Art for Sale Page 2

By Staff reports

Beginning Aug. 4, parents can enroll their child in the Center for African American Art and History’s after-school literacy program.

The program is designed to assist kindergarten through third grade students in reaching their grade level in reading while introducing them to the historical African American experience.

The program begins Sept. 20 and applications can be picked up starting Aug. 4 from 9:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., at the Center of African American Art and History, 21 W. 16th St.

This program is free and open to the public, but registration is necessary.

Call (616) 836-8559 for details.

Funding for this project was made possible by a grant from the Holland/Zeeland Community Foundation and the Haworth Corporation.

The Fire at the Core is a collection of 16 literary pieces in play or structured dialogue genre, satirical narrative genre and philosophical write-ups by a budding writer, playwright and thinker Malama Katulwende.Any literary appraiser of this piece cannot afford to ignore the assertiveness of the author; in such chapters as Crises: The poverty and futility of Zambian Hip-Hop and Is Zambian music definable? the voice embodies an authority on aesthetics.With mild reference to established authorities and major publications on the subject, the works question and summarily rebuke songs and artists who model their works along Afro-American templates such as Hip-Hop.The essays pick on the recent winner of the London based Black Entertainment, Fashion, Film and Television Award (BEFFTA) Chisenga Katongo also known as Crises as an exemplar of this pollution of authentic Zambian art, and deviation to culturally misplaced Afro-American music genres.It is however puzzling to learn that the author based his work on references to works by people who ply Western art themselves such as Elvis Zuma – a guitarist – an instrument which, unlike Malimba or drums, is not African in origin.In fact, but for Heavens Gate, The Trial of Chansa Kabwela, the Circus and The Clouds; the other 11 pieces in The Fire at the Core do not themselves qualify to be called African literature, a literary genre of tales with deep didactic aspect to them such as the Achebian Things Fall Apart.Thematically, whilst the first six chapters are dedicated to what is called popular literature or literature for the masses, other chapters like Why Should We Obey the Law and The Clouds and others are sombre in mood, and deal with heavy topics of law and classical philosophy of Plato, Aristotle and others which may serve graduate scholars of the disciplines well but may find limited resonance with the other 80 percent of Zambians who are either illiterate or mildly literate.The ease with which principles of law and philosophical arguments are applied on the Zambian scene is a matter of pure genius and sign of the authors’ full comprehension of the underlying fabrics of the pieces.‘Laughers beware’, in all the 16 short stories in The Fire at the Core, humour fails to find a bed. For example the two ‘prose odes’ I refuse to die and In Memory of Margo Schouten are sombre and melancholic in tone and mood whilst the others are a serious treatise on academic and social subjects with a rebellious approach to current social conventions.Whilst a simplistic deduction would attribute the absence of humour, and the controversy in The Fire at the Core to mere sensationalism and an attempt at gaining public acclaim through controversy; biographic and psychological approaches to the works show that The Fire at the Core borrows heavily from the authors’ life.A double orphan with a brother and a female best friend on the deceased list, it is not surprising that the works question religious cosmology and its essence. This in itself is a plus and a reason you may wish to read the work; it is reality through the mental lenses of a thinker and critic.One of the The Fire at the Core’s chapters entitled Art and Erotica has managed to incite a reaction from the respected Zambian art critic Andrew Mulenga.He states “The Fire at the Core’s attempt in a chapter on Art and Erotica to reference a work by Charles Chambata, who is known for the celebration of the female figure, does not help. Of Chambata’s work, the text asserts “it is our apprehension of the moment of creation and our relation to it that constitutes art”.But what helps this remark remain lacking in clarity could be the fact that out of the hundreds of Zambian artists, Katulwende only singles out one.Which brings to question his all the more confusing reason for mentioning 18 Western philosophers from Plato to Beardsley “to name but a few thinkers” and attempt to link so many names to the birth of what constitutes contemporary art.“The mentioning of an entire pantheon of philosophers and an ill attempt to link these to the subject at hand in this chapter, as well as an ill attempt to link the same to the Zambian artists whom he alleges to be “aping” Western erotic art makes one wonder whether he should have just left out the whole chapter altogether.”This scathing attack of The Fire at the Core by Mulenga who, if the reader knew not, is a passionate activist of Zambian art is part of Malama Katulwende’s hallmark: the ability to steer and arouse controversy from all echelons of society.For everything that it has and lacks, The Fire at the Core is sure not to pass unnoticed on the Zambian political and literary scene.It is the kind of material that both seasons university faculty discussions and manages to arouse interest in the meekly educated due to its populist and yet contemporary topics – a must have for those alive today in Zambia.

