Good Friends! Good Times!

This weekend I went to First Saturday (free every first Saturday of the month) at the Brooklyn Museum with my peeps and then we headed to the J Dilla Tribute party over at the Bell House. We had such a great time. It was an action packed night filled with so much creativity! Two amazing black artists J Dilla and Art Smith gave us such inspiration. I decided to feature them on the blog this week….

ART SMITH

At the Brooklyn Museum there is a great exhibit displaying the works of Brooklyn’s own, modernists jeweler Art Smith. The exhibit displays his archival material from his estate, such as sketches, the original shop sign, Smith’s tools, and period photographs of models wearing the jewelry, along with thirty pieces of modernist jewelry. Art Smith was inspired by surrealism and primitivism.

He trained at Cooper Union. Art Smith, an African American, opened his first shop on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village in 1946. One of the leading modernist jewelers of the mid-twentieth century, Smith was also an active supporter of black and gay civil rights, an avid jazz enthusiast, and a supporter of early black modern dance groups. Art Smith died in 1982.

(Pls excuse the blurry photos…there was a glare from the glass)

J DILLA

After the Brooklyn Museum, we headed to the J DILLA tribute party. It was PACKKKKED!!!! The line was a Manhattan block long! After fingers & toes were numb and noses were runny we finally made it in!!! Questlove DJ’d the event in honor of phenomenal J Dilla.

“J Dilla aka James Dewitt Yancey (February 7, 1974 – February 10, 2006), was an American Grammy Nominated record producer who emerged from the mid-1990s underground hip hop scene in Detroit, Michigan. He was one of the music industry’s most influential hip-hop artists, working for big-name acts like De La Soul, Busta Rhymes and Common. Yancey’s career began slowly. He has now become highly regarded, most notably for the production of critically acclaimed albums by Common, Busta Rhymes, A Tribe Called Quest, and The Pharcyde. He was a member of Slum Village for their acclaimed debut album Fantastic, Vol. 2. Yancey died in 2006 of complications with the blood disease, Lupus.”