Notes: August Wilson was an African American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". He is best known for a series of ten plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle, which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century.
Notes: Black Panther artist Dwayne Turner is an African American illustrator and comic book artist. Working for both Marvel and DC comics in the late 1980s and 1990s, Turner transitioned from comics to the gaming industry in 2006.
Notes: Carrie Mae Weems has carefully staged the photographs in this series to suggest moments of everyday life First exhibited in 1990, the Kitchen Table Series set the stage for future contemporary artists to explore issues of identity.
Notes: Two examples of Onitsha Market Literature published in Nigeria, primarily in the 1960s. The important role of Onitsha Market Literature in detailing what Chinua Achebe describes as the "social problems of a somewhat mixed-up but dynamic, even brash, modernizing community. Included in the collection are stories, plays, advice and moral discourses that were all published by local presses in the 1960s in the market town of Onitsha on the Niger River in southeastern Nigeria. Emmanuel Obiechina, a prominent scholar of Onitsha market literature, argues that this African popular literature is "an integral, if unique and startling, part of the West African creative scene.
Notes: Born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1971, Mickalene Thomas earned her BFA in painting at Pratt Institute in 2000 and an MFA at the Yale University School of Art in 2002. This volume is the first to gather together her various approaches to photography, including portraits, collages, Polaroids and other processes. The work is a personal act of deconstruction and reappropriation.
Notes: A series of illustrated poetry collections by Dunbar, "an important predecessor to the younger generation of poets of the Harlem Renaissance," The images accompanying Dunbar's eight poems in Poems of Cabin and Field were collectively made by "faculty members of the Hampton Institute Camera Club, most of them well-connected white Northerners," whose staged photographs were "largely made in African American communities in the environs of Hampton, Virginia."
Pictures of Poro College, Black cosmetology school founded by Annie Turnbo Malone
Notes: One of the nation's wealthiest African Americans was Annie Malone, founder and owner of Poro College (watch video below), a cosmetics firm (view products below) that started in St. Louis and later occupied an entire city block in Chicago. Annie Minerva Turnbo Malone was an African-American businesswoman, educator, inventor and philanthropist. Annie was two years younger than Madam C. J. Walker. She had launched her hair care business four years before Sarah Breedlove (later known as Madam C. J. Walker). In the early 1900s Madam Walker worked as a "Poro Agent" for Annie for about one year. In the first three decades of the 20th century, she founded and developed a large and prominent commercial and educational enterprise centered around cosmetics for African-American women.
Notes: A Raisin in the Sun, drama in three acts by Lorraine Hansberry, first published and produced in 1959. The play’s title is taken from “Harlem,” a poem by Langston Hughes. A Raisin in the Sun follows a poor black family that receives $10,000 from a life insurance policy after the father’s death. Instead of providing salvation, the money causes intense disagreements over what should be done with it.
Notes: A Soldier's Play is a play by American playwright Charles Fuller. Set on a US Army installation in the segregation-era South. The drama won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, among other accolades. It was the basis for a 1984 feature film adaptation, A Soldier's Story, for which Fuller wrote the screenplay.
Notes: Static is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. The character was created by Milestone Comics, an independently-owned imprint of DC Comics founders Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Michael Davis, and Derek T. Dingle. Static's civilian identity, Virgil Hawkins, was named after Virgil D. Hawkins, a black man who was denied entrance to the University of Florida's law school due to his race in 1949. Virgil Hawkins was fifteen years old when he became Static.
Notes: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song is a 1971 American blaxploitation film written, co-produced, scored, edited, directed by, and starring Melvin Van Peebles. The film tells the picaresque story of a poor black man fleeing from the white police authorities. In 2020, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".