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Review of Kadir Nelson’s I Have A Dream: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

1/12/2017

 
AUTHOR: Rachel Dangermond
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I never tire of hearing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s historic speech, I Have A Dream, and was pleased to see Kadir Nelson included a CD and the full transcript of the speech with his picture book, I Have A Dream. Nelson has delivered to us a sumptious visual rendition of what Dr. King said in 1961. Each illustration that accompanies an excerpt from the speech is a gorgeous interpretation of Dr. King’s words.
 
The intense close up illustration of a Black hand holding a white hand with Dr. King’s words: “With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day,” moved me to tears. Throughout the book, the combination of the gorgeous illustrations coupled with the powerful words of Dr. King is very stirring. The illustrations are bold, the words are bold, and together they are powerful.
 
I read the book to my seven-year-old son, and at the end, he said, “We need to be free! What [Dr. King] said doesn’t get old. And the pictures of the kids with kids is awesome.” I agree, this speech never gets old and Nelson’s illustrations are true art from the heart. I look forward to pulling this book down from our bookshelf to read over and over.

The New Orleans Blended Books Club will host a Martin Luther King Storytelling Hour and Book Sale on Saturday, January 14th from 3:00pm to 4:00pm at Stella Jones Gallery.  LOOK HERE for additional details, and please visit www.stellajonesgallery.com.  
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RACHEL DANGERMOND is the author of the forthcoming book, The Elephant In The Playground, a memoir about a Sephardic mom raising a Black son in New Orleans. She is a facilitator with New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu's Welcome Table, a race reconciliation initiative that began in 2013. She is also a trained mediator and participates with the Department of Justice on community policing topics.

Rachel is the founder of Transracial Parenting a wheelhouse of writing, speaking, and workshops helping to advance the conversation of race particularly as it relates to parenting. For more information visit www.transracialparenting.com and follow Transracial Parenting on Facebook.

Review of Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer by Carole Boston Weatherford

1/11/2017

 
AUTHOR: Rachel Dangermond
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Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer is a striking book for many reasons. Fannie Lou Hamer was a tour de force and her story is an amazing one. The illustrations by Ekua Holmes are colorful, vivid and expressive and beg for a pause before moving to the next page. Yet, what is most striking is the structure of the book, the narrative is told in Hamer’s own words and organized deftly into easy to digest sections by author, Carole Boston Weatherford.
 
I read the book to my son and when I closed the book, he said, “That was a long book but totally awesome! Yay to freedom, and no to beatings. [The book gave] very good reasons about why you should be free.” Yes, the book is long for a seven-year-old reading about Civil Rights, but the content in each section is narrated sparingly. From the opening Sunflower Country, Mississippi and through poetry and narration to the last section entitled No Rest, the author takes us through the timeline of Hamer’s remarkable life.
 
This is an excellent book to add to any child’s bookshelf and as an adult, I, too, came away with a renewed excitement for what one individual can accomplish and admiration for Hamer. Weatherford also includes a timeline in the back to punctuate each of the historic events in this country as well as Hamer’s place in that history. A beautifully rendered book about an iconic American woman.

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RACHEL DANGERMOND is the author of the forthcoming book, The Elephant In The Playground, a memoir about a Sephardic mom raising a Black son in New Orleans. She is a facilitator with New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu's Welcome Table, a race reconciliation initiative that began in 2013. She is also a trained mediator and participates with the Department of Justice on community policing topics.

Rachel is the founder of Transracial Parenting a wheelhouse of writing, speaking, and workshops helping to advance the conversation of race particularly as it relates to parenting. For more information visit www.transracialparenting.com and follow Transracial Parenting on Facebook.


"Voice of Freedom" is available for purchase at Community Book Center and Stella Jones Gallery.  

"There's An Alligator In Audubon Park" - BOOK REVIEW II

12/1/2016

 
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One of the facts about young minds is children like scary stories that produce pleasurable anxiety. In Gina Minor Allen’s book the alligator fills the role of dread in the plot. Little do we know as we turn the pages that it is actually an unreliable narrator, a boy who cried alligator, who is actually causing all the tension.
 
