Art for Sale Page 2

by: Michael H. Hodges

The new show at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, “Art of the Masters: A Survey of African American Images, 1980-2000,” opens with a knockout piece by Yvonne E. Tucker. “Desert Goddess” is a squat, two-handled vessel that calls to mind Greek amphoras. Topping it is the stern face of a woman, in something like pharaonic head gear. She gazes out at the world with eyes both wise and skeptical — not a bad combination for these times.

“Art of the Masters” will hang through Feb. 28.

The Michigan Chapter of the National Conference of Artists, whose mission is to introduce African-American “master artists” to the wider world, organized the exhibit.

The rest of the show measures up to Tucker’s example, and includes works by some of the 20th century’s greatest black artists, including giants Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden.

The one Bearden work on display is a gorgeous abstract essay in blues and whites called “Caribbean Harbor.” Playing next to it is a video profile of the artist that manages to be interesting and informative — and a little annoying when you’re trying to take in the rest of the show.

Still, the comparisons the narrator, renowned trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, draws between Bearden’s improvisation and jazz are well worth a listen.

“Bearden’s art is warm and inviting,” says Marsalis in an affectionate aside, “like you always feel at home.”

In addition, don’t miss the decorated funeral fan entitled “Our Dr. Betty Shabazz.” The mixed-media piece honors the educator and activist — and widow of Malcolm X — who died in 1997 of injuries suffered in a fire set by her grandson in her New York City apartment.

The image on the heart-shaped fan looks to be Shabazz’s high-school graduation picture. Around her smiling face, New Jersey artist Ben Jones has created an aura of gold, red and white squiggles and dots.

Sea shells create an outer circle beyond that. And rising from the fan’s top, as if they’re Shabazz’s very spirit, are gold-tipped, three-dimensional spirals reaching heavenward.

Detroit artists are well represented. Distinctly worth a look is the black-and-white photograph of a disintegrating Packard Motor Car plant by Detroiter Hugh Grannum, “Art of Destruction.”

A whimsical, cartoonish tone is struck by the late Robert Colescott with “Interiors #2: Homage to Roy Lichtenstein.” In it, a woman in a pink bikini smokes a cigarette in an apartment that resembles

Lichtenstein’s cartoon canvases — compelling and quite a hoot, and typical of Colescott’s satirical take on racial and sexual imagery.

Also…

At Ann Arbor’s Gallery Project, a 30-person group show called “Warp” will be up through Jan. 9, and features some well-known names — including 2009 Kresge Artists in Detroit fellows Cedric Tai and Susan Goethel Campbell.

“The show uses the weaving metaphor of warp — threads that go in opposite directions,” says gallery co-director Rocco DePietro. “So things come together in unusual ways, almost at cross purposes.”

‘Art of the Masters: A Survey of African American Images, 1980-2000’

Artist: Jimmie Lee Sudduth

Folk Art is usually described in one of two ways: as an artistic tradition passed down through generations, or as works of art created by individuals with no formal art training. Both descriptions are accurate. Folk artists have the uncanny ability to transform found objects and materials normally considered useless into unique and powerful works of art. In the hands of these talented individuals, scraps of worn clothing may be sewn into quilts of intricate design, tree branches and roots can become evocative sculptures and plywood, house paint and mud combined to create remarkable paintings.

Often inspired by deep intuitive callings or unique spiritual visions, the style of folk art commonly referred to as “Visionary Art” seeks to connect the inner world of the artists with the larger, physical world we all share. This intensely personal and highly expressive quality is a major reason why the art has become popular. But the acceptance of folk art into the mainstream art world has taken time. One reason for this may be that folk art celebrates inherent artistic talents not influenced by academic training. It is the intuitive nature of these works that allow them to dispel notions that only works created by trained artists can and should be appreciated. The Folk Art Collection contains impressive examples of the unusual media and various styles of notable African American vernacular artists. Their works represent a human desire for self expression that is not bound by the realms of academic training. The majority of the artists included in this collection have a connection to Georgia. The museum hopes to present the full range of folk and craft art by increasing the number of items that demonstrate artistic traditions passed down through generations such as quilt making, pottery and basket making.

Take a virtual tour of the Tubman Museum!

