Past My Shades
On the 49th birthday of the 44th President, LetterToObama presents a quilt by Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud. The back of this multi-media piece foregrounds a typed letter to the President. The front includes specific newspaper clippings obscured with paint. The snapshots of the work are blurry, only allowing the viewer to make out the colors and shapes. The actual text on the piece, both in Jasmine words and the news articles, are silhouetted. I have paired her piece with a single image from the September 12, 1963 issue of Jet Magazine taken at the civil rights March on Washington. As a black & white image, this photo is also distorted by eliminating the colors of the monument, the banner and the face. I ask the viewer to see past the shades of this image to see more. In addition to viewing the images of Jasmine’s quilt, you can see past the colors and read her words below.
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JET
THE WEEK’S BEST PHOTOS
CAPTION: “REFLECTIVE MOOD”
ISSUE: SEPTEMBER 12, 1963; PAGE: 32
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PATCHWORK, A QUILT + LETTER TO YOU
JASMINE JAMILLAH MAHMOUD
FRONT
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BACK
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ARTIST. STATEMENT.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
JASMINE JAMILLAH MAHMOUD is a writer and artist who seeks to establish a more just society through the arts. She is founder and editor of The Arts Politic, a print-and-online magazine dedicated to solving problems at the intersection of arts and politics. Her career experience includes progressive policy research, community-oriented arts journalism, innovative arts policy work and various performance pursuits with the Seattle-based band Lawn-dree, as a classical violinist and rock composer, and as music director for several original productions. She received a B.A. in Government from Harvard University, and a M.A. in Arts Politics from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU.
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August 4, 2010: Past My Shades by M. Liz Andrews, Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.LetterToObama.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.LetterToObama.com.
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