Art for Sale Page 2

By: ROGER CATLIN

NEW HAVEN — — Before Black History Month disappears next week, it’s worth noting a major show on the subject of African American identity that opened last week at the Yale University Art Gallery.

The 54 pieces in “Embodied: Black Identities in American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery” were chosen from the Yale collection by students from New Haven and from the University of Maryland, College Park, where the exhibit showed at the David C. Driskell Center last fall.

Organized around three large pieces, its centerpiece is Kerry James Marshall’s untitled 2009 acrylic of an African painter looking defiantly out from her work between the impressionist daubs of paint on a palette and a paint-by-number work behind her. From the no-nonsense gaze from the artist to the abstractions of her blouse, all manner of artistic possibility seem reflected.

That’s the case with the works near it, from a collage by Romare Howard Bearden to the geometric abstraction of Felrath Hines to the explosive color field expressionism of Sam Gilliam.

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by: Gary Younge

When Reverend Andre Reynolds, minister of music at the 16th Street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, looks out to the congregation for inspiration, he occasionally lifts his eyes over the pews, beyond the balcony and sets his gaze on the Wales window.

“I think it’s wonderful that people halfway around the world should choose to affiliate with both the accomplishments and the disappointments of African Americans,” he says. “It just reminds us that the world is smaller than we think, and that there are brothers and sisters somewhere else who thought about us.”

The story of how those “brothers and sisters” transferred those thoughts into actions, and produced an enduring testament to their solidarity in the face of tragedy, involves a white craftsman, a black Jesus, a campaigning editor and two Klansmen. It’s a saga that starts with the murder of four black girls and ends with a little piece of Wales embedded in the heart of one of the most iconic venues of the American South.

On the morning of 15 September 1963, just after Sunday school at the 16th Street Baptist church, 15-year-old Carolyn McKinstry went upstairs to hand in some papers to the office. She heard the phone ring. “When I answered it the caller on the other end said, ‘Three minutes’. As quickly as he said that he hung up. I stepped out into the sanctuary and took about 15 steps . . . when the bomb exploded.”

Racist bombings were not extraordinary in Birmingham at that time. There had been more than 50 in the city during the civil rights era, all unsolved, earning it the nickname Bombingham among African Americans. And it was hardly a surprise that the assailants chose this church. Throughout the previous six months it had become the organising centre for the local civil rights movement, which had grown ever more strident.

But this bombing was different. It killed four young girls: Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, all 14, and 11-year-old Denise McNair. Even for hardened segregationists, murder in a church was too much. But the outrage was not confined to the US. The revulsion was global. Four thousand miles away in Llansteffan, Carmarthenshire, artist John Petts heard the news. “Naturally, as a father, I was horrified by the death of the children,” he recalled in 1987. “As a craftsman in a meticulous craft, I was horrified by the smashing of all those [stained-glass] windows. And I thought to myself, my word, what can we do about this?”

Back in Birmingham, African Americans assumed nothing would be done.Four men, who formed a splinter group from the Klan, called the Cahaba Boys, were identified as complicit in the bombing. It was 14 years before Robert Chambliss, a Klan member, was brought to justice: it would take 37 years before another, Thomas Blanton, was put behind bars. Bobby Frank Cherry was jailed for life in 2002. Another man died before charges were brought.

In Wales, Petts, who died in 1991, decided to offer the only practical thing he could – his skills as an artist. “An idea doesn’t exist unless you do something about it,” he said. “Thought has no real living meaning unless it’s followed by action of some kind.”

So he called David Cole, editor of the Western Mail, and shared his idea. Cole launched a front-page appeal the next day to raise the funds to replace the smashed window. “I’m going to ask no one to give more than half a crown,” he told Petts. “We don’t want some rich man as a gesture paying the whole window. We want it to be given by the people of Wales.”

The campaign caught on, and soon the Mail was publishing pictures of black and white children in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay, lining up to hand over their pocket money. Within a short time the money had been raised. Petts travelled to Alabama to get a sense of what the church wanted. “They had never heard of Wales,” he said. “They had no idea where it was, but they were very quickly told something of the little country Wales was, and how it put great value on independence and freedom, to bandy with the great big words.”