“On the Shoulders of Giants” may very well be the quintessential Newark Black Film Festival movie. Mixing music, history, sports and the artistry of filmmaking, this documentary pulls together elements that make the Newark Black Film Festival unique.

“We try to look at sisters behind the camera, brothers behind the camera, diaspora, historical,” said Pat Faison, marketing associate and Newark Black Film Festival coordinator, explaining the importance of combining history, art and entertainment. “A lot of our children don’t know about that era so it’s always good to bring that historic factor back into the festival so we can teach our children because they don’t learn all this stuff in school.”

The documentary takes on the task of telling the tale of the Harlem Renaissance Five, or theHarlem Rens as they came to be known, the first all-black professional basketball team.

The film opens with an animated argument by a group of former basketball players and coaches debating what the best team in history was. They name everyone from the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls and the 1985-86 Boston Celtics to the 1966-67 Philadelphia 76ers. However, the debate ends when legendary cager Kareem Abdul Jabbar interrupts, “I want to tell you about the best team you’ve never heard of.”

The voice of rapper Chuck D. blasts in over another kind of animation. This time, still black-and-white photographs are put in motion and made to compete against modern day players over the backdrop of Harlem. That energy infuses the entire motion picture.

Over the course of the brisk 75-minute film, director Deborah Morales and host Jabbar guide the viewer through the violence and segregation African Americans faced in the early part of the last century up to the time of the Harlem Renaissance.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Harlem hosted a population boom of middle-class African Americans. With this demographic shift came a flourishing of art, music, poetry and writing.

That period also brought about African-American entrepreneurs like Bob Douglass. Douglass put together the first all-black basketball team, which played at the Harlem Renaissance Casino & Ballroom (all games ended by 11 p.m. at which point the basketball court was converted back to a dance floor). “On the Shoulder of Giants” tracks the story of the Harlem Rens as they gained popularity and respect among the African Americans across the country, even going as far as taking up a friendly rivalry with the best team at that time, the Boston Celtics.

“On the Shoulders of Giants” integrates the spirit of a bygone age with its jazzy soundtrack and vibrant artwork. Energy pops through every frame as the filmmakers clearly had an eye on catching the attention of school-aged and adult audiences alike.

The Newark Black Film Festival will continue next week with “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” The film will screen July 27 at the Newark Museum at 7 p.m.

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It was a secret known to few Cincinnatians and to virtually no one outside of the Cincinnati Art Museum.

For decades, a spectacular trove of more than 800 antique musical instruments languished – untouched, neglected and forgotten – in storage throughout the museum’s meandering undercroft.

The discovery means that Cincinnati could possess one of the most important collections of non-Western musical instruments in the United States. The collection spans four centuries and represents the cultures of more than 20 countries on four continents. It has drawn the attention of musical instrument specialists and curators in top museums across the nation.

“I was shocked,” said Charles Rudig, a Cincinnati native, antique instrument expert and former head of musical instruments for Sotheby’s Auction House. He has been hired by the museum as a consultant to help evaluate and catalog the instruments.

“They’ve got a fabulous world music collection. It’s wonderful. It’s big. And it’s very similar to the Metropolitan Museum (New York) collection. The Met’s is bigger, but they were both formed at about the same time – the late 19th century.”

About 650 of the instruments were donated to the museum around the turn of the century by a single collector, a wealthy Cincinnati industrialist named William Howard Doane. Many of them are so-called “world music” instruments. Doane traveled the world and snapped up African drums, exotic stringed instruments, keyboards and mallet instruments, flutes and rattles.

With the public’s insatiable interest in world music and global cultures today, the rare find is perfect timing.

“Because they are historic documents, this makes it a very important collection,” said J. Kenneth Moore, curator in charge of the Musical Instruments Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “You don’t find these things in many places. You just find them in a handful of places. It’s something that, I think, should be put on display and should be appreciated by Cincinnatians, and people who visit your city. It should be a point of pride.”

