Game
of Thrones released its new 10-second teaser for season 5, featuring
Arya Stark, who is told she has a "darkness" in her -- watch the clip
here!Credit: Helen Sloan/HBO
Arya ready?! Game of Thrones' official Twitter handle
tweeted out a 10-second teaser for season five of the smash fantasy
series, and it looks like Arya Stark has gone rogue.
"I see a darkness in you," high priestess Melisandre (Carice van Houten) says to Arya (Maisie Williams)
in the short clip. Meanwhile, the headstrong orphan of the late Ned and
Catelyn Stark is seen experiencing flashbacks which include her holding
the iron coin that leads to Jaqen H'ghar, stabbing a man, fleeing
through the woods, and reaching a set of mysterious doors.
As witnessed in the final scene of season four, Arya used the coin to
set sail for Braavos as the show's theme song played in the background.
In addition to the teaser's release on Tuesday, Game of Thrones producers also directed fans to a new website called ThreeEyedRaven.com, luring subscribers with "visions of the future."
The three-eyed raven has remained an ominous symbol from seasons one
to four, with Bran Stark experiencing visions with the creature in his
dreams.
While fans are eagerly anticipating the return of the sixth season of Thrones, it was reported last month that HBO has renegotiated the contracts of actors for a possible seventh season.
16 year old Malia and 13 year old Sasha
Obama looked all grown and beautiful as they stood next to their father,
President Barrack Obama, as he
pardoned the National Thanksgiving Turkey at the White House yesterday
November 26th.
The nominees for the 2014 American Music Awards include Iggy Azalea, Pharrell Williams, and Katy PerryCredit: Michael Tran/FilmMagic; Paul Bergen/Redferns via Getty Images; Matt Kent/WireImage
She's so fancy! The 2014 American Music Award nominations were revealed on Monday, Oct. 13, and — no surprise — Iggy Azalea
tops the list. The "Fancy" rapper is up for awards in six different
categories, including Artist of the Year, Single of the Year, and
Favorite Female Pop/Rock Artist.
Also in the running for Artist of the Year are superstars Katy Perry and Pharrell Williams, who earned five nominations each, and singer Lorde, who earned four nominations. Other top nominees include Beyonce, Luke Bryan, One Direction, and Sam Smith.
The American Music Awards are voted on by fans, and will be announced
during the live show on Sunday, Nov. 23, on ABC. You can see the
complete list of nominees below:
ARTIST OF THE YEAR Iggy Azalea Beyonce Luke Bryan Eminem Imagine Dragons John Legend Lorde One Direction Katy Perry Pharrell Williams
NEW ARTIST OF THE YEAR PRESENTED BY KOHL'S 5 Seconds of Summer Iggy Azalea Bastille Sam Smith Meghan Trainor
SINGLE OF THE YEAR Iggy Azalea Featuring Charli XCX "Fancy" John Legend "All of Me" MAGIC! "Rude" Katy Perry Featuring Juicy J "Dark Horse" Pharrell Williams "Happy"
FAVORITE MALE ARTIST – POP/ROCK John Legend Sam Smith Pharrell Williams
FAVORITE FEMALE ARTIST – POP/ROCK Iggy Azalea Lorde Katy Perry
FAVORITE BAND, DUO OR GROUP – POP/ROCK Imagine Dragons One Direction OneRepublic
FAVORITE ALBUM – POP/ROCK Lorde "Pure Heroine" One Direction "Midnight Memories" Katy Perry "Prism"
FAVORITE MALE ARTIST – COUNTRY Jason Aldean Luke Bryan Blake Shelton
FAVORITE FEMALE ARTIST – COUNTRY Miranda Lambert Kacey Musgraves Carrie Underwood
FAVORITE BAND, DUO OR GROUP - COUNTRY Eli Young Band Florida Georgia Line Lady Antebellum
FAVORITE ALBUM - COUNTRY Garth Brooks "Blame It On My Roots: Five Decades of Influences" Eric Church "The Outsiders" Brantley Gilbert "Just As I Am"
FAVORITE ARTIST – RAP/HIP-HOP Iggy Azalea Drake Eminem
FAVORITE ALBUM – RAP/HIP-HOP Iggy Azalea "The New Classic" Drake "Nothing Was The Same" Eminem "The Marshall Mathers LP 2"
FAVORITE MALE ARTIST – SOUL/R&B Chris Brown John Legend Pharrell Williams
FAVORITE FEMALE ARTIST – SOUL/R&B Jhene Aiko Beyonce Mary J. Blige
FAVORITE ALBUM – SOUL/R&B Beyonce "Beyonce" John Legend "Love in the Future" Pharrell Williams "G I R L"
FAVORITE ARTIST - ALTERNATIVE ROCK Bastille Imagine Dragons Lorde
FAVORITE ARTIST - ADULT CONTEMPORARY Sara Bareilles OneRepublic Katy Perry
FAVORITE ARTIST - LATIN Marc Anthony Enrique Iglesias Romeo Santos
FAVORITE ARTIST - CONTEMPORARY INSPIRATIONAL Casting Crowns Hillsong United Newsboys
FAVORITE ARTIST - ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC (EDM) Avicii Calvin Harris Zedd
TOP SOUNDTRACK Frozen The Fault in Our Stars Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix, Vol. 1
Jennifer Aniston had to gain weight for her movie role in Cake and more top stories from Nov. 20
Credit: Mike Coppola/Getty Images
Jennifer Aniston had to gain weight and stopped working out for two months for her Cake movie role. Plus, The View panelists Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie O'Donnell, Rosie Perez, and Nicolle Wallace got super heated while talking about the alleged rape scandal surrounding Bill Cosby. Check out the rest of Us Weekly's top stories from Thursday, Nov. 20, in the roundup below!