He returned home and struggled to come up with a design worthy of the occasion. “How could it begin to be near the huge issue that was involved at a Christian level – the problem of what we do to each other during the short time we have the gift of living on the earth?”

Then it struck him. A verse from Matthew 25:40 that spelt out the Christian message of brotherly love: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” Petts employed the last refrain: “You do it me”. Once the words were in place, the image followed. The window was installed in 1965. It showed a black figure, his chest thrust out and arms outstretched as though on a crucifix, the right one pushing away hatred and injustice, the left offering forgiveness. A rainbow, representing racial diversity, arcs over the head. Christ. As a black man. In the South. In the 60s.

“The boldness – in this country – of having a black Christ speaks volumes. For the African American community that’s not a stretch at all, but for many people in the white community during that time, to say that Jesus Christ was black and of African descent would be blasphemous,” explains the present 16th Street pastor, Reverend Arthur Price. “But I think the major message we try to take out of the window is not so much identifying Christ’s colour but knowing that Christ identifies with us. To the white community this is that the Jesus you love identifies himself with the African American community, so you are really crucifying him again when you persecute someone who does not look like you.”

Today, the Wales window is embedded not just in the church’s architecture but its identity. When visitors come from the Civil Rights Institute, an excellent museum cataloguing the era, just over the road, Petts’s window is always part of the tour. The story the guides tell has been somewhat embellished: “When the children of Wales heard of the tragedy they saved their pennies to buy a new window.” Roughly half the visitors I spoke to had heard of Wales (one thought it was London) – not a surprising number when you consider that Wales could fit into Alabama six times. But that’s what, beyond the imagery, makes the window so powerful. Even as people geographically closest to them saw them as alien and inferior, people they didn’t know existed not only identified them as fellow humans but sought to demonstrate support.

“I was surprised that people cared about blacks altogether,” explains Kathleen Bunton, a member of the church and lifetime resident of Birmingham. “Because if you had encountered the situations that were going on here . . . it was as if nobody cared. Of course you want to feel, that I know God cares and he loves us all, but to think that another race would respond to this was very moving for me.”

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By ELISABETH KIRSCH

Long before Google Earth, artists (or, perhaps, aliens) created images that could only be viewed in their entirety from way up high.

Witness the Nazca Lines in Peru, the prehistoric Serpent Mounds in Ohio, and crop circles just about everywhere. Rock drawings in the Australian continent demonstrate that mapping the Earth — or what one thought was the Earth — began before recorded time.

Barbara Grad’s paintings reflect that ancestral need to take a bird’s-eye view, the better to locate oneself on the planet.

Her recent paintings in “Video Villa,” now at Kemper at the Crossroads in her first solo museum exhibit, are contemporary evocations of urban and natural landscapes fabricated from a virtual reality high in the sky. Her dizzying compositions spin, catapult and melt into abstract roadways that seem to plummet to the center of the Earth.

Curator Barbara O’Brien notes in the exhibition essay that Grad refers to the colors, forms, meaning, and perspectives in her work as “collisions,” an apt description for the globe’s current state of boundary disputes, cultural overloads and shifting allegiances.

In all her work, Brad also abuts one painted panel next to another of different size, which reinforces the notion of a collision or of fluctuating perimeters.

Grad is a professor of painting at the Massachusetts College of Art. As an art student in Chicago, she became familiar with the work of Joseph Yoakum (1890 – 1972), an African-American outsider artist whose pen and pencil artworks of abstracted, sinuously drawn, flattened landscapes first came to attention in Chicago.

Grad was inspired by his art, as well as the ethereal, translucent 15th century paintings of Piero della Francesca in Tuscany.

The density of Grad’s compositions, along with their strong graphic quality, also aligns her work with the muscular, contorted abstractions of Gregory Amenoff, and the tangled, painted skeins of Terry Winters’ organic abstract art. Grad clearly shares the same love of painting for the sake of painting for which both those artists are famous.

But her work differs significantly from theirs. Besides using a multi-paneled format, Grad’s art possesses a viscous emotionality. Her paintings consistently allude to the necessity and difficulty of communicating across the geographical and psychological divides that are now every where.

