Visual Art

Bayete Ross Smith: An Interview with the Artist

02 Feb 2015
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  Bayete Ross Smith is a Harlem-based multi-media artist who explores constructions of identity and representations of African-American culture with his practice. Apogee Visual Arts Editor Legacy Russell spoke with Bayete on the occasion of his work being featured as the cover image in Apogee’s fourth issue.    Legacy Russell [LR]: Tell me about your background. Where did you begin your relationship with photography? Bayete Ross Smith [BRS]: I began photographing in high school. I took a black and white photography class and I just fell in love with the concept of re-creating and archiving my view of the world. It’s a typical beginning for many photographers prior to the digital SLR, I suppose. I continued photographing as a hobby throughout high school and into college. I never really thought of it as a career. Then when I was entering my junior year of college, when I was studying business administration, I realized becoming a corporate executive would be a miserable life for me, so I switched my area of study to photography and began studying photojournalism. I got my start as a newspaper photographer for the Knight Ridder Newspaper Corporation. I worked at the Tallahassee Democrat, the Philadelphia Inquirer, which...
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Fiction

Sam, by Alexandra Watson

23 Jan 2015
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  Sam by Alexandra Watson   He grows exhausted of her: the way she squeezes toothpaste from the top instead of rolling up the bottom, how she references literature in their fights to remind him of her education, the slight click in her jaw when she chews, the rusty taste of her mouth. Before they were minor things, now they are all she is. They’d met in the teacher break room at the high school where he’d subbed for years; she’d taken a spot in the English department a little under a year ago. He didn’t get called in today, so he sits watching the Twilight Zone marathon and drinking ice cold beer, occasionally lighting the same joint he rolled right after she left that morning. She gets home early that afternoon and finds him in the kitchen, sliding the last empty beer bottle into the twelve-pack box. She looks weary in a way he recognizes; a tiredness from too much noise and too much fighting, not enough windows and not enough textbooks. When she sees him, she grabs the back of his neck to pull him towards her mouth. He recoils, as if the kiss has sent a static...
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Nonfiction

Stagnant Blackness and the Modern Race Drama

17 Jan 2015
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  Literary Editor Chris Prioleau has an essay up on The Awl this week: It feels as if, where the modern race drama is concerned, we’re not as firmly central in our own stories as one might think. These stories are still coming from the same set of antiquated notions that wrote Hattie McDaniel’s speech for her, notions that dictate that a dramatic non-white narrative is only successful in so far as it speaks to the good-intentioned but ultimately reductive theme of racial progress, which in this case is a euphemism for proving one’s worth to the white population. Read the rest here.
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