Ronald “Butch” Lewis, known in the fight industry for tenaciously landing his light heavyweight champion Michael Spinks a massive $13.5 million purse for what turned out to be a brutal, one round KO at the hands of Iron Mike Tyson, apprently suffered a massive heart attack. Lewis, age 65 and more active in recent years in the music and TV fields than in boxing, was in or around his stately home in Delaware when he went into cardiac arrest.
Other close friends of Lewis were actor Denzel Wasdhington and former Black Entertainment Television Network owner turned NBA Charlotte franchise owner Bob Johnson. The celebrity trio often sat at ringside at major fights together and I think they may have had “ringside seats” together at President Barack Obama’s Inauguration.
Later on in his illustrious life, soul signer supreme, Soul Brother Number One, Mr. James Brown did a jail stint for drug use. When he got out of jail, he had a comeback concert at an historic theater in the Hollywood area and the promoter of the event was none other than Butch Lewis.
Lewis’ sartorial trademark was his “Chocolate Tuxedo” look which only mean he wore a tuxedo without a shirt underneath it. Lewis even had one of his sons at ringside for a big fight dressed the same way.
Lewis grew up in Philadelphia, was always fascinated by boxing and became a close friend and associate of first Smokin’ Joe Frazier and then Muhammad Ali.
In the boxing industry, Lewis oversaw the development of Leon Spinks when Lewis was a VP to Bob Arum’s Top Rank company, including that incredible night in Las Vegas when Leon, with only eight pro bouts, took a unanimous decision over “The Greatest” in Las Vegas.
Source: www.examiner.com
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.
His graphically styled paintings investigate racial stereotypes drawn from a history of American advertising, product packaging, billboards, radio jingles, and television commercials. Charles draws comparisons between Sambo, Mammy, and minstrel images of an earlier era and contemporary mass-media portrayals of black youths, celebrities, and athletes—images he sees as a constant in the American subconscious. “Stereotypes have evolved,” he notes. “I’m trying to deal with present and past stereotypes in the context of today’s society.” Caricatures of Black experience, such as Aunt Jemima, are represented in Charles’s work as ordinary depictions of blackness, yet are stripped of the benign aura that lends them an often unquestioned appearance of truth. “Aunt Jemima is just an image, but it almost automatically becomes a real person for many people, in their minds. But there’s a difference between these images and real humans.” In each of his paintings, notions of beauty, ugliness, nostalgia, and violence emerge and converge, reminding us that we cannot divorce ourselves from a past that has led us to where we are, who we have become, and how we are portrayed.
His paintings are not about people, they are about images. They are about the negative stereotypes that Blacks still buy into – the minstrel and the mammy-’ and how they are updated, and (hidden in new images). These images are about the racial stereotypes that white people created and perpetuate, rather than knowing Blacks as (elaborate) individual human beings. Charles says ‘that the negative images about Blacks are hiding throughout American culture, just below the surface, on TV sitcoms and cartoons of every vintage and in advertising and sports.’ He didn’t invent them, and he is not singlehandedly perpetuating them. The images that Michael Ray Charles paints are not to confuse people, he is not creating these stereotypes. He is trying to seek and create an understanding’ among all people.
Michael Ray Charles takes old tired images, and, like a surgeon, tries to expose the cancer within them, and like a doctor, the artist’s intent is to heal us by showing us our scabs. Michael Ray Charles is trying to express to the world for all people to understand that blacks are human beings, and don’t deserve being pigeonholed through images which play and still play a major role in society today.
Michael Ray Charles is filmed on location at his home and studio in Austin, Texas. Through his studies of advertising, the minstrel tradition, and blackface, Charles seeks to deconstruct and subvert images of blackness through painting. “I’ve been called a sellout. People question my blackness. A lot of people accuse me of perpetuating a stereotype,” he says. “I think there’s a fine line between perpetuating something and questioning something. And I like to get as close to it as possible.” Pointing out items from his collection of memorabilia, Charles traces the transformation of stereotypes in his work.