Conservators will be wiping away a century of grime and soot (from when the museum was heated by coal) in preparation for an exhibition of 75 to 100 instruments to coincide with the 2012 World Choir Games in Cincinnati next July.

Curators hope to integrate some pieces throughout the museum’s collection after the exhibition closes. But a dedicated gallery doesn’t fit the museum’s current mission, said museum director Aaron Betsky. So far, the museum – which has put off a planned expansion and laid off employees – has received a small grant to survey the musical instruments. The museum is applying for grants and is seeking other avenues to raise more funds for that project.

Until recently, no one at the museum realized what they had.

“What’s remarkable about it is the breadth,” said Betsky. He said that with the approach of the World Choir Games, it made sense to examine these instruments.

“When I arrived here in 2006, a few of them were out, like the Amati in the case upstairs … I found out that we hadn’t really paid attention to this incredible collection because, like so many other parts of our collection, we don’t really have enough room.

This is really about instruments from around the world. And it was collected for the visual intensity of the pieces, not necessarily for their functionality. It shows the delight that people took in designing and decorating these objects.”

Even if only half of it were refurbished, the collection would be an invaluable resource for scholars and school teachers, said ethnomusicologist Stefan Fiol, an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music.

“Because they’re very old and rare, they are a piece of that historical time, and depending on how they’re displayed, they can really shed light on practices of the period,” said Fiol, who plays the sitar and a range of Himalayan instruments. “In that sense, they’d be invaluable.”

Just a sampling of the find impresses the experts, such as a 19th-century African drum carved from a log, a Burmese crocodile zither, a Chinese version of a hammered dulcimer, a Native American ceremonial raven rattle and a beautifully carved Turkish harp.

The collection also includes a rare 17th-century Amati viola, an 18th-century oboe d’amore by Jakob Denner (one of four known to exist) and a stunning Ruckers virginal (a keyboard instrument), one of just two known in the country.

“It’s important,” said Christina Linsenmeyer, curator of musical instruments at the Musical Instruments Museum in Phoenix. “If they let people know about it and published a catalog, it could become one of the strongest collections in the States.”

Rudig, who lives in New Jersey and Kenwood, and Amy Dehan, Cincinnati Art Museum’s associate curator of decorative arts and design, are meticulously inspecting and cataloging each instrument.

“This has opened up a new area of inquiry for me,” Dehan said. “As it turns out, I’m learning about world musical instruments via one of the best collections in the country, a collection that has been under our nose for 100 years. I can’t tell you how exciting this is. We are making discoveries about this collection every day. “

From initial inspection, some instruments are in surprisingly good condition, while others may not be worthy of conservation efforts. The ravages of time, temperature and humidity may have been contributing factors, and some items possibly arrived in poor condition. There are few records.

“I think most of them did pretty well. But at one time, this building was heated with coal, so some of them have dust and grime on them. It’s not uncommon when you’re dealing with things of age,” Dehan said.

Cincinnati music lovers, including Rudig, recall only sporadic exhibitions of some musical instruments – most recently in the 1980s. Typically, museums can only display a fraction of their holdings. In the past, non-Western musical instruments were often relegated to a corner of an Asian or African wing as a “curiosity,” or put into storage because they were so little understood.

Wealthy travelers or missionaries often collected these musical treasures, said the Met’s Moore, who oversees 5,000 musical instruments, two-thirds of them non-Western. Their provenance and descriptions were sometimes well-documented, sometimes vague and incorrect – such as a “Chinese piano” that Moore recalled seeing in a museum. The field of ethnomusicology – the study of music as culture did not start to grow until the 1960s.

The industrialist Doane began loaning pieces of his eclectic stash in 1887 – a year after the Cincinnati Art Museum opened and two years before the Metropolitan Museum of Art started its musical instrument collection. Doane’s instruments were donated to the Cincinnati museum in parcels, beginning in 1914.

The last published book about the collection, in 1948, lists only 110 instruments (plus “drums”) and has many errors. But the cache was so unusual, it warranted a visit from the first established curator of the Metropolitan’s musical instrument division, Emanuel Winternitz, who wrote the introduction.

Today, with world music and exotic cultures a click away on the Internet, the public’s interest has exploded – and along with it, attendance in musical instrument galleries.