For centuries black people appeared in art as slaves or exotic novelties – and the painter Kerry James Marshall wants to challenge these racist ideas. He talks to Alastair Sooke
“When I go to the movies, I’m expected to identify with all of the characters, and most of them are white,” says the African-American artist Kerry James Marshall, sitting on the top floor of David Zwirner’s immaculate gallery in a Mayfair townhouse in London, where his new exhibition of paintings Look See has just opened. “But when you put a black character in there, somehow the white audience isn’t expected to identify with them. That’s a problem.”
He smiles, before continuing: “If you walk into any magazine store, I guarantee that nine out of 10 covers will feature white, blonde, blue-eyed, slim women because that’s still the ideal of beauty. When a black or Asian figure shows up in a fashion magazine, she’s the exception, not the rule. So what does that mean when we talk about equality? To me, equality means that I would be as likely to see black figures as anybody else.”
Kerry James Marshall in 2014 (Felix Clay. All rights reserved/Courtesy David Zwirner, London)
Now 59, Marshall may have little sway in the world of moviemaking or the fashion industry, but he is doing his damnedest to ensure equality for black people in contemporary art. It is more than three decades since he painted Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (1980), a caustic, subversive work in which the whites of a schematic black man’s eyes, as well as his bright teeth and shirt, float against a dark background. “That grin referred to a joke people used to tell about black people,” he says. “That they are so dark you couldn’t see them at night unless they were smiling.”
Since then, he has earned acclaim for placing black figures centre-stage within his complex, beautiful paintings – and his new exhibition continues this campaign. From the victorious beauty queen and the happy couple enjoying cocktails in a nightclub, to the models in an artist’s studio and the woman holding up a pink towel against her chest, every figure in the show is black.
Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Studio), 2014 (All rights reserved/Courtesy David Zwirner, London)
Not only that, but their skin tone is strikingly uniform: ebony-dark, with an attractive, satiny sheen. “The blackness of my figures is supposed to be unequivocal, absolute and unmediated,” Marshall explains. “They are a response to the tendency in the culture to privilege lightness. The lighter the skin, the more acceptable you are. The darker the skin, the more marginalised you become. I want to demonstrate that you can produce beauty in the context of a figure that has that kind of velvety blackness. It can be done.”
It feels sad to write this in 2014, but seeing black people represented in paintings in this fashion remains unusual. In part this is the legacy of the way that they were traditionally presented within art history.
Western artists often cast a black figure as one of the magi when painting the stock scene of the Adoration of the Kings (Jan Gossaert’s Renaissance altarpiece on this theme in the National Gallery in London is a good example). Other than that, though, black people usually appear in Western art as peripheral servants: the Moorish page to the left of Van Dyck’s 1634 portrait of Princess Henrietta of Lorraine or the woman bearing flowers in the background of Manet’s famous nude Olympia (1863) are both typical of this trend. “Those are the two primary forms of representation,” says Marshall, “although you might also see images of black people in the process of being conquered.”
Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863
Marshall, who was born in Birmingham, Alabama and grew up in the South Central area of Los Angeles, first became aware of the invisibility of black people within what he calls “the visual field” not by visiting museums but by reading comic books. “There were no black superheroes,” he recalls. “When they did introduce the Black Panther in Fantastic Four [in 1966], I became acutely aware that the black superhero was a strange phenomenon – an exception to the rule. Then I started noticing the same thing everywhere else. Black figures were never the central subjects in art-history books.”
There is no rancour in Marshall’s voice when he says this: rather, it is obvious that he loves art history and hopes to emulate the Old Masters, not raze them to the ground. But he does lament the fact that black artists still have to negotiate a predominantly white art world.
Figuring it out
Of course, in recent decades, many black artists have enjoyed enormous success, from Jean-Michel Basquiat in the ‘80s to Kara Walker, Yinka Shonibare, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Steve McQueen today. But Marshall believes that there is still much work to be done.
“For black people,” he says, “everything we do has to be ratified and endorsed by a power structure that is white. And that reinforces a kind of racial hierarchy where whiteness is the privileged position to be in, and ethnicity is problematic. But if you are always standing on the sideline as witness to other people achieving great things, then ultimately that has a damaging psychological effect because it undermines your sense of self-worth.”
Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Pink Towel), 2014 (All rights reserved/Courtesy David Zwirner, London)
This is why Marshall is so keen to thrust black figures into the limelight in his art. “The reason why I do figurative work is because I think the presence of those figures is really important,” he says. “What is of value in the work I have done is that I am bringing with me an image that a lot of other people are afraid to bring into the mainstream. Eventually, I want the presence of black figures in the art-history books to be commonplace.” Slowly but surely, he is rewriting art history, one picture at a time.