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By Kinshasha Holman Conwill

The US art world is abuzz over the White House campaign to bring a greater diversity to its art collection—including more works by African American artists [the Obamas have been quietly notifying an array of public institutions, dealers and collectors that they are looking to borrow first-rate art of a more recent vintage to display in the White House with an emphasis on works by black, Hispanic, Asian and female artists]. Such a gesture from so influential a place has understandably had a catalytic effect—stirring conversation, raising expectations. And that’s a good thing. The move is also throwing a strong light on African American art and the artists who create it.

This comes at a time of increased interest in African American art among mainstream museums and collectors. The 2007 retrospective by the renowned sculptor Martin Puryear, organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and shown at major museums across the country is one of the most vivid examples of that interest. It follows by two years the Sam Gilliam retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery. Gilliam’s participation in the 1972 Venice Biennale foreshadowed the watershed decades of the 1980s and 1990s which saw African American artists from Puryear to Robert Colescott, Emilio Cruz, Leonardo Drew, Melvin Edwards, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, John Outterbridge, Betye Saar, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Nari Ward and Fred Wilson, among others, represent the US in international venues from São Paulo to Venice, from Johannesburg to Cairo, Dakar, Kassel, Sydney, Istanbul and Cuenca.

Yet this was not always the case. There was a time not long ago when one could visit major museums or attend international fairs and rarely find works by African American artists. Their work was rarer still at auctions and those few there were, were not commanding prices commensurate with their cultural significance nor competitive with their non-African American counterparts.

Those of us building the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture have a keen interest in past history and current practice as we determine the role of African American art in a museum with a mandate to tell the broad story of the African American experience. We needn’t look far for inspiration in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum—one of the strongest and most longstanding collections of African American art in this country—and the growing holdings of the National Portrait Gallery, two sister institutions with whom we are collaborating. Beyond the National Mall, the collections begun in the 100 years after the Civil War, including those documented in the major traveling exhibition, “To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities” (organized by the Addison Gallery and the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1999), were for decades the nearly singular models of continuous commitment to African American art. The stewards of those collections—joined over the decades by scores of private nonprofit museums of African American history and culture—have often been the most stalwart advocates of art by African Americans.

The arts need such advocacy to survive. African American art, given its historically lower level of sustained attention, requires advocacy at a higher volume. The President and First Lady already have provided a resonant and nuanced voice for a more diverse notion of American art.

What is the significance of the attention being paid to the art of African Americans by this country’s most visible museum? Puryear is arguably one of America’s greatest sculptors and certainly doesn’t require the imprimatur of the White House. Many of his peers seem to be skillfully navigating the fraught waters of contemporary art as well.

Yet when one steps outside the vaunted and insular precincts of art, validation takes on a different tone. Beyond museum exhibitions, auction prices, critical reviews and international fairs, lies the vast territory of a larger society less swayed by esoteric notions of the vaporization of art and artists. Rather, there one finds a public whose tastes and desires are being stirred by the heady—and welcomed—promise of change. It is that indefinable sense of possibility that opens minds and fuels concrete action to challenge the status quot.

It would be presumptuous and premature to predict that the actions of one president, even one as influential as Barack Obama, would single handedly alter the course of American art history or the destinies of African American artists. Yet his and the First Lady’s early actions in expanding the agenda for White House art have evinced an ability to transform the bully pulpit into a poetic perch from which to suggest new strategies for broadening the conversation about art and culture in this country. The echoes of those actions are reverberating not only in the hallowed halls of the First Family’s residence, but down the decades of American creative expression.

Does this moment signal a new era in American and African American art? It’s too soon to tell. But it is extraordinarily intriguing in its potential.

The writer is deputy director, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of African American History & Culture

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by: Wilfred Stroud

A musician, storyteller/oral historian, the traditional Griot was the product, or rather the embodiment of West African oral traditions. A native of Macon, Georgia, Wilfred R. Stroud embodies many of the qualities of the traditional West African Griot. But where the Griots of old preserved history through recitation and song, Stroud uses oil and acrylic paint on canvas to illustrate the history and contributions of African Americans in Macon and beyond.

Wilfred Stroud’s best-known work is the mural From Africa to America. Measuring 68 inches tall by 55 feet long, the work is installed on the first floor of the Tubman Museum. A signature piece in the Museum’s collection, the work was commissioned in 1988 with funds provided by the Macon Arts Alliance and the City of Macon. At the time of its creation, Stroud stated that, “The purpose of this mural is to present a visual history of the black man and woman from the earliest times in Africa to the present times in America. The panels focus attention upon the impact of outstanding persons, and events that made a change in the lives and conditions of black people in particular, and the world in general.”