In works such as “Video Villa” and “Erosion,” which are packed with circuitous passageways and maze-like spaces, escape is clearly not an option. “Executive Shift” acts as a visual for both the seductiveness and the depravity of Wall Street’s famed corporate corridors, which here offer no exit or entryway. “Greenspace” has an otherwordly, underwater sensibility that is inviting but chaotic.

“Round Trip,” one of the smallest, simplest and most appealing works in the exhibit, looks like a spider web spinning out of control. It is so flirty and meticulously painted that it presents one ride we wouldn’t mind taking. In a world with too much information, Grad’s art insinuates, at least try to enjoy part of the journey.

Read more: http://www.kansascity.com/2011/03/09/2708804/barbara-grads-exhibit-is-a-higher.html#ixzz1GE9vxuAP

By Rebecca Rafferty

The Baobab Cultural Center gives voice to local and regional African-American concerns, joys, and visual talents more frequently than the designated annual Black History Month. Year round, the center serves as an important meeting space for community members, and as a venue for film screenings about African-American and African issues, community dialogue series and art exhibits, and even yoga classes.

Gallery Director Terry Chaka explained that the current exhibition, “No Boundaries: New Expressions in Black Art,” is the second in a series of three shows, each representing contemporary African American art from a different age group. The previous show featured 40- to 60-year-old photographers from New York City. “No Boundaries” is a representation of “how we see ourselves,” says Chaka, and includes two Rochester- and two Buffalo-based artists ranging in age from 27 to 41, “born post-Civil Rights era,” and featuring more technological aspects in the creation and presentation of their work. The final show will feature three artists in their early 70s, who Chaka calls exhibition veterans.

Upon entering the center, viewers will first encounter work by Rochester artist Michelle Harris that discusses the limiting stereotypes and definitions of women and races in American society. “Mudflaps” I & II are mixed-media works made to resemble the pin-up silhouettes often seen on the titular truck accessories. The left silhouette contains names women are called, ranging from the semi-flattering “Shorty,” “Betty,” and “Princess,” to the offensive “Heifer,” “Hoochie,” and “Bitch.”

In Harris’ “Three Graces,” nude and masked Barbie dolls are grouped in provocative poses together and surrounded by mirrors; as the viewer approaches for a closer look, cat calls and whistles emitted from an electronic element assault the viewer. “Barbie Mirror” is an interactive video installation in which a camera picks up your image as you look on and reflects you in pixels made up by images of the feminine-defining toy.

Photographic work by Harris includes the tender and maternal print, “Feet,” as well as more political works in which the artist takes on the ironic persona of Scarlett O’Hara. In “Scarlett Hopes,” the artist reaches, in silhouette, for lace curtains and beyond the transitioning day; the image is paired with the film’s memorable quote, “After all, tomorrow is another day.”

Buffalo-based visual artist and hip-hop MC and producer Edreys Wajed (a.k.a. Billy Drease Wiliams) demonstrates his illustration skills with acrylic and ink works celebrating creative and sustaining forces in black culture. “Strong-Willed” is a work of abstract gold and black, with the title in brass lettering. His “Scarification Series” features linear works in pen and ink of faces with waves and symbols in decorative patterning, and often incorporating birds and plants to show humans and nature in beautiful balance. In “Sing Peace,” a female singer emits a bird from her breath, and in “Breathe Life,” both a fetus and tree gust from breath. Check out Wajed’s music online, particularly his self-illustrated video for “Get Free.”

Also featured in this exhibition is artist and community arts organizer Shawn Dunwoody, whose own artistic talents occasionally get a much-deserved spotlight. One of my favorite works in the show is his simple, beautiful portrait “Moses,” a pastel and colored pencil, delicately rendered aged black man, his face and hair made up of highlights emerging from darkness like truth emerging from obscurity. The remainder of Dunwoody’s contributions are mixed-media works that engage our political and social understandings, challenging us to contemplate the past and consider the present and future. The collage, “I Am a Man,” includes news articles, a painted image of Martin Luther King Jr., and images of maps, protestors and soldiers.

