LaVerne Wells-Bowie recently retired as a senior architecture professor at Florida A&M University, where she served for 30 years. Her professional involvement in architecture unfolded through a career in textile design. How cultural lifeways are intrinsically woven by the spaces people create, occupy and celebrate heavily informs her creative interests.
LaVerne has been the recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts Awards, as well as Fulbright and McKnight Fellowships. Her research has been published internationally and her works of art have been exhibited in local and national galleries.
For COVID-19 PAGES, LaVerne contributed a mixed media “diptych” comprised of “Cameo for ‘A Poor Man’s Blues’ (Bessie Smith)” and “Cameo for a Crown Jewel.” Read what she shared about her work:
“The fabric assemblages included in this COVID-19 virtual exhibit are from a series of cameos that engage the impacts, both of and on, Black women in these times. While intended to address the present cultural and political milieu, these works are statements explained as that which cannot separate historic circumstances from those we now encounter in this age of Covid.
“Two of the cameos feature images of Bessie Smith. The blues singer rose to notoriety in the Golden Age of Jazz, an offshoot of the Harlem Renaissance. Blues has been documented by some scholars as the first Black cultural art production to be accepted in the greater American mainstream, and Bessie Smith was dubbed its ‘Empress.’
“The Cameo series works are intended to provoke the question, ‘In what ways will we, as Black women now being ‘featured’ on many new fronts, be interpreted in the future.”
To visit COVID-19 PAGES: The Influence & Inspiration of Women, click on the following link: https://wellsinternationalfoundation.org/covid-19-pages-exhibit/
