A-Tisket, A-Tasket 

This exhibition celebrates Black girls’ complex emotional lives as portrayed in a range of artworks, from portraits painted in the 1930s to twenty-first-century photographs. Resistance, hope, anger, defiance, curiosity, joy, anxiety, vulnerability, and exhaustion are some of the feelings seen on the faces of children who have been on the front lines of profound social changes such as the Great Migration, Civil Rights movement, Women’s March, and Black Lives Matter movement. Inexpression can also be a strategic refusal that makes space for freedom in an often-dangerous world. Artists featured include Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Frank Döring, Larry Fink, Edward Franklin Fisk, Baldwin S. Lee, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, RaMell Ross, Lorna Simpson, Alexandra Soteriou, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems.

 

The Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies, part of African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky, will host their 30th Annual Black Women’s Conference, “WE ARE THE CULTURE: A Symposium on Black Girls and Girlhood,” on March 7 – 8, 2025. Works on view are visual counterpoints to many of the themes studied as part of the symposium such as play, innovation, technical excellence, and global cultural connections. 

IMAGE: Carrie Mae Weems, Mayflowers from the series May Days Long Forgotten, 2002, chromogenic print. Collection of the UK Art Museum, purchase: The Robert C. May Photography Fund.