In his provided artist statement, Buffalo State College graduate Hiram Cray reveals his understanding of something crucial in art and in life: “I am the art and I am the art work, the process and the product. My greatest, most grueling, and simple creation is me and the life I live – can’t create anything more beautiful or grotesque.” He also nods to influences from an artist mom and Montessori education, an “enriched and culturally diverse life,” and an interest in cartooning. This latter matter is apparent in his drawing and portraiture skills, with heavy emphasis on varying facial expressions found in his self-portrait series, and enhanced by his background as a facial prosthetics designer for a hospital in New York City.

Cray’s “4our Vices and T3ree Statues of Misguided Reality” self portrait reveals a beautiful face with a grounded expression, warm tones against a blue background, and youthful and contemplative brown eyes glancing up at a white square, on which is printed “Time is a here and there relative, existing only in its designation.” Cray’s work is joyful, celebrates wonder and discovery, and reflects his interests in philosophy and the human experience. Also included is his verse work, “I Love Tea,” which praises the sensual and near-spiritual experience of drinking the tonic. I hope this poetic youth retains his sense of wonder and play.

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by: Margaret Burroughs

FAITH LAPIDUS: The National Museum of African American History and Culture is presenting the exhibit. It is called “The Kinsey Collection: Shared Treasures of Bernard and Shirley Kinsey – Where Art and History Intersect.”

It is being shown at the NMAAHC gallery at the National Museum of American History on the National Mall. The National Museum of African American History and Culture is to begin building its own center next year.

Bernard and Shirley Kinsey began collecting African American art and historical objects in the nineteen seventies. Bernard Kinsey says it started with an old document sent to him by a friend.

BERNARD KINSEY: “It was a bill of sale from William Johnson, eighteen thirty-two, for five hundred dollars. And when I opened that Fed-Ex up and held this document in my hand it was like I was holding this brother in my hand. And I said I want to know everything about him, and how he lived and this period. And that just started this deep and wide quest.”

The bill of sale is in a part of the show called “Stories of Slavery and Freedom.” The bill of sale, like many objects in this area, is extremely unsettling. The physical fact deepens the knowledge that people were once considered property.

There is a second bill of sale nearby. This time the purchaser is Henry Butler in eighteen thirty-nine. The bill shows a payment of one hundred dollars to Anne Graham of Washington, D.C. for the freedom of Henry Butler’s wife and four children. The bill states: “Signed, sealed and delivered.”

There are also a pair of shackles from around eighteen fifty. This device was placed around the ankles to restrain captives on the way from Africa to the Americas. The exhibit display explains that the shackles are so small they may have been for a child.

As visitors move through the show, they move forward in time. Covers of Harpers Weekly magazine give an idea of the involvement of black men in the Union Army. One cover shows the Twentieth Colored Infantry of Eighteen Sixty-Four receiving a silk banner in New York City. The banner was made by their mothers, wives and sisters. A proud African American crowd watches the ceremony.

In the “Freedom Struggles” area, there are signs of racial separation. These include a drinking fountain sign with arrows pointing one way for “whites” and another for “colored.”

Toward the end of the exhibit visitors reach “Remembering the Faces of a People.” This joyous section includes oil paintings, woodcuts, drawings, sculpture, photographs, fabric art and more. It shows the many ways African American artists see themselves and their community.

And it was the best part of the Kinsey Collection for visitor Aaron Crenshaw, of Woodbridge, Virginia.

AARON CRENSHAW: “The touching artwork. I never knew about, never knew existed. Been in the military so I’ve seen, like, the military side. But the art factor. It’s just an eye opener, if you’ve never seen it before.”

The Kinsey Collection will be on view until through May first. For a link to the exhibit visit our website at voaspecialenglish.com.

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By MAUREEN ELGERSMAN LEE

Before I moved to Virginia three and a half years ago, I started an intellectual journey unlike any I had embarked on before. The goal was as complex as it was simple: reconstruct the history of a small African-American community in a small city in northernMaine, a state with one of the smallest black populations in the country.

The goal was to understand why this black community almost tripled in size in the decades after the Civil War — and to learn where its members came from, where they lived and worked, what families they formed and what institutions they created.

