The New Yorker's COVER STORY: KADIR NELSON’S “A DAY AT THE BEACH”

“I grew up close to the shore, and I have always loved spending time at the beach,” the Los Angeles-based artist Kadir Nelson says of his cover for this week’s issue. “When I was young it meant time with my dad, and now that I’m a father myself I relish the long summer days spent with my own children.”  
Do check out some of his other New Yorker covers: 

Kadir Nelson’s painting for the cover of this issue which celebrates the Schomburg Research Center, in Harlem. He says he wanted to create “a stylistic montage as an homage to the great Harlem Renaissance painters: Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Norman Lewis, Jacob Lawrence, Elizabeth Catlett, Archibald Motley, and Palmer Hayden.” Also on Nelson’s mind were artists and performers like the Nicholas Brothers, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington; the activist Malcolm X; and writers such as James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston.

“I wanted to capture the memory of Hurricane Katrina and its aftereffects—the spirit of New Orleans, its resilience, its culture,” Kadir Nelson says of his cover for this issue, which coincides with the tenth anniversary of Katrina. “And one of the first images that came to mind was a kid playing music, an image somber and hopeful at the same time.”

*Source- The New Yorker