Today, Charles continues to exhibit in national and international venues. His work remains the subject of books, magazines, and newspaper articles and is included in many public and private collection. Currently, Charles is a Professor of Art in the department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin. He and his family reside in Austin, Texas.
Source: The Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Artcyclopedia.com, PBS, Ask Art and Art Net
Dwayne McDuffie, who wrote comic books for Marvel and DC and co-founded his own publishing company before crossing over to television and animation, has died. He was 49.
The Detroit native died Monday, a day after his birthday, DC Comics said. His cause and place of death weren’t immediately known.
McDuffie wrote comics for the New York-based DC and Marvel, including runs on Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, the Fantastic Four and the Justice League of America. He also penned several animated television shows and features, including the just-released “All-Star Superman” as well as “Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths” and the animated TV series “Static Shock” and “Ben 10: Alien Force.”
News of McDuffie’s death was first reported Tuesday by the website Comic Book Resources. As recently as last week, McDuffie attended the premieres of the new “All-Star Superman” film in Los Angeles and New York, and was scheduled to appear at an event Wednesday at Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles.
Instead, there would be a remembrance at the launch party that McDuffie was supposed to attend, said film director Reginald Hudlin, a friend of about 15 years who was debuting a new project.
McDuffie’s work for Marvel included “Damage Control,” which took a serious but fictional look at a company whose job it was to clean up the damage — both physical and legal — resulting from battles between superheroes and supervillains. In 1992, however, he helped form the comic book company Milestone Media Inc., which gave him the freedom and leeway to create his own characters, many of whom were of differing ethnic backgrounds.
Milestone Media focused on creator-owned multicultural superheroes including “Hardware,” “Icon,” “Blood Syndicate,” “Xombi” and “Static,” which was turned into the popular children’s cartoon “Static Shock,” on which he served as a story editor.
McDuffie also wrote for other titles and characters, too, including Black Panther and Deathlok.
His work at Milestone set a new tone for the use of multicultural characters in the pantheon of heroes, something that lent itself to his television work, too, where characters of color became part of interlocking teams.
Besides comics, McDuffie was a producer and story editor on Cartoon Network’s “Justice League Unlimited,” and wrote and produced episodes of other cartoons, including “What’s New, Scooby Doo?,” “Ben 10: Ultimate Alien” and “Teen Titans.”
Christopher Chambers, a journalism professor at Georgetown University and author of the graphic novel “The Darker Mask,” told The Associated Press that McDuffie’s influence resonated in animation and comic books.
“For minorities in this mode of entertainment … he was a hero, he was a pioneer,” Chambers said Tuesday. “Not just for we who are fans but also for content creators. He spilled over into other media.”
Bruce Timm, executive producer of the DC Universe animated original movie series, heaped praise on McDuffie’s talents and character.
“As a writer he was simply brilliant — adventurous, effortlessly funny, ferociously smart. As a person, he was all that and much, much more — more, in fact, than my puny words can even hope to express,” Timm said.
McDuffie was nominated for two Emmy Awards for “Static Shock,” a Writers Guild award for “Justice League” and three Eisner awards for his work in comic books, his website said.
Organizers of Seattle’s annual Emerald City Comicon said they planned to hold a memorial panel remembering McDuffie at the three-day event on March 5.
Dan DiDio, co-publisher of DC Entertainment, said McDuffie “left a lasting legacy on the world of comics that many writers can only aspire to. He will not only be remembered as an extremely gifted writer whose scripts have been realized as comics books, in television shows and on the silver screen, but as the creator or co-create of so many of the much-loved Milestone characters, including Static Shock.”
Tom Brevoort, Marvel’s senior vice president for publishing, said McDuffie was a force behind bringing more diversity into comics.
“He was very interested in creating a wider range of multiculturalism in comics, having been profoundly affected by the example of the Black Panther when he was growing up, and wanting to give that same opportunity to others of all races, creeds and religions, which is one of the reasons he left Marvel and co-founded Milestone,” Brevoort told the AP. “And he eventually came back to write both Beyond! and Fantastic Four for me.”
McDuffie is survived by his wife, Charlotte, and his mother, Edna McDuffie-Gardner.