The illustrations show us iconic scenes of a typical day at the park in New Orleans. There is a pleasant hue spectrum of people chilling out, exercising, playing music and even grilling, when the boy announces the appearance of the perpetrator, “There’s an Alligator in Audubon Park!” He then goes on to tell you just how scared you should be about that. The alligator is going to eat the critters, young kids, and he’s partial to redheads with brown eyes. Oh no! He’s actually coming for you, the boy says.
 
Typical of New Orleans, everyone he tells has a different vision for what to do when the alligator is caught. Make him into a purse? Collect reward money for his capture? Free him! Eat him! This is deftly illustrated as an almost street parade as everyone follows their imaginings to hunt for the alligator. Until we learn that this creature is only the imaginings of the narrator himself.
 
Why do children love to be scared? Reading scary stories reflects the range of human emotions that we all experience. Since we are all storytellers in our natural state, children also like to see someone like them making stuff up. Truth is there could be alligator in Audubon Park. Allen’s nicely blends this fact and fiction in her book. 

The New Orleans Blended Books Club will host a reading and book signing event with author/illustrator, Gina Minor Allen at 2:00pm on Saturday, December 10th at Community Book Center.  LOOK HERE for additional details and please visit www.ginaminorallen.com.  "There's An Alligator in Audubon Park" is available now at Community Book Center.  
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RACHEL DANGERMOND is the author of the forthcoming book, The Elephant In The Playground, a memoir about a Sephardic mom raising a Black son in New Orleans. She is a facilitator with New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu's Welcome Table, a race reconciliation initiative that began in 2013. She is also a trained mediator and participates with the Department of Justice on community policing topics.

Rachel is the founder of Transracial Parenting a wheelhouse of writing, speaking, and workshops helping to advance the conversation of race particularly as it relates to parenting. For more information visit www.transracialparenting.com and follow Transracial Parenting on Facebook.

BLENDED BOOKS CLUB - 2017 Youth Essay & Poster Contest

12/1/2016

 
Apply at www.charitablefilmnetwork.submittable.com/submit. Please spread the word!  #LoveYall #BlendedBooksClub
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"There's an alligator in audubon park" - BOOK REVIEW

10/23/2016

 
​A Cute Story About A Real Fact.
 
This will be the fifth time I have read this book slowly, and the third time by myself. "THERE'S AN ALLIGATOR IN AUDUBON PARK" is a delightful story for children and for those like me who know the true story behind this children’s book.

GINA MINOR ALLEN gives us a quick peek of a normal day in Audubon Park when it's discovered that there is an alligator in the park. Rumors and tales quickly fly among interesting characters who want to catch the said alligator for reasons ranging from reward money to using it for stew! The characters are beautifully illustrated, each with their own look that is unique to them alone while fitting in with the overall look.  The lines are funny and quick to read in a sing-song way. And the story from beginning to end keeps kids enraptured for their first and second time reading. I should know I read the book to my siblings who demanded encore readings of the book. While not a long read, this story gives a quick boost to the imagination of young and old about something that did happen in my home city. It’s wonderful for those who wish to keep a funny bit of history as well as people who like to give children quirky books. This is a great story that only leaves you wanting in one thing, this wish for more!
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Book illustrations courtesy Gina Minor Allen.

"There's An Alligator in Audubon Park" is available now at Community Book Center.  The New Orleans Blended Books Club will host a reading and book signing event with author/illustrator, Gina Minor Allen at 2:00pm on Saturday, December 10th at Community Book Center.  LOOK HERE for additional details or visit www.ginaminorallen.com.
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BRANDON BIGARD is an actress, activist, a Baby Doll, writer, spoken word artist, and a native of New Orleans. She has been a youth advocate for over a decade being in may groups, including the Blended Book Club. A consultant that specializes in creating youth, color, and gender friendly/ appropriate climates, she claims to just be a lover of creating and created worlds.

New Orleans Loving Festival Receives Jazz & Heritage Grant Award

10/10/2016

 
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The Loving Festival is proud to announce that we are a recipient of a 2016-17 "Jazz & Heritage Presenting: Festivals and Concerts in Music and Performing Arts Award."  Since 1979, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation (NOJHF) has reinvested the proceeds from Jazz Fest directly into our community — in the form of grants to arts and educational organizations — to support projects that reflect the Foundation’s mission.

NOJHF award funds will be used to present Louisiana-based musicians and other performing artists during the 7th annual New Orleans Loving Festival in June of 2017.

