Latest news with #Merriweather
Black America Web
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Black America Web
Inside Our ‘Women To Know: Modern Mavericks' Panel With LaToya Hobbs, Murjoni Merriweather, And Jewel Ham
HelloBeautiful x MadameNoire's 2025 Women To Know event, held in New York City, brought together the Black women artists featured on this year's list: LaToya Hobbs, Murjoni Merriweather, and Jewel Ham. In a panel moderated by MadameNoire managing editor, Danica Daniel, the women spoke in-depth about their work as Black women artists, what inspires their art, what fuels their creativity, occupying space within the art world, and more. The event was a moment to celebrate these talented Black women creating art on their own terms and using their work as a vehicle to highlight their respective communities who act as their muses, while also inspiring the next generation of fearless creatives. Source: Andre 'DreVinci' Jones / Andre 'DreVinci' Jones When asked by Daniel what fuels their creativity and how they define themselves as an artist, Merriweather and Hobbs responded with the common theme of community. 'The thing that fuels my creativity is my own self-love,' Merriweather began. 'I feel like when I started I was making it for us, and then eventually I started wanting to make more work that represented my own healing journey. I learned a lot more about myself through creating new work. My community and the people I surround myself with [has also been fuel] it's been like Red Bull to my heart.' Hobbs added her own perspective, stating, 'I'm inspired by my life in general. My own life experiences. I really try to channel and champion the stories of people in my community.' '[I'm] very much inspired by what I like to call everyday heroes because they have extraordinary stories, extraordinary lives. I think there's so much power in the everyday and so many people have phenomenal stories that maybe just don't have like a million followers,' she said. Source: JD Barnes / for HelloBeautiful x MadameNoire Fellow artist Ham also let attendees in on she chooses which stories to tell through her art. 'I always want to stick with the story that feels like home to me,' she said. 'That feels like something that I've experienced or people in my community that are close to me, we've shared an experience.' 'A lot of my sketches and things, they start with a lot of writing, a lot of just what I want the viewer to experience when they're looking at the works. It feels comfortable to me and that's where I'm able to use my voice the most,' Ham added. Source: Women To Know Covers | iOne Editorial | 2025-04-23 / Ione Digital – cs To close out the insightful event and conversation, the ladies were asked the advice they would give their younger selves. 'I would tell my younger self not to be concerned about what people think about you because that's something that I used to do. I used to dim myself. Don't try to dim your light to make other people feel comfortable,' Hobbs shared. Merriweather added that she would tell her younger self to 'make the work that I wanna make, do what I wanna do…find my tribe and people who love me for who I am.' Source: Women To Know Covers | iOne Editorial | 2025-04-23 / Ione Digital – cs 'Keep at it baby! If you don't wanna go, you don't gotta go,' Ham exclaimed. We thank these incredible women for sharing their art with us and can't wait to see what they do next. SEE ALSO Inside Our 'Women To Know: Modern Mavericks' Panel With LaToya Hobbs, Murjoni Merriweather, And Jewel Ham was originally published on
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Former Notre Dame wide receiver changes schools again
Former Notre Dame wide receiver Tobias Merriweather has left Cal and will sign with Utah. Merriweather has 26 career catches for 450 yards and four touchdowns with Cal and Notre Dame. He spent two seasons with the Fighting Irish. Advertisement The junior from Camas, Washington, will now be a member of the Utes. Merriweather's most productive season at Notre Dame was 2023, when he had 14 catches for 284 yards, two touchdowns, and a long of 75 yards. He had 20.3 yards per catch that year. Contact/Follow us @IrishWireND on X (Formerly Twitter), and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Notre Dame news, notes, and opinions. Follow Tim on X: @tehealey This article originally appeared on Fighting Irish Wire: Former Notre Dame wide receiver Tobias Merriweather settles on Utah
USA Today
05-05-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
Former Notre Dame wide receiver changes schools again
Former Notre Dame wide receiver changes schools again Former Fighting Irish wide receiver Tobias Merriweather heads to Utah from Cal Former Notre Dame wide receiver Tobias Merriweather has left Cal and will sign with Utah. Merriweather has 26 career catches for 450 yards and four touchdowns with Cal and Notre Dame. He spent two seasons with the Fighting Irish. The junior from Camas, Washington, will now be a member of the Utes. Merriweather's most productive season at Notre Dame was 2023, when he had 14 catches for 284 yards, two touchdowns, and a long of 75 yards. He had 20.3 yards per catch that year. Contact/Follow us @IrishWireND on X (Formerly Twitter), and like our page on Facebook to follow ongoing coverage of Notre Dame news, notes, and opinions. Follow Tim on X: @tehealey
Black America Web
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Black America Web
Murjoni Merriweather's Clay Sculptures Shape Black Style Into Renaissance Era Art