Source: Associated Press
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. You can’t move to Watts in 1963 and not speak about it. That determined a lot of where my work was going to go,” says Marshall. In his “Souvenir” series of paintings and sculptures, he pays tribute to the Civil Rights movement with mammoth printing stamps featuring bold slogans of the era—Black Power!—and paintings of middle-class living rooms where ordinary Black citizens have become angels tending to a domestic order populated by the ghosts of Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and other heroes of the 1960s.
Marshall creates a comic book for the twenty-first century, pitting ancient African sculptures come to life against a cyberspace elite that risks losing touch with traditional culture. Marshall’s work is based on a broad range of art-historical references, from Renaissance painting to black folk art, from El Greco to Charles White. A striking aspect of his paintings is the emphatically Black skin tone of his figures, a development the artist says emerged from an investigation into the invisibility of Blacks in America and the unnecessarily negative connotations associated with darkness. Marshall believes “you still have to earn your audience’s attention every time you make something.” The sheer beauty of his work speaks to an art that is simultaneously formally rigorous and socially engaged.
“I persist, trying to make pictures that inscribe Black existential realities without sacrificing a sense of majesty. I’m driven by a desire to meaningfully provoke others’ curiosity, to paint without cynicism. I still believe in mastery; in the service of imagination it can exceed the limitations of circumstance.”
— Kerry James Marshall
Source: PBS, Greg Kucera Galley, Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Christies.com and Wikipedia
Naomi Sims: Entrepreneur; Writer; Fashion Model
Naomi Sims, one of the top Black businesswomen in the United States, began her career as the first Black supermodel. According to Essence magazine, “Never had a model so dark-skinned received so much exposure, praise, and professional prestige.” After just five years, however, Sims decided to give up modeling to start her own wig business. Sims continued to expand her business interests in the 1980s, launching her own perfume and a line of prestige cosmetics. As founder and CEO of the Naomi Sims Collection, she oversaw a multimillion-dollar range of wigs, skin care products, and cosmetics specifically designed for Black women.
Naomi Sims was born on March 30, 1949, in Oxford, Mississippi. Later, she moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she attended Westinghouse High School. Other than that, information about Sims’s childhood is contradictory. However, all sources agree that after graduating from Westinghouse, Sims moved to New York to live with her sister Betty, a flight attendant who later also became a model. Sims had won a small scholarship to the Fashion Institute of Technology, where she studied merchandising and textile design. At the same time, she earned another small scholarship to study psychology at New York University, where she took classes in the evenings. Despite the scholarships and her sister’s help, Sims soon realized that she needed a job, and a counselor at the Fashion Institute suggested that she try modeling.
At 5’10″, with dark skin, Sims had not been considered particularly attractive as a teenager. “Black wasn’t beautiful then,” she said in Black Enterprise. “The darker your skin, the less good-looking you were considered; and I was too tall, and too skinny.” In the wake of the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement, however, the idea that only light-skinned women were attractive was being called into question.
Still, when Sims approached modeling agencies in New York, she was told outright that there was no work for Black models. Alternatively, Sims told Mademoiselle that the agencies made “very insipid excuses–’too many of my type’–and there were no other Black women and certainly not anybody of my type!”
Undeterred, Sims tried a different approach. She contacted a well-known fashion photographer, persuading him to meet with her; to her surprise, he agreed. Immediately spotting Sims’s potential, the photographer sent her to meet his wife, a fashion editor at the New York Times. In 1967, after her very first modeling session, Sims found herself on the cover of the Times’; Sunday magazine.
It was a huge break, but when Sims returned to the modeling agencies, she found that nothing had changed; they still insisted there was no work for Black models. Finally, she approached former top model Wilhelmina Cooper, who was just starting her own agency. A born businesswoman, Sims made Cooper an offer she could not refuse: Sims would mail out copies of the Times layout to 100 different advertising agencies, along with Cooper’s phone number. If anyone was interested, Cooper had just earned a modeling commission; if not, she had wasted no time or energy on the project. To Cooper’s amazement, the response to the mailing was immediate and overwhelming, and a few days later, Sims was officially on her books.
