Today is James Baldwin's birthday

He was born in Harlem in 1924, became an accomplished writer in his twenties, moved to France and got involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank, achieved massive success in his thirties with Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni's Room, returned to the United States and became a social and political activist. Aside from novels, Baldwin wrote tons of essays, plays, and poetry during his lifetime. He died from Esophageal cancer in 1987 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence and was buried in New York.

To commemorate Baldwin's birthday, here's I Heard It Through the Grapevine, a free-form, feature-length documentary produced in 1982. The film, made by Dick Fontaine and Pat Hartley, follows the writer as he revisits the settings of civil rights struggles of the 1960s in the Deep South and reexamines the movement's ideals twenty years later.

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How sculptor Ptolemy Elrington turns old hubcaps into works of art

One British artist has found treasure in the junk that some people throw away and, using his creativity and resourcefulness, turns it into metal masterpieces. Ptolemy Elrington, who is currently based in Brighton, England, takes abandoned hubcaps and repurposes them into spectacular animal sculptures using hand tools and wire. Ptolemy specializes in wheel trims, but any piece of discarded metal scrap is a potential art masterpiece in his eyes. His creations can take anything from a single day to three months, such as the ten-meter long dragon he built from 200 hubcaps, which sold for £3,000. Check out the video, embedded below, and his website for more. [h/t: FREEYORK ]

The Adorable Sculptures of Yen Yen Lo

These images are from a series of wall sculptures created by Yen Yen Lo . Here you can see her intricately textured ceramic pieces, looking downright adorable. Yen Yen Lo's eye for the unique and whimsical is delightful. Apparently they are not intended for kids under 16. Fifteen-year-olds cannot be trusted with fragile stuff. Get them a Funko Pop instead.

A Look at Karl Arnaiz's "Duality"

It 's me, not the artist. Karl Arnaiz's "Duality" (currently on view at Eskinita Art Gallery ) is an invitation to ponder the complexities of life and appreciate the balance that exists even in differences. This 36 x 27-inch piece in charcoal and watercolor isn't just art that looks pretty on a wall. It's art that makes you stop, think, and maybe even re-evaluate how you see the world. Karl Arnaiz paints a meditation on death and its contrasting yet inevitable connection with life. In Duality, he explores the darker corners of the human experience. There is a certain sense of psychological imprisonment that permeates his work, as he paints a woman confined in a room with a disconnected skull floating against the wall. It shows how powerless humans are in the face of mortality and how the imminent passage of time from the woman’s face to the skull is simply nothing but a straight line, a blank, negative space on the wall, showing how nothing can obstruct death...

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