These pieces of mine appeared on The Root and in Bidoun Magazine recently. First, the Root:

Notes on a Negress

In the 16 years since her 1994 debut, 38-year-old Kara Walker has arguably become the best known and most feted African American visual artist of her era. "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love," her current retrospective now on view at Los Angeles' Hammer Museum, is a high-profile honor for an artist so young. Walker's cut-paper silhouettes -- the antic, bruising, racial fever-dream her sharp black shapes and blobs depict -- are already an unmistakable visual signature. [more]

Then, the Bidoun Objects Issue:

The Cleaver Sleeve

In 1975, Eldridge Cleaver, having tried his hand at petty crime, insurrectionary sexual assault (so-called), essay writing, public relations, civil rights activism, US presidential politics, and paramilitary training, decided to become a fashion designer.. The menswear line he produced while on the run in Cuba, Algeria, and France (his line was waggishly called Eldridge de Paris) has faded nearly completely from memory, with the exception of one novel sartorial affectation: the Cleaver Sleeve.

Essentially a sock-like codpiece affixed to tight-fitting, flat-front slacks, the Cleaver Sleeve put the male member on permanent display, abolishing the “crime of indecent exposure” in favor of its vaguely worded opposite, “decent exposure.” He explained the concept to an interviewer: “I’ve always been keen about sex. I like it. So you know the whole thing about the Kama Sutra—there’s something to learn there, right?” He was a “tantric guru” now, he said, “a label I bestowed upon myself, because I know who I am. I’ve mastered it. That’s why I made these pants.”

And also:

The Decline of Middle Eastern Civilization

Heavy Metal in Baghdad, a twitchy, hand-held documentary that jets in and out of the lives of some Iraqi metal-heads, signals its intentions up front in the encompassing breadth of its title. The naming is a bit of a fake-out, as “Video of Some Emblematically Unlucky and Tense Dudes in a War Zone” would have been a more accurate name for the actual material. Unlike, say, Jeff Krulik and John Heyn’s 1986 Heavy Metal Parking Lot, which discovered an entire emotional ecology outside a Judas Priest stadium show, or, more aptly, Penelope Spheeris’ iconic 1981 portrait of the LA punk scene, The Decline of Western Civilization, Heavy Metal in Baghdad turns out to have little to do with its purported subject. It is not really about Iraq or metal or the War or even Acrassicauda, the band it sets out to document. Instead, Heavy Metal in Baghdad is an almost universalist gloss on what it’s like to be trapped, male, and screwed while possessing a skill that may or may not allow you to play your way to safety. As such it has most in common with basketball tragedy Hoop Dreams or even Roman Polanski’s WWII drama The Pianist.

Neither one of the Bidoun pieces is online, so you'll have to read them the old fashioned way.