Became First Black Supermodel
After that brief period of discouragement, Sims saw her modeling career take off at blinding speed. Within a week of joining Wilhelmina Cooper, she was hired for a national television commercial for AT&T. Later that year, she appeared on the cover of Life magazine, which ran an article about new Black models. In 1969 and 1970, she was voted top model of the year by International Mannequins. Just two years after beginning her modeling career, Sims had appeared in virtually every fashion magazine in the world.
While Sims’s skin color was newsworthy, her walk received just as much attention. According to the Kansas City Star, “Her walk became her hallmark. It wasn’t like the glide or bounce of many models. Her serpentine movements of the arms, torso, and legs were beautiful to watch and as subtly controlled as a dancer’s.”
“When she put on a garment, something just m-a-arvelous happened,” fashion designer Halston, one of the first to hire Sims, was quoted as saying in Black Enterprise. Even Cooper, who had been slow to see Sims’s potential, was quoted in Black Enterprise: “She could make any garment–even a sackcloth–look like sensational haute couture.”
Gave Up Modeling for Business
In 1973, Sims married Michael Alistair Findlay, a Scotsman who ran an art gallery in New York; the couple later had one son, Pip. The same year, Sims decided to give up modeling, though she was just 24 and potentially had a long career in front of her. “Modeling was never my ultimate goal,” she was quoted as saying in Black Business Leaders. “I started to model to supplement my income to go to college….but the idea of starting my own business had always appealed to me, and I was fortunate that my first career led to my second.”
Sims’s second career was a business selling wigs specifically designed for Black women. The idea came directly out of Sims’s struggle with her own hair while she was modeling, when she was under pressure to look different in every picture. “I was sort of driven to distraction in terms of how to vary my hairstyle,” she told Black Enterprise.
One easy solution would be to wear a wig, but Sims was dissatisfied with the wigs available at the time, which had smooth, straight fibers that looked nothing like Black hair. So she decided to start experimenting in her kitchen. “I got hold of a current best-selling fiber for white women, wet the fiber down, put it in my oven at a very low temperature, and baked it for maybe five or ten minutes,” she explained in Black Enterprise. The result was a curlier, coarser fiber–and a new business idea. “I thought it might be possible to market this type of product.”
After approaching several wig manufacturers, she finally inked a deal with Metropa Company, a small import-export firm that sold a line of wigs for Black women. The company agreed to put up some money, and make its research laboratories available to Sims. “Those were scary days in the beginning,” Sims was quoted as saying in Black Enterprise. “It had to be a fiber that wouldn’t get too frizzy, wouldn’t get too straight, and wouldn’t lose its curl.”
Developed New Wig Fiber
After experimenting with different techniques, the company developed a lightweight wig fiber that looked like straightened Black hair, and did not have to be set. The fiber was patented and trademarked under the name Presselle, and the first line of the Naomi Sims Collection went into production.
For the first three years, Sims designed all the wig styles herself. “Basically, we duplicated the styles that were popular–what Black women in the street were wearing, and combined that with my fashion sense,” Sims told Black Enterprise. She also wrote and designed the advertisements, and traveled around the country promoting her wigs.
Initially, store buyers were skeptical about the need for Sims’s product, not understanding the difference between Black hair and Caucasian hair. Customers could certainly tell the difference, however: in the first year, sales of Sims’s wigs reached $5 million. By 1979, when the Naomi Sims Collection was spun off into a separate division, it was generating the majority of Metropa’s sales.
Wrote Books for Black Women
During this time, Sims also launched a career as an author. Her first book, All About Health and Beauty for the Black Woman, was published in 1976. As well as beauty tips, the book included information on nutrition, disease prevention, common health problems, fashion, and etiquette. “I had originally planned to call this book The Beautiful Black Woman, but as my thinking and reading plunged me into all areas of our Black female ethic, I soon realized that this approach was too one-dimensional,” Sims wrote in the book’s preface. The book sold well, and three years later was in its tenth printing.