While on this journey, I transcribed manuscripts of census returns that gave names, ages, occupations, addresses, property ownership, military service and literacy. I thumbed through countless high school and college yearbooks and found honor students, student-paper editors and band members. I read innumerable obituaries, which, in turn, led me to birth, marriage and death records. I even studied probate records — the final balance sheets of people’s lives.

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By C. Zawadi Morris

New Orleans Native and Bed-Stuy resident Shantrelle P. Lewis is the director of public programming and exhibitions at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI). She also is curator for a new exhibit, “Sex Crimes Against Black Girls,” which opened Saturday February 5^th at the Skylight Gallery in Restoration Plaza.

Lewis has traveled around the world in her pursuit to gain greater understanding of the African aesthetic first-hand, including to Cuba, Ghana, Nigeria, Brazil, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Spain and London.

Her curatorial credits include exhibitions on a variety of topics, including Contemporary Haitian Art, a tribute to Betty Davis, the Haitian Revolution, The Feminine in African Sacred Traditions and New Orleans sacred traditions. Lewis is producing her first documentary The Wild Magnolia, as part of an oral history project of the Magnolia Projects in New Orleans, of which she is the Project Director.

Lewis sat down with Patch to provide insight on her motivation behind a very serious subject matter pervasive in the black community, and within the black Diaspora – childhood sexual abuse – also the subject of her latest project at Skylight Gallery.

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You may not know her name, but you have seen her paintings everywhere from gift bags in Macy’s Department Store to a 2’8″x150 foot tile mural for Ontario International Airport. Synthia Saint James is an internationally known artist whose illustrations are on over 60 book covers including the literary works of African American women authors like Alice Walker, Terry McMillan, Iyanla Vanzant and Julia Boyd.

With her paintings running in the thousands of dollars Saint James most noted work costs no more than 37 cents when the United States Postal Service commissioned her to create the first Kwanzaa Stamp in 1997.

As a self-taught visual artist Saint James command of color and geometric forms intertwined with history and tradition exude an indelible Afrocentric style promoting family and unity. Saint James early influences were French Impressionists, primarily Van Gogh and Monet. Her contemporary influences are Ernie Barnes, Charles Bibbs, Larry ‘Poncho” Brown and Varnette Honeywood.

“When I was five years old, I knew that I wanted to be an artist simply because I loved to color and draw. When I actually truly knew that I wanted to be an artist, I was probably about eleven years old and that was after seeing “Moulin Rouge.” The movie dealt primarily with the life of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, but it spoke to me of the passion of artists, the struggle to succeed in making a living as an artist and the importance of remaining true to your individual creativity and your own style of painting. I fell in love with the French Impressionists and that whole era.”

A graduate of Los Angeles High, Saint James attended Los Angeles Valley College and Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. She conducts art-marketing seminars and is a keynote speaker for major corporations, organizations and schools promoting art.

Saint James has completed over 50 commissions for major organizations, corporations and individual collectors, including Brigitte Matteuzzi’s School of Modern Jazz Ballet (Geneva, Switzerland), Essence Magazine’s 25th Anniversary, The Girl Scouts of the USA’s 85th Anniversary, Attorney Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr., Coca Cola for “The Lady of Soul Awards”, the International Association of Black Professional Fire Fighters, in tribute to the 12 black fire fighters lost in the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, etc.

Saint James has also licensed her images on gift bags, T-shirts, magnets, boxes, deck cards, puzzles, mugs, and calendars, watches, a CD-ROM, and she has recently signed a deal introducing “THE SYNTHIA SAINT JAMES COLLECTION”, a sportswear clothing line.

She is the recipient of numerous awards like the 1996 Coretta Scott King Honor for her illustrations in NEENY COMING, NEENY GOING, the 1998 Black Women Lawyers, Inc. Women of Vision Award and the 2004 Women of the Year in Education from the Los Angeles County Commission for Women.

Synthia Saint James’s paintings are a treat to your soul and an uplifting experience conveying family, harmony and unity.

“My art, for me, is a release, but at the same time, every painting is a child that I’ve created. There are several messages that I wish to convey through my art. They are unity and acceptance of all cultures because we’re actually all the same.”

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