this means for a New Orleans rapper now.

I took 200 close-ups of these grills. They were a document, and they were something else, too. I would blow these pictures up to 40 x 60 inches, and they would look very surreal and erotic. The museum of Natural History in London included these in an exhibition of the history of diamonds.”

“Michelle L. Elmore began traveling to New Orleans in 1989, fresh from personal loss. A decade later, she was living in the city with her young son Jack Marley, their lives centered around the people and places, the sounds and sights, the rituals and rhythms captured in these frames. She left New Orleans in 2005, after the flood that resulted from the levee failures that followed Hurricane Katrina. She had $69 in the bank, and had lost many of her personal possessions. But

she thought to pack up and move her negatives two weeks earlier. Her search through those 12 salvaged boxes yields these images. They document the friendships that, for Elmore, transformed alienation into a sense of community, of family. They suggest joy and pain in elegant balance. And they pay tribute to the city that turned Elmore in the artist she sought to be, and that lent her art meaning.” – Larry Blumenfeld  

MICHELLE L. ELMORE: COME SEE ABOUT ME

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“I can never forget one Mardi Gras Day I experienced in 1997. It was right after both of my grandparents died and I felt heartbroken and alone. I had a flat tire because I had run over a whiskey bottle. A guy stopped to help me the street, a total stranger. He asked me why my eyes were different than most white people. He didn’t mean physically. He meant something else, and I understood. It was as if he could see all the loss in my life. And right then I understood that people in New Orleans deal with tremendous loss and struggle all the time, and that there’s joy and faith that feels very real. I had never been in a place where you could look at death as a celebration of the person’s life. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel alone. And that was it. I moved to New Orleans.” MICHELLE L. ELMORE

“In 2006 I had the Quixotic experience of traveling 5 mph in a Chinese car up and down narrow rolling roads through the mountains of Cuba during the Golden hour with Michelle yelling, “Stop, Stop,” every forty seconds despite having suspicious government spooks floating nebulously everywhere round our tail. I’d stop and she’d leap out of the car and I’d jump out the car and she’d bend, lean, lay, contort, with still, Zen breath and click, click and she’d glow then smile.”

“I’d look close as she shot but everything looked like everything else to me. I got worried but said nothing. I was already well aware that Michelle has the grand gifts of grit, fearlessness and foresight combined with a working woman’s work ethic and love of the people and places she’s photographing based on her abundant talent, precise trade-craft and fundamental philosophy that life is precious and tomorrow is promised to no one.”

Throughout Cuba any place we went twice people would light up and smile and greet her warmly. In the years since Cuba I’ve witnessed this uncanny reaction to her spirit everywhere we’ve traveled. That evening in the mountains she showed me what she’d shot that day — my jaw dropped — her photographs popped off the screen — what had seemingly not been there to me really was there; vibrant faces, landscapes, the wheels of life in subtle action with the light framed just so by an experienced eye that sees the mysterious well beyond the veil. This is Michelle’s hallmark; prescience, detail, the epiphany of the extraordinary laced through the ordinary so if you look closely at her work you can see the Divine. These traits are also the same qualities of a master artist which the following pages will reveal.” NELSON EUBANKS

WEI XIONG: UNPARALLED LANDSCAPES

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“Landscape is one of the most important subjects in my work. I spend most of my spare time going to the mountains near Tibet, on the plateau. At 2000-4000 meter elevations, very few humans can settle their homes in that high plateau. Humans and animals fight nature’s severity there to keep alive. Those mountains are beyond a human’s imagination, it’s profound and powerful.“

“The paintings of Wei Xiong are exuberant, mythic and boundless in their expansiveness and energy. Working with an alternately muted and sometimes bold and colorful palette, Xiong poses a series of questions within these mostly large-scale oil paintings – questions about mortality, our connectivity to the earth, and our often complex, relationship to the divine.”

EXCERPTS BY EVE WOOD OF ARTILLERY MAGAZINE

“Mining a purely abstract territory, Xiong's paintings suggest movement and authenticity as various shapes and forms mediate the surrounding space, sometimes breaking free from the background, while at other moments counterbalancing the darkening space with more darkness. Xiong's work makes references either directly or indirectly to work by other artists for whom abstraction is a significant mode of expression. Sometimes reminiscent of Cy Twombly's fiercely enigmatic “landscapes” wherein form appears to devolve and deconstruct into another alternate dimension, Xiong's paintings also suggest chaos and unpredictability within her own tightly rendered range of form. Space and time, it would seem, have no meaning except insofar as they are, like everything in the known world, subject to the often, unforgiving laws of hubris.”

EXCERPTS BY EVE WOOD OF ARTILLERY MAGAZINE

“Atmospheric drifts of colors seeping through wet spaces, floating poetic messages as coursing streams changing to transcendental shifts that are evocations of earlier conveyances. Muted flamboyant fires, subtle densities, and permeating tones flash soft fires in rising dashes.” EXCERPTS BY AMIR BEY OF ARTVOICES MAGAZINE

“In Wei Xiong, we can see how ancient Chinese artists were writers whose calligraphy was the basis for traditional Chinese art, and Wei’s early years were steeped in Chinese painting and literature. Wei grew in Chengdu, China, where her mother taught art in a high school there. In that community, she was nourished in a literature- loving environment. Poetry has a long history there, where she would listen to poetry readings as a teenager. Children recite poetry, which to her later paintings infused with spontaneous poetry.” EXCERPTS BY AMIR BEY OF ARTVOICES MAGAZINE

LALI KHALID: Home. In my heart, beating far away.