“We have seen an increase of visitors in our galleries, and it’s not only just the treasures of Western art music,” the Met’s Moore said. “I think there is more of an interest in the non-European cultures, in understanding them on various levels, and music is one of them. Certainly, the instruments can tell you a lot about what’s going on.”

Rudig agreed that attitudes have changed.

“You have to have things in a museum display that are fun to look at. You’re entertaining people. So we’ve rediscovered this collection at the right period of time. World music is coming into its own, and people are much more anxious to see those things than they used to be,” he said.

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Visitors to Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History will be inspired by the stories and artistic experiences they find.

The artistic emphasis found in much of the museum is no accident. The museum’s primary founder was the late art teacher and art historian Margaret Burroughs. The museum opened in 1961 in her South Side Chicago mansion as the Ebony Museum of Negro Art and History.

The museum moved in 1973 to its present location at 740 E. 56th Place in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, just west of the University of Chicago campus, at the edge of Washington Park.

The location already was a part of Chicago’s history, said Jomo Cheatham, who guides visitors as a member of the museum’s education department. The first building, known as the Burnham Wing, is a city landmark designed by Daniel Burnham, a distinguished landscape architect known as the father of Chicago’s park system. Long used as a police administration building, the structure was obtained from the city through a long-term lease the year before the museum opened there. A large addition was added in 1993 as the Washington Wing, a memorial to the late Harold Washington, Chicago’s first African American mayor, and whose stepbrother, Ramon Price, was the museum’s chief curator until his death 15 years ago.

Currently, another Burnham building, formerly used as a stable for horses south of the present museum area, is being renovated as the next addition to the museum complex. As with other major Chicago museums, the land will continue to be owned by the park system.

The museum’s name comes from the first settler who was not a Native American in what became Chicago, a crossroads called Es-chi-ka-gou. That settler was Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, an African-Haitian, who arrived in 1779 and established a trading post that grew into the settlement that eventually grew into a thriving metropolis.

The present museum’s holdings consist of some 150,000 items, including works of art, printed materials and historic artifacts. Visiting exhibits also contribute to the visitor’s experience in what is widely regarded as the nation’s largest museum of African American history.

Visitors enter the museum through the Founders Hall, where eight portraits honor the principal founders. In a prominent location is a sculpture paying tribute to DuSable himself, a rendering of his appearance based upon remaining descriptions rather than an actual portrait, as none exists.

Another gallery displays art from the various African cultures and gives a perspective of the influences that were brought from Africa to the New World.

An especially popular area of the museum is known as “A Slow Walk to Greatness: The Harold Washington Story,” telling about the political life of the city’s first African American mayor.

A recent guest exhibit, “Sixteen Pieces,” consisted of a display of visual art inspired by the sacred literature of the Yoruba people of West Africa. Seventeen paintings created by artists to illuminate the Yoruba divination tradition and interpret verses from the ancient system called Ifa, giving insights into the the Yoruba view of life, death transformation and rebirth.

About 170,000 visitors tour the museum each year, including more than 10,000 public school students last year.

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Over the years, The John Birch Society — the organization of which The New American is an organ — has been besmirched by its ideological rivals for all manner of evil, most prominently of which is the sin of “racism.” More specifically, given that its membership has always been and remains predominantly white, it is “white racism” with which it has been charged.However, it is difficult to see how this charge can be made to fit once it is recognized that as far back as the 1960s, one of the most notableblack writers in the country — George S. Schuyler — became a member of JBS. Actually, Schuyler was among the most astute, courageous, wittiest, and impassioned writers, black, white, or other.

Of course, that Schuyler was a conservative and a member of JBS is not recognized by many because, regretfully, Schuyler himself is no longer remembered.

Born in 1895 in Rhode Island, Schuyler spent his formative years in Syracuse, New York. He served in World War I and, upon being discharged, moved to Harlem where he spent the rest of his days until his death in 1977. Yet during this time, Schuyler enjoyed quite an eventful existence.

Throughout the decade of the 1920s, he became associated with that circle of artists that history would recall as “the Harlem Renaissance.” During this same period, interestingly enough, Schuyler also joined the Socialist Party. However, in his autobiography, Black and Conservative, Schuyler admits that it was from a craving for intellectual stimulation, and not an affinity for socialism, that initially drew him to this organization. But even though it was only a relatively short while before he became disenchanted with the ideas of his associates, apparently his time as a member was not for naught, for from this juncture onward, Schuyler became an ardent enemy of all things that so much as remotely smelled of communism. To the end of combating “the red threat,” he employed his skills as a writer for such publications as H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury and The Pittsburg Courier, the largest black newspaper publication in America of which Schuyler was editor from 1922 until 1964.

