Best Of African Fashion For Johannesburg

• 30 designers collections shown over 4 days,
• 2 day fashion seminar
• Africa Fashion Awards
• The launch of the African Fashion International Boutique.

 Johannesburg will be awash with style, elegance and beauty for four days in June and July when the world’s leading African Fashion designers from across the continent and Diaspora gather to showcase the finest contemporary African design at the second annual Africa Fashion Week. 

The exquisite collections of 33 designers will feature in 19 runway shows from 30 June – 3 July, before an influential audience of international buyers, media, World Cup guests, VIPs and celebrities.   

The significance of this fashion summit is critical for African Fashion International (AFI) chairperson Dr Precious Moloi-Motsepe “Africa Fashion Week (AFW) is potentially the most important platform for the African fashion industry, being perfectly positioned to promote African designers globally.” 

It is rare, in fact completely unique, to have all the leading voices in African Fashion in one place, at one time, in one country.  Those voices will give expression to Africa’s fashion future at a two-day seminar that runs alongside the runway shows; and that will examine ways of strengthening the burgeoning African Fashion industry, debating an African aesthetic and building a global network.  (Read More)

Sierra Leoneans Show Patriotism...Vote for Swadu

By Umaru Sitta Turay, New York, USA

Could Swadu be the next Miss Africa in USA 2010? Sierra Leoneans home and abroad are supposed to mobilize themselves and vote for Swadu. Swadu has taken the national pride of Sierra Leone (Green, White and Blue) to the highest level in show business. That is the reason Sierra Leoneans should mobilize themselves to vote for the only Sierra Leonean in the contest for now. Swadu is just one step away to make it happen and that step is largely dependent on the votes that are going to be cast by Sierra Leoneans themselves.

Swadu Natasha Beckley, a 22 year old Poet (with over 300 poems under her name) and a Senior at the University of Virginia's College at Wise majoring in foreign studies, is the current Miss Sierra Leone in Washington DC, 2009 and reigning Miss University of Virgina, Wise 2009. (Read More)

Can One Human Being Save The World?
Writer: Charlene Collins Haug

Can one human being save the world? A “Superman?” In his current exhibition at the Noyes Museum, Richmond Otolorin Garrick gives us a personal glimpse of the emotional toll of war-torn Sierra Leone. Compelling, large-scale figures spill off the canvas into the viewer's personal space. We are witnesses implicated in the action, caught-up in the terrible events. According to Mr. Garrick, he wants his paintings to “engage with the viewer so the viewer can have a dialogue with the work. You don't get the message immediately. You piece things together and then you begin to get the message.”

Like contemporary Impressionist paintings, the lush, impasto, textured works draw the viewer in for close inspection. In “Ambush,” boy soldiers are expressively painted in strong brush strokes that emote and pull the viewer's eye through the surface, past fleshy tones and a dark, shadowy, compositionally exciting backdrop. Figures emerge from the paint. As you step back they coalesce – boys holding guns, boredom and anxiety showing in their features. Through his paintings Garrick tells us about the personal cost of the war. He says “I use the canvas to put (record) my own burden, my own problems. My canvas is the only place where I can show my deep emotion.”

In “The Rescue,” a figure is being dragged by his arms, his foreshortened hand extends into the viewer's plane. The scumbled, bloody lip drips red onto a blue and white striped shirt whose brush strokes move like a roller coaster, describing the broken body and frantic energy of dragging the heavy, wounded man. In “Resistance,” a larger than life figure lays supine, hands drawn-up close to the face and clenched in the rigor mortis of terror. An eerie light bathes the face, hands, and chest; the rest of the figure dissolves into the canvas and drops off our frame of view. We look down on the figure in a perpetrator or bystander's perspective. Raw and powerful emotion engages the viewer. In a change of pace, Mr. Garrick has eight ball point pen drawings, an homage to civil rights leaders and prominent African Americans.

My favorite is the one of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The viewing space is personal as one leans in for a closer look at the fine details of these beautifully rendered works. Dr. King has a twinkle in his eye. The drawing is exuberant and joyful. Garricks' work is powerful and moving, a first person account of the tragedies of war. The drawings, as you enter the gallery, seem to point generally toward resolutions and leadership and forces of light and hope; men and women who are superheroes. Mr. Garrick's work is on display at the Noyes Museum until April 10, 2008 in an exhibition entitled, Portraits: Defining the Foundation for Humanity and Expressions of Oppression: A Metaphor for Thinking about the Unthinkable.

Miss Pennsylvania USA Contestant Erica Workman

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