Take a virtual tour of the Tubman Museum!

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By Richard J. Powell

Many artists whose careers extended back to the 1930s and 1940s resurfaced with a renewed sense of racial solidarity and political insurgency during the Black Arts Movement. Painters Lois Mailou Jones and John Biggers and sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett all aligned themselves with the younger generation of black artists, creating works that underscored their shared interest in African design sensibilities, the black figure, and the continuing struggle for civil rights.

For many abstract artists like Frank Bowling, Sam Gilliam, Richard Hunt, Barbara Chase-Riboud, and Raymond Saunders, critical and commercial success provided evidence that black artists were capable of overcoming racial obstacles and taking their rightfully earned places within the contemporary scene. These advancements were made all the more emphatic by the achievements of artists like the Washington painter Alma Thomas, who, at the age of eighty, was the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 1972. Artists who subscribed to a black nationalist agenda argued that Thomas (along with the other well-known black abstractionists) created works that did not challenge the aesthetic sensibilities of the white cultural mainstream. In response, abstractionists like Al Loving, Ed Clark, Joe Overstreet, Jack Whitten, and William T. Williams felt that this line of thinking showed how pervasive more conservative approaches to the visual arts were in African American communities. Both positions demonstrated how difficult it was for even the most sophisticated art connoisseurs to glean cultural elements out of abstractions. The same myopia often existed in interpretations of works by folk artists like Clementine Hunter and the evangelist-turned-painter Sister Gertrude Morgan.

As artists and audiences grew more conversant in the diverse ways that one could express black culture, the 1970s and 1980s ushered in a variety of artists and artworks all comfortably operating under the rubric of Afro-American art. From the photorealism of painter Barkley L. Hendricks and neomannerist stylizations of painter Ernie Barnes to the cloth-and canvas accretions of mixed-media artist Benny Andrews and altar-like installations of sculptor Betye Saar, African American art could no longer be contained in neat, stylistic categories. The important exhibitions of past and present African American art organized by curators David C. Driskell and Edmund B. Gaither and the definitive histories and art publications of Elsa Honig Fine, Samella Lewis, and Ruth Waddy helped educate the experts and uninformed public alike on all that might constitute an African American art.

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On Friday, the main Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton (800 Vine St., Downtown) gets its 2011 exhibition season underway with My Castle on the Nile: Illustrated Sheet Music by Black Composers, 1828-1944. It will be up through Feb. 28 in the museum’s Cincinnati Room. The show draws on sheet music from the library’s extensive collection, featuring covers that are hand-drawn and often reproduced as brightly colored chromolithographs.

While it has work by such well-known figures as “Fats” Waller and Duke Ellington, it also delves deeper into the music’s history. For instance, there is 1828 sheet music by Francis Johnson, the first African-American composer to have his works published in this form and to give racially integrated concerts. Also featured is 19th-century Tin Pan Alley composer Gussie Davis, a native Cincinnatian who wrote “Irene, Good Night” in 1886, made famous decades later in an altered version — called “Goodnight, Irene” — by the folksinger Leadbelly.

The show was curated by Theresa Leininger-Miller, assistant art history professor at UC who will give an opening lecture at 2 p.m. Saturday. For more information, call the Library’s Geneology & History Department at 513-369-6905.

Go here for library hours and exhibit information.

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By Adams Susan,

Hanging in Robert Johnson’s den is an oil from the 1930s by an African-American artist named Palmer Hayden. The painting depicts a black American businessman getting his shoes shined.

The subject is nattily dressed in suit and spats, a little like Johnson himself, who is sporting a crisply pressed blue shirt and a shiny yellow tie.

Johnson may be known for the low-budget comedy routines and booty-shaking music videos that drove the success of BET, the cable channel he founded that turned him into America’s first black billionaire in 2001.

But in his private moments he is moved by art that documents the struggles and achievements of black people in America. Since the early 1980s Johnson, 62, has assembled some 250 pieces by 19th- and 20th-century African-American artists.

