“Josephine Baker (June 3, 1906 – April 12, 1975) was an American-born French dancer, singer, and actress. Nicknamed the “Bronze Venus”, the “Black Pearl”, and even the “Créole Goddess” in anglophone nations.

Baker was the first African American female to star in a major motion picture and to integrate an American concert hall, and to become a world-famous entertainer. She is also noted for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States (she was offered the unofficial leadership of the movement by Coretta Scott King in 1968 following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, but turned it down), for assisting the French Resistance during World War II and for being the first American-born woman to receive the French military honor, the Croix de guerre”.

Photo: American entertainer Josephine Baker in costume for her famous “banana dance”. Baker was an overnight sensation when she arrived in Paris in the mid-1920s. (Photo by Walery/Getty Images)

“Yucca is a genus of perennial shrubs and trees in the agave family, Agavaceae. Its 40-50 species are notable for their rosettes of evergreen, tough, sword-shaped leaves and large terminal panicles of white or whitish flowers. They are native to the hot and dry (arid) parts of North America, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. Early reports of the species were confused with the cassava (Manihot esculenta). Consequently, Linnaeus mistakenly derived the generic name from the Carib word for the latter, yuca. It is also colloquially known in the midwest United States as “Ghosts in the graveyard”, as it is commonly found growing in rural graveyards and when in bloom the flowers appear as an apparition floating.” – Wikipedia

Photo: A yucca standing among flowers bursts forth a very large stalk of flowers as a heavy wildflower bloom on June 21, 2005 in the Angeles National Forest northwest of La Canada, California. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

“Lorenzo Quinn (born May 7, 1966) is an Italian artist and sculptor and the fifth son of the actor Anthony Quinn. By the age of 21 he gained the respect of the New York art community when he was commissioned to make an art work for the United Nations of which a stamp was later made. Quinn was later selected to head the Absolut Vodka ad campaign for which only top international artists are chosen”. – Wikipedia

Photo: Lorenzo Quinn's Vroom Vroom sculpture is installed in its new setting on Park Lane on January 23, 2011 in London, England. The four-metre high sculpture, consists of a vintage Fiat 500, the first car that the sculptor ever bought, grasped by an oversized aluminium child's hand modelled from Quinn's son. The exhibition has previously been displayed in Valencia and Abu Dhabi. (Photo by Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images for Halcyon Gallery)

Despite the high winds and fright temperatures, about 1/2 dozen brave members of the Coney Island Polar Bear Club took a dip in the Atlantic Ocean at March 14, 2017, just of Stillwell avenue in Coney Island beach in Brooklyn NYC. (Photo by Paul Martinka)

A Yemeni soldier, pictured through a vehicle's windscreen, which was damaged by a bullet, gestures out of the window, in Marib, Yemen October 15, 2015. Marib is a city that is heavily armed even by the standards of Yemen, where the ready availability of weapons helped start civil war and is now preventing anyone coming out on top. Yemenis often say there are three guns for every person, a boast that has become an urgent concern in a country where the United Nations says the humanitarian situation is "critical". (Photo by Angus McDowall/Reuters)

In his series “Ballerinas of Cairo”, photographer Mohamed Taher documents Egyptian dancers making the city streets their stage – pirouetting, leaping and posing their way through their country’s sprawling capital. The photos are, at first glance, stunning snapshots of a city’s vibrant culture in motion. (Photo by Mohamed Taher/Ballerinas of Cairo)

In this Tuesday, July 29, 2014, photo, Syrian refugee Samah, 5, poses for a picture at Zaatari refugee camp, near the Syrian border, in Mafraq, Jordan. More than 2.8 million Syrian children inside and outside the country – nearly half the school-aged population – cannot get an education because of the devastation from the civil war, according to the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF. That number is likely higher, as UNICEF can't count the children whose parents didn't register with the United Nations refugee agency. (Photo by Muhammed Muheisen/AP Photo)

Indigenous dancers participate in a traditional healing ceremony for the mother earth at El Salvador del Mundo Square in San Salvador, December 10, 2014. Salvadorean indigenous organizations participated in a ceremony to ask for solutions to stop climate change and respect planet earth as the U.N. Climate Change Conference COP 20 is bring held in Peru. The two-week long United Nations climate summit opened on December 1 in Lima, with experts and analysts from around the world gathering to discuss melting glaciers and extreme weather patterns. (Photo by Jose Cabezas/Reuters)