In 1979, Sims published her second book, How to Be a Top Model. Three years later, she published two more books: All About Hair Care for the Black Woman, and All About Success for the Black Woman. In All About Success, Sims was able to draw on her own experience as an entrepreneur, offering advice about landing a job, dealing with corporate politics, and juggling a career, marriage, and motherhood. In a review of the book for Black Enterprise, Phil W. Petrie wrote, “I am going to ignore the reference to gender in the title of this book and give it to my sons.”
Launched Second Company
Meanwhile, beginning in the early 1980s, Sims gradually expanded her business interests to include perfume, skin care products, and cosmetics for Black women. Her signature fragrance, Naomi, was launched in 1981. Four years later, she founded her own company, Naomi Sims Beauty Products Ltd.
In 1987, the company introduced a line of skin-care products, with Sims as the spokesmodel. “One of the things people notice about me is the quality of my skin,” Sims told Anne-Marie Shiro of the New York Times. “We decided I was the best person to advertise my products.” Black Enterprise’s Alfred Edmond Jr. concurred, “Her look–clean, simple, and elegant–conveys sophistication, class and power.” Edmond continued, “It’s the look the company is selling–and the public is buying.” Shortly afterward, Sims added cosmetics to the mix. By 1989, Naomi Sims Beauty Products was grossing $5 million, and its products were distributed not only across the United States, but also in Africa, the Caribbean, and Canada.
From the beginning, all of Sims’s products have been marketed as prestige items, at prestige prices. When Naomi Sims wigs were first introduced, they were considered expensive at $20 to $30; and when Naomi perfume was launched in 1981, it cost $100 an ounce. The pricing policy was deliberate, Sims told Black Enterprise: “When I started my business I insisted that my wigs not be put on sale… [because] it would cheapen the image. I know as a Black consumer that we will go out of our way to pursue the best products –no matter what the cost, we buy quality.”
By the late 1980s, however, Sims’s firm was being challenged by larger, white-owned firms, who wanted a share of the Black cosmetics market. In 2001, the competition for the dollars of Black women remained intense; nearly all the major cosmetics companies now offer products aimed at Black women. According to an article on the website women.com, “In the past, the global beauty market was called ‘ethnic’ and was catered to by Black-owned makeup companies like…Naomi Sims. Recent competition has sounded a wake-up call for these old brands.”
While Sims’s accomplishments as an entrepreneur are truly impressive, she has been criticized by some feminists, who accused her of making money from women’s fears about their own attractiveness. Sims brushed off these criticisms, however: “I am sure I have my share of Black female critics and enemies,” she was quoted as saying in Black Business Leaders. “It doesn’t matter. I adore women and I know I am a woman’s woman….I would be nowhere if it weren’t for Black women.”
Naomi Sims honored at Oprah’s Legends Ball.
Career
Fashion model, 1967-73; Naomi Sims Collection, founder and CEO, 1973-; author: All About Health and Beauty for the Black Woman, 1976; How to Be a Top Model, 1979; All About Hair Care for the Black Woman, 1982; All About Success for the Black Woman, 1982; Naomi Sims Beauty Products, founder and chairman, 1985-.
Awards
Model of the Year Award, 1969, 1970; Women of Achievement, Ladies Home Journal, 1970; New York City Board of Education Award, 1970; Key to Cleveland, 1971; Women of Achievement, American Cancer Society, 1972; International Best Dressed List, 1971-3, 1976, 1977; Modeling Hall of Fame, International Mannequins, 1977.
Works
Selected writings
- All About Health and Beauty for the Black Woman, 1976.
- How to Be a Top Model, 1979.
- All About Hair Care for the Black Woman, 1982.
- All About Success for the Black Woman, 1982.
Further Reading
Books
- African American Business Leaders, Greenwood Press, 1994.
- All About Health and Beauty for the Black Woman, by Naomi Sims, Doubleday, 1976.
Periodicals
- Black Enterprise, March 1989, p. 42; July 1979, p. 41.
- Fortune, Nov. 9, 1987, p. 162.
- Mademoiselle, August 1974, p. 296.
- New York Times, May 15, 1987, p. A20.
Sources: Fashion Illustration, Wikipedia and Flickr