The title of Schuyler’s autobiography, Black and Conservative (1966), is indeed a fitting description, for Schuyler was a conservative. That there were differences of various sorts between the races he never would have dreamt to deny. But these differences, he insisted, had nothing to do with nature; they werecultural. To put this point another way, like any good conservative, Schuyler underscored the monumental role that tradition plays in constituting identity. And in order to show that it was culture or tradition that accounts for differences between black and white Americans, he drew attention to their similarities — likenesses that ordinarily escape casual observers of both races.

For example, Schuyler repudiated the notion that there was something that can aptly be termed “the Harlem Renaissance” — if it is said to center around a distinctively black art. He wrote: “Negro art there has been, is, and will be among the numerous black nations of Africa; but to suggest the possibility of any such development among the ten million colored people in this republic is self-evident foolishness.” Slave songs, “the blues,” jazz, and “the Charleston” are alike the creations of blacks, but, as Schuyler notes, they originated with Southern blacks and, as such, are “foreign to Northern Negroes, West Indian Negroes, and African Negroes. In short, they are as “expressive or characteristic of the Negro race” as “the music and dancing of the Appalachian highlanders or the Dalmatian peasantry are expressive or characteristic of the Caucasian race.”

Within the context of America, so-called “Negro art” is in reality Eurocentric. As Schuyler put it, “the Aframerican [sic] is merely a lampblacked [sic] Anglo-Saxon.” He was not short on substantiation for this claim.

“The dean of the Aframerican literati is W.E.B. Du Bois, a product of Harvard and German universities; the foremost Aframerican sculptor is Meta Warwick Fuller, a graduate of leading American art schools and former student of Rodin; while the most noted Aframerican painter, Henry Ossawa Tanner, is dean of painters in Paris and has been decorated by the French Government.”

That black American artists are more akin to their white counterparts than either blacks and whites tend to realize is unsurprising once we consider that “the Aframerican is subject to the same economic and social forces that mold the actions and thoughts of the white American.” For instance, “in the homes of the black and white Americans of the same cultural and economic level one finds similar furniture, literature, and conversation.” Schuyler asks: “How, then, can the black American be expected to produce art and literature dissimilar to that of the white American?”

What Schuyler believes is true of the black American artist he is convinced is no less true of black Americans generally: their dispositions, tastes, and sensibilities are the products, not of a uniquely “black nature,” but the Eurocentric or Anglo-Saxon cultural traditions in which they were nurtured. Conservatives, forever mindful of the tradition or culturally constituted character of individual identity, have always regarded the radically individualistic notion of the “self-made man” as a fiction: no one can literally lift himself up by his own bootstraps, for every person is dependent, often in ways of which he is unaware, upon the assistance of others. Doubtless, Schuyler is of a piece with other conservative thinkers on this score. But he goes a step beyond this to rebuke the related idea that racial groups can shed the cultural traditions within which their distinguishing features were formed.

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With a fife and drum band playing Yankee Doodle and civil war re-enactors sweltering in the summer sun, a museum honoring the contribution of African Americans in the US Civil War moved into its new home in Washington Monday.

“It is finally finished, a great new 5,000 square foot (465 square meters) African American Civil War Museum,” Frank Smith, the director of the museum, said at a ceremony to install it in its new home overlooking a square housing a memorial to black Civil War soldiers.

The inauguration ceremony came as the United States marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in the country’s history.

More than 500,000 people were killed in the war, in which the north, or Union, and south battled over states’ rights and slavery.

Fighting began April 12, 1861, with an attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

Two years later, the first unit of black soldiers recruited in the north fought in a battle for Fort Wagner in South Carolina.

The battle took place on July 18, 1863 — 148 years to the day of the ceremony on Monday preserving the memory of fighters like the 54th Massachusetts infantry in a new, state-of-the-art museum.

The 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry suffered heavy losses in the assault on the key fort. Its white commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, and dozens of rank and file soldiers died, alongside several hundred other Union troops.

