Michael Ray Charles was born in 1967 in Lafayette, Louisiana, and graduated from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1985. In college, he studied advertising design and illustration, eventually moving into painting, his preferred medium. Charles also received an MFA degree from the University of Houston in 1993.
Kerry James Marshall was born in 1955 in Birmingham, Alabama, and was educated at the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, from which he received a BFA, and an honorary doctorate in 1999. The subject matter of his paintings, installations, and public projects is often drawn from Black popular culture, and is rooted in the geography of his upbringing: “You can’t be born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1955 and grow up in South Central, Los Angeles near the Black Panthers headquarters, and not feel like you’ve got some kind of social responsibility.
The 1970s produced the film genre that would become known as ‘Blaxploitation’. These films were made specifically with an urban Black audience in mind. These movies were larger-than-life, action-packed and full of funk and soul music. These films also incorporated progressive social and political commentary. From Pam Grier to Bill Cosby, check out who delved into this genre and what the actors have been doing since the 1970s.
The Museum of UnCut Funk celebrates and pays homage to a few of our favorite Black sports heroes who rocked the 1960′s and the 1970′s (“The Greatest Decade Ever”).
Leontyne Price, a lyric soprano, is one of the world´s leading lyric sopranos. Her career in concerts and opera has brought her the praise of public and critics alike.
Janet MacLachlan, who played the compassionate schoolteacher in Martin Ritt’s Oscar-nominated “Sounder” (1972), has died at age 77. A highly respected stage, film and television actress, Maclachlan was known for a serious, no-nonsense style that led her to be often cast as a judge, nurse, doctor, psychiatrist, teacher or social worker. She was highly visible during the transitional period of the 1960s and 70s, when African-Americans fought against negative stereotypes on screen and began to make significant inroads in front of and behind the cameras.
The Museum of UnCut Funk is all about celebrating the power of THE FUNK and of 1970′s Black Culture. As we continue to provide information on one of the most powerful and productive decades in Black history, we also want to pay homage those those who passed this year who were major players during this period and beyond.
Rodney is a child actor who appeared in TV commercials for the fast-food chain Jack in the Box in the early 1970s, as well as in numerous roles in television and movies.
An internationally acclaimed opera and concert singer, Mattiwilda Dobbs has a voice often compared to the clear and resonant sound of a bell and she is known for warm, intimate performances. Only two Blacks sang at the Metropolitan Opera before her, and, appearing in Rigoletto in 1956, she was the first Black to perform a romantic lead on that stage.
Sissieretta Jones aka Black Patti (1869-1933) was a pioneer of Black operatic singing, and she paved the way for a long list of black opera singers to follow, including Marian Anderson, Roland Hayes, Leontyne Price, and Grace Bumbry, among others.
Eartha Kitt established herself in film, theater, cabaret, music and on television. By the time she was 20, Eartha was a featured dancer and vocalist in the Katherine Dunham Dance Company Troupe and was touring Europe where she was seen by Orson Wells who was quoted as calling her ”the most exciting woman in the world”.
Comic actor Marlon Wayans’ next screen role could turn out to be portraying a real-life comedy icon.
Rosalind Cash was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on December 31, 1938. As a young woman, she took off with only $20 in her pocket to seek her fame and fortune in New York City. At first things were difficult: “I had a cold-water one-room apartment in Harlem sharing a kitchen I didn’t dare use because of the rats,” she told The Guardian. But Cash attended the City College of New York, and managed to ferret out the first stirrings of independent black theater in the city. She made her stage debut in 1958 in a production at the Harlem YMCA, performing in a play by Langston Hughes called Soul Gone Home.
Born in 1927, Sidney Poitier grew up in the small village of Cat Island, Bahamas. His father, a tomato farmer, moved the family to the capital Nassau, when Poitier was eleven. It was there that he first encountered cinema.
Juanita Moore started her acting career in the early ’50s, a time during which very few Black actresses were given roles of substance in major-studio films.
Lena Horne, whose striking beauty and magnetic sex appeal often overshadowed her talent and artistry, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason for her success: “I was unique in that I was a kind of Black that white people could accept,” she once said.
Marpessa Dawn was directed by Marcel Camus and based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, “Orfeu Negro,” as it is called in Portuguese, brings together an innocent country girl, played by Ms. Dawn, and a trolley car motorman and gifted guitarist, portrayed by Mr. Mello. They meet amid the frenzy of Rio’s carnival and are soon swaying to a provocative samba among the crowds. But Eurydice is stalked by a man in a skeleton costume. Eventually, Orpheus finds her in the morgue. In the end, bearing her body in his arms, he falls to his death from a cliff.
