The Wonderful soul is delightful. Someone people admire in a way that borders on myth.
Explore the works below. Before expanding the text, think to yourself:
What do you see?
What do you feel?
What might it be addressing?
What questions do you have?
Do you like it? Why or why not?
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These are stills from the film A Magical Substance Flows into Me by Jumana Manna. The film focuses on the creation of an archive of “oriental music” in Jerusalem. Following in the footsteps of ethnomusicologist Dr. Robert Lachmann, Manna traveled throughout this geographic space of historic Palestine, interviewing musicians of various ethnicities and religions including Kurdish, Moroccan, and Yemenite Jews, Samaritans, Palestinians, Bedouins, and Coptic Christians. The film defies shallow understandings of the Palestinian landscape, both historically and contemporaneously.
If you would like to watch the video (1 hour), click the link below.
About the Artist
Jumana Manna (b. 1987) is a Palestinian artist who holds Israeli citizenship. She is primarily a filmmaker, though she engages with sculpture often as well.
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This is the painting Pussy Willow by Lucy Bull. Pussy Willow, like all of Bull’s paintings, is a sensory overload. The flowing rivers of color are chaotic and impossible to decipher, but calming all the same. One can get lost in this work, that takes paint and makes it feel like a digital glitch.
When I think of something wonderful, I think of something that goes beyond our realm of reality. Bull encourages people to find figuration and narratives in her seemingly abstract works. Can you make out anything in this piece?
About the Artist
Lucy Bull (b. 1990) is an American painter whose works aim to speak to your senses before your mind. Each work of hers take 4 to 20 laters of paint, starting with one base color before building up paint and scratching away at the canvas
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This is Origin of the Universe (2012) by Mickalene Thomas. In this piece, Thomas is referencing Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (1866) in which a white woman’s genitalia is focused on—and cut off from the rest of the body. Thomas however, centers a Black body in the same position, with public hair, nipples, and folds of the body made of rhinestones. In Courbet’s piece, he associates everything in the world as coming from the female genitalia, bringing in a narrative of the Eve archetype. Thomas takes that association and amplifies it. For Thomas, the Black body, and all it invokes, is the Origin of not only the world but the Universe.
About the Artist
Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971) is an American artist who creates works combining painting with non-traditional materials (like rhinestones) and techniques (like collage). She depicts almost exclusively Black women, often nude, sometimes sexual. She engages with histories of exploitation and objectification that Black women face in media, the arts, and daily life.