Clifford Thompson

May 29, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Robert Rubsam |Clifford Thompson |Xiao Situ |Gareth Dale

Years ago, when I was on the teaching staff of a museum, I led a group of schoolchildren to view an installation of sculptures made by the American ceramic artist Toshiko Takaezu (1922–2011). The assemblage included several multicolored orbs, each about two feet high, positioned a few inches apart from each other on the floor. One child exclaimed that the sculptures were like “giant bath bombs,” the kind that fizz and dissolve when you drop them in water.

Apr 24, 2024 | commonwealmagazine.org | Xiao Situ |Robert Rubsam |Clifford Thompson |Gareth Dale

“For generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden.” So wrote Alain Locke in the anthology The New Negro (1925), often considered the founding document of the Harlem Renaissance, the artistic movement of which Locke is generally recognized as...

Sep 27, 2023 | commonwealmagazine.org | Megan Buskey |Joseph Sorrentino |Elena Curti |Clifford Thompson

For a baker’s dozen of years beginning in the late 1990s, I was the editor of a monthly reference journal called Current Biography. Our articles on accomplished living people relied heavily on secondary sources; in the course of writing and editing each 2,500-word biography of an actor, businessperson, writer, athlete, scientist, politician, musician, or what have you, my staff and I combed through dozens of published reviews, interviews, and profiles.