On Monday, a dozen African American men wearing the wool coats of Civil War soldiers from the north stood to attention outside the museum’s new home, sweltering in the heat and humidity that are a hallmark of Washington summers.

Alongside them, women re-enactors of the 19th-century era wore bustles under their skirts and carried parasols. A fife and drum band played “Yankee Doodle” as a color guard led the way a few hundred feet from the square to the new museum.

“This is a grand event, wonderful, just grand,” said Helen Hassell, who was portraying Mary Peake, an African American schoolteacher, born around 1823 in Virginia, a southern state that allowed slavery.

The museum aims to use historic documents, photographs, exhibits and oral histories to tell the stories of more than 200,000 African Americans who fought in the Civil War and their descendants, who 50 years ago launched the US civil rights movement.

“This museum will show us and teach us history the way it really happened, not the way it’s portrayed in the movies,” Hassell said.

“With a few exceptions, films about the civil war never show black soldiers. And yet President Lincoln said that had it not been for colored troops, the north would not have won the war.”

According to museum historians, Civil War era president Abraham Lincoln initially refused to allow blacks to fight, “until it became clear the Union would not be preserved without the aid of the black soldier.”

“On May 22, 1863, the Bureau of US Colored Troops was established to recruit, train, outfit and deploy what would become a force of 200,000 African American soldiers,” a museum handout says.

Americans elected their first African American president, Barack Obama, in 2008 — 145 years after blacks fought in the Civil War to keep the country united and around 50 years since the start of the civil rights movement.

“We’ve come a long way, yes, we have,” Hassell said, as the fife and drum band — made up of a black man, a white woman and a Latino — finished a stirring rendition of the US national anthem, the Star Spangled Banner.

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From the recognizable sounds of the O’Jays to the lesser-known art of Thornton Dial, the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta offers a little bit of everything.

There is a magic to almost any arts festival. You can feel the joy and affection flowing through the eager crowds of like-minded people who have come together to revere beauty, creativity and vision. For African Americans, there is no grander celebration of the community’s talents than theNational Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, which ended on Sunday. While the music pulses every year at the Essence Music Festival in New Orleans, the words are onstage at the Harlem Book Fair and the drums can trigger thrilling movement at DanceAfrica in Brooklyn, N.Y., the National Black Arts Festival is an amazing amalgamation of each of these art forms, and much more.

From music to visual arts, writing to drama, dance to film, it’s a 10-day feast of black talent. Not only can festivalgoers revel in their favorite forms of creative expression, but at NBAF, which began in 1988 and became an annual event in 2003, they also get introduced to new artists and art that can change the way they see the world. Indeed, this year’s festival was titled “Unexpected Encounters.”

Every year the festival honors some of the most important performers the black community has ever produced. This year the centerpiece of the 2011 Legends Celebration was the O’Jays, who for more than 50 years have provided the sound track to African-American life with hits like “Back Stabbers,” “For the Love of Money” and “I Love Music.” Like comfort food, these are the songs that warm our insides and remind us that we’re surrounded by love. Music is always a highlight of the festival, and the O’Jays were part of a slew of outstanding musical artists, in genres ranging from the blues to gospel, jazz to R&B.

While it reconnects us to the familiar, the festival always manages to surprise as well. One of these surprises was provided by the Bill Lowe Art Gallery in midtown Atlanta, which featured a breathtaking exhibit celebrating the work of one of the most important visual artists the South has ever produced — an 83-year-old, self-taught Alabama native named Thornton Dial, whose work is revered throughout the international art world but whose name is far from familiar to most African Americans.

Dial creates massive 3-D assemblages on canvas, made up of discarded materials like shoes, window frames, doors and broken dolls. His works sell for amounts well in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The exhibit, which ends Aug. 27, is called “Disasters Areas” and features the art that Dial created from the detritus of natural disasters such as the tsunami in Japan and the hurricanes, tornadoes and floods that have ravaged his native South.

Other noteworthy visual art events included renowned artist Radcliffe Bailey’s exhibit at the High Museum of Art — the first-ever headline exhibit by an Atlanta-based artist at the High, the leading art museum in the Southeast — and Texas-based Trenton Doyle Hancock’s exhibit at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s ACA Gallery, inside the Woodruff Arts Center. As usual, there was also the showcase of dozens of brilliant artists with works for sale at Greenbriar Mall.

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