July 21, 2021

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‘Home. In My Heart, Beating Far Away’    LALI KHALID 

(Artvoices Art Books) 

"Home. In my heart, beating far away." is a narrative collage of photographs, captured over a span of ten years. This first monograph examines Lali’s exploration as an immigrant, grappling with issues of identity, home, family and diaspora. In her photographs, she illustrates complex challenges where she is continually shifting, trying to find new ways of retaining her identity in an environment of changing ideologies and perspectives.

Khalid seeks to bridge two ends of the spectrum, the fading past and the vague future. The images, when viewed without a predetermined perception, reveal the evolving stories embedded in them. 

This book includes essays by Professor Allen Frame and Professor Jaspal Kaur Singh.

“Changing the photo language from the psychological to the conceptual, these images depict a procession of mood shifts denoting the vagaries of her existence. There is a sense of optimism, as if a desired change would follow upon a new set of circumstances, but instead, the pieces of cloth, like clouds or shadows or thought balloons, end, and we are back in the anxiety of coping, with signs of worry and confrontation— through court proceedings and darker moods which extend to the images of the child, who is now more often seen in the same dramatic, concealing light with which we were introduced to his mother. In one of the last ones, he has caught his head in her black t-shirt that covers the whole contours of his face. He has become an extension of her; metaphorically, her constraints are now his. “    

- Introduction Excerpt by Adjunct Professor Allen Frame Assistant Professor SVA, Pratt Institute & ICP

“Symbolizing the theme of journeys and movements, of loss of identity and the recreation of new ones, Khalid integrates plentitude in the image of her small son who, in the initial shots, is her mirror image and close to her body, but through time and space, stands in isolation, beseeching her simultaneously for protection and independence, but he is never too far from her watchful gaze. The diasporic move from one continent to another, from one cultural space to another, the simultaneous sense of displacement and of belongings are reflected in many of the shots: Khalid, returning the gaze back to the dominant spaces of the US or Pakistan, whether she is in the fields, by the tires, or by the railway tracks. The images are ambiguously placed, as they are simultaneously bright or dark, signifying both expansion and loss—she is self- reflexive as a mother with her small son in the pool, she is sitting isolated and apprehensive in a courthouse, she is prayerful in a green head scarf, she is forever aware of the loss of culture and identity, yet she has agency for, although she is an immigrant and a Muslim in a post 9/11 world, she reconstructs her identity as empowering through remembrance, in the images of her sister and mother, or through the act of emerging from darkness with a white cotton top, or her son, sitting in the circle of her arms, looking directly at the camera—she is forever rebuilding and recreating her identity as an South Asian American in the private and public spaces of the nation.”          

 – Foreword Excerpt by Professor Jaspal Kaur Singh Professor, Department of English Northern Michigan University

Lali Khalid (Self Portrait)

Mehreen (Lali) Khalid came to the United States from Pakistan in 2007 as a Fulbright Scholar and attended Pratt Institute, NY where she received an MFA in Photography in 2009. After returning to Pakistan for two years, she immigrated to the United States in 2011.

Issues relating to diaspora, identity, family and home dominate Khalid’s photographic inquiry. Her images focus on cultural and private conflicts, broaching these topics obliquely through the emotive effects of natural light, and subdued narrative allusion. By photographing primarily in color, and using the startling qualities of “found light,” Khalid’s photographs exist between a mood of quiet longing.

Lali Khalid has shown her work in numerous exhibitions throughout Europe, Pakistan, and the U.S., including most recently at Light Work, Roy G Biv and DeVos Art Museum. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography in the Roy H. School of Communications, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY.

Please click the link below to purchase a FIRST EDITION copy: 

Lali Khalid ‘Home. In My Heart, Beating Far Away’

https://www.artvoicesartbooks.com/shop/lalikahlid

Artvoices Art Books is an independent publisher that will focus on the platform of providing limited edition art monographs, books and catalogues on artists who possess an independent voice. Each monograph, book and or catalogue released with Artvoices Art Books is an artist of like mind and vision.  Artvoices Art Books concept is to champion artists who are important and relevant living and working in America. Artvoices Art Books sole mission is to create limited edition quality monographs, books and catalogues that are relevant, important and necessary. Artvoices Art Books is a necessity in continuing and or starting a necessary dialog with the art community and the public at large. We believe people buy art monographs, books and catalogues that define, mirror and educate their lives. Artvoices Art Books will champion the artists who make a difference, so they don’t go undocumented in the sea of derivative trends. Artvoices Art Books is committed to publishing outstanding illustrated monographs, books and catalogues on artists that are contributing to the landscape of contemporary art. Artvoices Art Books creates works of art in the form of monographs, books and catalogues to celebrate and recognize great artists for the now and next generations of contemporary art. 

For more information about Artvoices Art Books, visit: http://www.artvoicesartbooks.com.

PRESS High-Resolution images and complimentary books available upon request.

Book Details:

Lali Khalid ‘Home. In My Heart, Beating Far Away’

Softcover, 8.5 x 11 inches

104 pages

Color photographs

ISBN: 978-1-7320048-0-1

Edition: English

US $40.00

Availability: In Stock

Media contact: 

Terrence Sanders-Smith

Email: artvoicesartbooks@gmail.com / Cell: 1 310 906 5780

JAMEL SHABAZZ: Pieces of a Man →

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