​Visit www.CommunityPartnershipGrants.org for more details.  #LoveYall #LovingFestival 

#PutYourStampOnLoving - CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS 

8/15/2016

 
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Help us Celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Loving v Virginia Supreme Court decision with a United States Postal Service commemorative stamp! Please send a message to President Obama and the Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee in support of the Loving Festival's petition for a US Postal Service stamp to commemorate the 1967 Loving v Virginia Supreme Court decision.
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     President Barack Obama, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington, DC 20500
     [email protected], www.facebook.com/barackobama, https://twitter.com/BarackObama


     Citizens' Stamp Advisory Committee, 475 L’Enfant Plaza SW, Room 3300, Washington, DC 20260-3501

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:
​The 7th Annual New Orleans Loving Festival is looking for 50 great stamp designs to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Loving v Virginia Supreme Court decision. If selected, your stamp design will be featured in a limited edition Loving Festival Philatelic Collection and Exhibition.  Look Here for guidelines - www.charitablefilmnetwork.submittable.com/submit. Please spread the word!  #‎PutYourStampOnLoving‬ ‪#‎LoveYall‬ :-) ‪#‎LovingFestival‬

Mixed Messages 6: Race · Identity · Love - EXHIBITION REVIEW

8/11/2016

 
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Conisha the Civil Engineer - Donna Woodley
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Meesha the Chief Operating Officer - Donna Woodley
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Shamika La Tray the Doctor - Donna Woodley
​Its truly encouraging to see the New Orleans Loving Festival is back for its sixth anniversary. Described by its organizers as “a Multiracial Community Celebration and Film Festival that challenges racism through outreach and education”, the Loving Festival approaches this commendable mission with dedication instead of provocation, contemplation in lieu of agitation, and with art instead of politics.

​The major visual art component of the 2016 festival is a juried exhibition called Mixed Messages 6: Race-Identity-Love. This year the show is presented not in a typical gallery space but on the third floor of the Myrtle Banks Building on Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard in New Orleans. The building was once a school, then an empty and abandoned testament to inner-city blight, but now restored features a food-market on the ground floor, and office and work spaces above. Mixed Messages 6 was hung in a large central hallway that serves as an exhibition space for the Creative Alliance of New Orleans, and the common area for a suite of offices leased by a local entrepreneurs, non-profits and charter schools.  Its placement in this area felt synergistic― the works of art providing arresting and thoughtful reflection about some of the significant social and cultural issues that many urbanists, education professionals, and children in a New Orleans charter school are likely to wrestle with continuously.

Donna Woodley's series Black Women Rock: Painting Black Female Experience, demonstrate this relevancy.  They are small rectangles, equipped with descriptive titles (such as Conisha the Civil Engineer, Meesha the Chief Operating Officer, and Shamika La Tray the Doctor) but they are deliberately inscrutable pictures. Though the titles are suggestive of some distinctive African American women's professional identities (and attire), you're not going to find portraits like these on anyone's LinkedIn page. Each face is obscured, and instead of business suits and lab coats, the sitters appear not only in their underwear but in Grandma's as well. As the artist revealingly explains on a small text panel that accompanies her works “...White "granny panty" underwear placed on the heads of black women covering their eyes presents tension between humor and seriousness, absurdity and truth, and visibility versus invisibility. The female figures in my paintings are confrontational towards the visibility and value of black women within American society, both historically and from a contemporary context...” If these works do indeed foster trenchant and comic social discourse it's worth noting that they're coming from an African American female artist who is confidently and self-consciously defining the rules of the debate.
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Ahuva with Papers - Leona Strassberg Steiner
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Aziza with Papers - Leona Strassberg Steiner
Directly across the hall another female artist also explores issues of identity and the pliable craft of portraiture. As opposed to Donna Woodley's paintings, in which clothes definitely do not make the woman, in Leona Strassberg Steiner's photographs the difference between two simple garments is shown to be a potent but unreliable cultural, religious and political marker. Her series Aziza and Ahuva- A Love Story, consists of diptych self-portraits cloaked in disarmingly simple disguise. In each work the artist presents herself twice, in identical surroundings and in nearly identical pose. The main difference between the two personas is that she wears a hijab in one and she sports a smaller more western head scarf in the other. Strassberg Steiner's statement about these works relates that she has spent half her life in Israel and that they raise “...questions about land, borders, and displacement.” I don't think that these photographs are meant to tell us something that we don't know‒excluding extremists on either side don't we accept the basic humanity of Israelis and Palestinians? Strassberg Steiner's message seems more plaintive than novel, more personal than political. If ending the protracted conflict is currently too much to ask for or expect, at least in Strassberg Steiner's mind and in her photos, some manner of reconciliation is achievable.

