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B-Girl Be: A Celebration of Women in Hip HopJune 28 – September 9, 2007rap . graffiti . dj . dance . panels . fashion . poetry . visual exhibition . film |
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Krista Franklin |
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Krista Franklin is a poet, visual artist and educator from Dayton, OH who currently works and resides in Chicago, IL. Her poems and visual art have appeared in and on the covers of literary journals, CDs, book covers and websites. Most recently, her collage “Transatlantic Turntable-ism” was published on the cover of Callaloo Art and Literary Journal’s “Hip Hop Music and Culture Issue,” and in early 2007, her collage “What Yellow Sounds Like,” named after the book of the same title, was published as the cover art for Linda Susan Jackson’s debut collection of poetry (Tia Chucha Press). At the heart of the collages she makes is a deep concern for creating complex and interrogative images of black community, dream worlds and psychic landscapes. Deeply inspired by American popular culture and histories, as well as by the frenetic glamour of music videos and magazines, her collages are composed in much the same way a hip-hop music producer creates a beat; through a process of “sampling.” Using a variety of mixed media – paint, decorative and handmade paper, playing cards, old photographs, receipts – she collages new visions and post-modern American totems wherein image is in dialogue with words (sometimes prominent, sometimes obscured), and the complexities of histories are evoked through purposeful layering.
The aesthetic of my collages is, without a doubt, a hip-hop aesthetic.
I have often compared the process of creating my collages with the process
of using sampling to make a song. However, the relationship between my
collages and hip-hop is deeper than that. I pull heavily from the imagery
and iconography of hip-hop in my collages, as well as the energy and attitude
of the culture. It is my goal to be the female Romare Bearden of the hip-hop
generation – to tell the narratives and make the connections between
the past artistic movements and cultures of color with the ones we are
living in now. I continue to be in the process, through my artwork, of
interrogating, questioning and “riffing on” the images that
pervade people of color in the media, of trying to reconfigure these images
in affirming ways, to go against the grain of what we are told to think
of ourselves. |
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kid & family-friendly . all ages . all genders . all incomes . all ethnic communities |
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