Though Johnson’s collection is probably worth only a couple of million dollars, it includes some of the most famous names of the genre: cubist-inspired collage artist Romare Bearden (1911-­88); modernist Harlem painter Jacob Lawrence (1917­-2000); and Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859­-1937), who studied under Thomas Eakins in the 1880s and was the first black painter to gain international acclaim.

Son of a Mississippi factory worker, Johnson started his channel in 1979 with a $500,000 investment from John Malone. He sold it to Viacom in 2001, receiving $1.5 billion in stock for his 63% share. Today he owns an NBA team, North Carolina¹s Charlotte Bobcats, and runs RLJ Investments in Bethesda, Md., which includes hotels, car and motorcycle dealerships, a bank and a nascent hedge fund and private equity arm. (Johnson’s current net worth: perhaps $700 million.)

In Pictures: Where To See African-American Art

In Pictures: Black Masters

Though mainstream museums and galleries have been slow to appreciate work by African-Americans, the black community has been collecting for decades.

Bill and Camille Cosby have built a collection of 400 works, including artists like Bearden, Lawrence, late-19th-century landscape painter Edward Mitchell Bannister, self-taught 20th-century artist Horace Pippin and 1960s abstract painter Alma Thomas.

Basketball star Grant Hill owns a collection of midcentury work. Entertainer Harry Belafonte has been collecting African-American art since the 1950s and Oprah Winfrey has been buying a mix of work, including pieces by contemporary artists like Whitfield Lovell. Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, Samuel L. Jackson, Richard Parsons and Kenneth Chenault also collect.

Now white collectors and institutions are discovering these long overlooked works.

“What’s happened in the last five years is a paradigm shift,” observes Steven L. Jones, 61, an African-American dealer in Philadelphia. “This means that the best work is going up exponentially in value.”

Last year Swann Auction Galleries in New York became the first auction house to create a department of African-American art and in February sold a 1944 modernist oil by Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas for $600,000.

Johnson bought most of his art in 1998, when he learned that a significant body of work, the Barnett-Aden collection, was for sale by the Florida Education Fund, along with the building where the art was housed, the National Museum of African American Art, in Tampa. Johnson acquired 222 pieces, including 68 drawings, paintings, prints and sculptures from the original gallery. The rest of the pieces, all by black artists, were added by the museum. Johnson says he doesn’t recall what he paid, but a dealer familiar with the sale pegs it at $400,000. Two dealers who know the collection say it’s tripled and possibly quadrupled in value in the last decade.

Prices continue to climb for quality pieces, even while other collecting categories founder.

Manhattan dealer Michael Rosenfeld says business is strong; he made three six-figure sales during two weeks of stock market turmoil in November. The highest prices for artwork by African-Americans come in the still overheated contemporary art market, where Andy Warhol protégé Jean-Michel Basquiat is the reigning star, with a 2007 auction record of $14.6 million. Kara Walker, 39, who makes large cut-paper silhouettes containing sexual images and black stereotypes like pickaninnies, stirs controversy and commands prices over $400,000.

Johnson, who plans to stage a Washington, D.C., exhibition of his art this February, believes the works should be displayed separately from those of white Americans.

“This is work by artists who were influenced by the fact that they were African-Americans living in America and dealing with all that that means,” he argues.

Sometimes they provocatively exploit racial stereotypes. Example: a 1940 canvas hanging in Johnson’s office by Archibald Motley. Called “The Argument,” the painting depicts a street scene and a couple of men who look like minstrels in blackface, with oversize red lips. Johnson doesn’t have a problem with this picture.

“It’s just black folks being black folks,” he observes, smiling. “They’re talking about what happened in the club last night,” he adds. “Or maybe they’re talking about when they’re going to have a black president.”

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The artworks, valued at approximately $120,000, will be on display from Jan. 13-Feb. 20 at the Ross Art Museum, 60 S. Sandusky St., Delaware. Rembert will visit the Ohio Wesleyan campus Feb. 10 to meet with students, demonstrate his leatherworking techniques, and participate in a panel discussion dealing with the accomplishments and impact of African American artists and the issues affecting the production and acceptance of their works.