The seven other artists featured in Mixed Messages 6: Race-Identity-Love, offer diverse responses to the exhibition's broad parameters. Iris Crey focuses on love by creating visual allegories that explore the relationships and influence between well-know 20th century artists; Belinda Shinsillas uses abstract paintings to explore the intersection of her Mexican and New Orleans identities; Gason Ayisyin finds resonance of his childhood in Haiti in documentary photographs of New Orleans; Sean G. Clarke's assemblage, In Case of, compels viewers to think about racism in everyday and in emergency situations; the artist ChE's Altar Piece is a multi-disciplinary interactive installation made in response to the Black Lives Matter movement; José Tores-Tama's drawings honor Latino immigrant workers who struggle to remain in New Orleans, a city they helped to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina; and Bottletree (the nom de guerre of Jerald L. White who is the founder of Charitable Film Network and the New Orleans Loving Festival) contributes images from his New Orleans Tokens & Souvenirs project that documents how Black Americans are depicted in contemporary New Orleans tourism memorabilia, and how these items impact the lives of Black New Orleanians.  Befitting the Loving Fest's inclusive and egalitarian practice, a collaborative work made during a Create Community - Make Art Together event by artists Sallie Knox Hall, Lisa Kaichen, and about 30 New Orleans participants, is also on view.

The New Orleans Loving Festival is not only a welcome annual event. As can be gleaned from its website and its Facebook page, the organization produces, sponsors, and promotes a year-round program of community happenings, artistic performances, exhibitons, discussion groups, and various other educational initiatives. Mixed Messages 6: Race-Identity-Love, like all of The Loving Festival's perseverant endeavors, is an earnest and illuminating step along an admirable path.    STEVEN MAKLANSKY

MIXED MESSAGES.6 is on view through August 13th at the Myrtle Banks Building - 1307 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd., NOLA.
Gallery Hours: Weekdays from 10:00am to 5:00pm and Saturdays from 12:00pm to 4:00pm. 

Steven Maklansky is an art and arts administration consultant in New Orleans. He previously served as the Director of the Boca Raton Museum of Art and the Brevard Art Museum in Florida, the Director of Curatorial Services for the Louisiana State Museum, and as the Assistant Director for Art and Curator of Photographs at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

#DignityInProcess Call for Artists, Activists, & Wisdom Keepers

6/16/2016

 
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Open Call for MIXED MESSAGES.6 group Art Exhibition

4/3/2016

 
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The 6th Annual New Orleans Loving Festival is seeking original artwork and short films with themes concerning Love, Race, Identity and the Multiracial Experience, for a juried group art exhibition from July 1st to August 6th at the Myrtle Banks Building Gallery. Please follow the guidelines below for consideration:
  1. ART Submissions must include your bio or resume, high resolution photo(s) of the artwork, and a description - including the title, size, medium, and the year the artwork was created.Artwork created before 2013 should not be submitted for consideration.
  2. SHORT FILM Submissions must include your bio or resume, a film synopsis, and a web link to preview the film (or screener DVD).
You will need to create a Submittable User Account to submit your materials. See instructions at https://charitablefilmnetwork.submittable.com/submit/56316­. 

The DEADLINE for receiving submissions is Wednesday, June 1, 2016 at Midnight - Central Standard Time.

The New Orleans Loving Festival is an initiative of Charitable Film Network. For more information contact [email protected] or visit lovingfestival.org. Please follow the Loving Festival on Facebook and Twitter!
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    The New Orleans Loving Festival is a Multiracial Community Celebration & Film Festival that challenges racism through outreach and education. The "Loving Festival" is an initiative of Charitable Film Network.

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    JW Bottletree
    ​Rachel Dangermond
    Elizabeth Underwood

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