JD Barnes MURJONI MERRIWEATHER Artist Murjoni Merriweather is gifted with a rare ability: the potter's touch. With just dirt and water in her hands, she is able to form life-like images of the Black men, women, and children we see in our homes and on our street corners every day. Based in Maryland, the sculptor works delicately with clay to transform the formless faces of her imagination into inspiring, material creations. As she basks in her studio filled with shelved-rows of ceramic Black heads, it's clear Merriweather isn't just creating art: she's fashioning a spiritual army. 'I really see my sculptures as guardians. I see them as protectors,' Merriweather told HelloBeautiful . 'I am making my safe space, literally, and I'm hoping that my sculptures also give a safe space to other people.' Merriweather said she picked up clay work in the eighth grade after dabbling in different art forms (like graphic design and photography) throughout her childhood. She said after taking her first clay class, she fell in love with the feeling of cool, mushy, wet, mud between her fingers. 'I love to get dirty in my work,' she said. 'I'm a tangible person. I like to touch textures. And I've always been that way since I was a kid.' By the time she got to high school, Merriweather said she began to peruse the exhibition halls of museums in search of inspiration, but all she saw staring back at her were white, alabaster stone faces. 'A lot of sculptures in museums didn't look like me. And I didn't really like that,' she said. 'So, I decided to make work that looked like my family.' Murjoni Merriweather: Shapeshifter At first, her commitment to turning Black life into sculptured art wasn't well received by her peers. Merriweather said as a student at a PWI, there weren't many people who looked like her in the first place; so she decided to create the tribe she wanted around her. That mission inspired her iconic Grillz series, which features Black contorted faces decked out in gold-toothed smiles and skinny cuban-link chains. At first, the art was negatively critiqued by her classmates (to this day, some spectators call her work scary ) so she decided to make even more of them. A self-described 'hard-headed' person (about as hard as her dried-clay pieces), Merriweather said the art of proving others wrong is just as thrilling as making the art itself. 'I kept making them, and I kept making them, and I started making them in different ways, and then people started to enjoy it,' she told HelloBeautiful. Merriweather's dedication paid off. Her work went on to be exhibited in Sweden (where she sold all three of her sculptures) and Grillz became the featured work on display at the Walters Museum in Baltimore. The choice to exhibit her work in the renaissance section of the museum was a bold and disruptive decision made by a white curator, she said. At the time, there was only one Black sculpture on display, and it was one of a Black slave. The curator asked if she could fill the room with Merriweather's grill sculptures instead as a visible challenge to visitors' narrow perceptions of renaissance art. 'I was like, love that. Let's do it,' Merriweather said, 'And I got so many photos from teachers [and] parents with their children next to this big grill sculpture. They're like, 'That looks like my uncle. That looks like my dad.' The familiarity is such a beautiful thing to witness,' she said. The community's passionate response to Merriweather's work underscores her mission: to advocate for Black visibility at all costs, especially in an era where educational systems and governments are literally trying to wipe Black lives from history. Even how the pieces are shown is by design: they are required to be displayed at eye-level or higher, so exhibit visitors are never afforded the opportunity to look down on the image of a Black person. Merriweather said she often gets told her work is 'unsettling,' which she says tells her more about the viewer than it does about the art. 'I make work about Blackness and Black culture. So then my next question leads me to, what is your perception of Black culture?' she said. Every piece of pottery Merriweather produces is an attempt to publicly normalize Blackness. She said recently, she's been intentional about directing her outward creative process inward for her own nourishment, too. One of her exhibits, Seed , which was on display fall of 2024 at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, was created as an ode to her own personal evolution. The piece features unnaturally elongated, stone heads that appear to grow like blooms from various soil mounds on the floor. ' Seed was about my own healing, my own growth, how to ground myself,' she said. Creating Seed allowed Merriweather to work through her own impatience, as she reflected on the slow, tiny seed to green sprout germination system of nature. In a time where urgency and microwave-paced progress rules as culture's king, Merriweather urges artists to resist the impulse to get rich or famous fast. Instead, she believes the art of becoming is a miracle itself. 'We have to learn to slow down and be patient, and know that things are coming in their time. And that's what I was literally just talking about in Seed ,' she said, 'Learning about patience and growing my own seed. I can't rush it.' More Women To Know: Modern Mavericks
USA Today
28-04-2025
- Sport
- USA Today
Former Notre Dame wide receiver enters the portal for the second time
Former Notre Dame wide receiver enters the portal for the second time It was a bit odd that Tobias Merriweather wanted to transfer from Notre Dame, after his redshirt freshman season where he caught 14 passes for 284 yards and 2 scores, he opted to leave the program. The Washington native would land a California, and proceeded to see him not getting nearly the same opportunities with the Bears as he did with the Irish. Merriweather caught 11 passes for 125 yards and a touchdown this past fall, but he wasn't happy. On Monday, the 6-foot, 5-inch and 195-pound wide receiver entered the transfer portal once again, as he will eventually be on his third school in three years. While the grass may seem greener on the other side, Merriweather is a precautionary tale that leaving a program that fits your needs isn't always a good choice. We still wish him the best at his next school, as we always like to see the majority of former Notre Dame players excelling wherever they land.