Rembert’s studio demonstration will be held from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Feb. 10 in Edgar Hall, 35 S. Sandusky St., home of Ohio Wesleyan’s fine arts department. The panel discussion will be held at 7 p.m. Feb. 10 in Room 312 of the R.W. Corns Building, 78 S. Sandusky St. Artist and educator Willis “Bing” Davis of Dayton, Ohio, will moderate the discussion. A reception for Rembert and his exhibition, “Winfred Rembert: Memoirs in Paint,” will follow from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. Feb. 10 at the Ross Art Museum. All of these events are free and open to the public.

Four of the Rembert artworks being donated to the university are gifts from Gordon V. Smith and Helen Crider Smith of Potomac, Md., who graduated from Ohio Wesleyan in 1954 and 1956, respectively. The Smiths first saw Rembert’s work at New York’s Adelson Galleries during an exhibit co-sponsored by Peter Tillou Works of Art of Litchfield, Conn.

Tillou, a 1957 Ohio Wesleyan graduate and friend of the Smiths, is donating two Rembert works from his private collection. Tillou met the artist nearly a decade ago and was immediately drawn to his vibrant personality and creativity. Over the years, Tillou has become friends with Rembert and assisted him in exhibiting and marketing his art.

“This is a wonderful example of the enduring friendships created at Ohio Wesleyan and the lifelong connections of our alumni with the university,” said President Rock Jones, Ph.D. “When Gordon and Helen Smith saw Winfred Rembert’s captivating art, they immediately thought of the educational and aesthetic value of adding them to the Ross Art Museum’s permanent collection. Their passion inspired former classmate Peter Tillou, who assisted with the acquisition and added his own generous gift.”

A self-taught artist, Rembert uses more than 60 tools to carve his life onto leather. Born in 1945, he grew up working in the cotton fields of Cuthbert, Georgia. During the 1960s, he was arrested after a Civil Rights march and later survived a near-lynching. He spent seven years in jail during which time he worked on a chain gang and learned to make leather wallets. Years later, his wife suggested he use the medium as a canvas for his life.

According to the Hartford Courant, Rembert’s works “glisten with style, flair, vitality, skillful draftsmanship and dramatic use of perspective. They capture and charm the eye with their bright colors and shapes that almost seem to pop out at you.”

Ohio Wesleyan’s Rembert collection now includes:

• Amazing Grace (2008). “Amazing Grace is one of the songs I remember that was sung in the fields,” Rembert said. “I just loved to listen to the singing. … I still sing those songs today when I’m working.”
• The Alexander Sisters (2009). “Mr. Alexander was a preacher, and all his kids could sing. … They could really wreck a church—their harmonies were like no other.”
• Saved and Saintified (2005). “I never considered myself saved and saintified; church folk said you can’t get to heaven unless you are saved and saintified. … I go to church almost every Sunday and it looks as if I’ll never get saved and saintified.”
• The Wood Boy (2007). “The teacher made me the wood boy. I would go outside, get wood, and feed the potbelly stove. I didn’t mind because I didn’t want to be called on by the teacher to answer questions.”
• Chain Gang (2010). This black-and-white piece represents Rembert’s chain gang memories.
• Cotton Field #4 (2003). This unfinished piece shows Rembert’s intricate leatherwork before he applies dyes.

With the Rembert acquisitions, Ohio Wesleyan’s permanent art collection grows to nearly 2,500 pieces. Other recent acquisitions include pieces by African American, Native American, and Hispanic artists.

“Ohio Wesleyan is fortunate to have such a rich and varied portfolio of artworks,” said museum director Justin Kronewetter, M.F.A. “The Rembert gifts add to the diversity and importance of the university’s collection. I am grateful to our visionary alumni, and I encourage everyone to come see this important exhibition.”

The Richard M. Ross Art Museum is open Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. The museum is fully handicap-accessible and admission is always free. For more information, call (740) 368-3606.

Ohio Wesleyan University is one of the nation’s premier small, private universities, with more than 90 undergraduate majors, sequences, and courses of study, and 23 Division III varsity sports. Located in Delaware, Ohio, just minutes north of Ohio’s capital and largest city, Columbus, the university combines a globally focused curriculum with off-campus learning and leadership opportunities that translate classroom theory into real-world practice. OWU’s close-knit community of 1,850 students represents 45 states and 52 countries. Ohio Wesleyan earned a 2009 Presidential Award for Excellence in General Community Service, is featured in the book “Colleges That Change Lives,” and is included on the “best colleges” lists of U.S. News & World Report and The Princeton Review.