Art for Sale Page 2

It’s official: Kimora Lee Simmons has parted ways with Baby Phat, a fashion line that she launched with her ex-husband Russell Simmons.

Late last week, the former model broke news to her Twitter followers that she would be leaving the label behind, to instead focus on her other labels. But, the New York Post’s Page Six now reports that she was dumped by the label, which is owned by Kellwood Co.

“Kimora was going over budget. She’d pay herself a fee to be in the ads, plus she paid her children fees to appear in ads. It costs thousands of dollars to airbrush her because she’s a size 10. Plus, they spent a ton of money on body doubles. They would shoot another model in the clothes, and take Kimora’s head and put in on her body,” the gossip column writes, quoting an unnamed source.

“It’s time for me to move on and further expand my other businesses and create a new phenomenon. I adore all those who have faithfully been with me since the beginning,” Simmons says in a statement. “I’m forever dedicated to my family, fans and customers. My inspiration has always come from the fabulous women who have been with me through the years as we’ve grown from young party girls to power players! We’re ready for our next journey together and we’re taking a whole new generation of incredible young women with us. Girl power unite!”

Simmons, who divorced hip-hop music mogul Russell Simmons in 2008, served as creative director of the label, and her other business interests, include her clothing lines, KLS, Fabulosity and Kouture by Kimora Collection for Macys. Russell Simmons sold Phat Farm to Kellwood in 2004 for $140 million.

After the news broke, Simmons headed back to Twitter to tweet a few more updates to fans. She told them that there wouldn’t be a Baby Phat fashion show at this year’s Fashion week, tweeting “I will not b there. And corporate has decided not 2 do one!”

Simmons, who also is the star of her own reality show, “Kimora: Life in the Fab Lane,” tweeted that her daughters with Russell Simmons, Ming Lee and Aoki Lee, will cease modeling for the Baby Phat line as well.

Artist Stacey Brown, currently residing in Atlanta, Georgia offers an eclectic collection of original paintings for the contemporary art lover. Born and reared in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, his artistic journey of discovery began with aspirations for a career in graphic design. After graduating from the Art Institute of Atlanta, he embarked on a successful ten year career in his chosen field, but something was “missing” in his life.

That something “missing” drew him to his paint brush, and he decided to pursue his true love, fine art. His passion for the arts has led him to a successful career as a full-time artist, expressing himself through acrylic paintings on glass, and watercolor on paper. He remains visually aware of his surroundings by incorporating colors that correspond with current contemporary trends, as well as remaining in tune with his roots with traditional landscapes, and urban neighborhood scenes that exude keen observations of everyday life.

Stacey’s paintings have graced the walls of the mansion on the hit reality show BET College Hill, the Atlanta Street of Dreams Home Tour, and the 2008 Tom Joyner Fantastic Cruise. Just recently, he was commissioned by Verizon Wireless to create an original painting entitled, “Crowns of Praise” for the How Sweet the Sound 11 city national gospel tour. www.howsweetthesound.com His painting will represent ed the Atlanta market. Discriminating art lovers throughout the country and abroad collect his eclectic and contemporary creations, which has led him to emerge as a visionary artistic talent for the 21st century.

A startling vision greets visitors to “The Art of Romare Bearden,” the awe-inspiring retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. At the airy mezzanine entrance to the show, a photograph of Bearden’s remarkable 1972 collage, “The Block,” has been blown up to the size of a mural, supersizing patchworked faces and Harlem tenements and illustrating, in a big way, Bearden’s making of a world.

“The Art of Romare Bearden” is on display at the National Gallery of Art, Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue, NW in Washington, DC until January 4, 2004. Information on all activities related to the show, including lectures, films, videos, concerts, children’s programs and the exhibition shop is online at www.nga.gov.

“The Art of Romare Bearden” is sched-uled to travel, with slight variation, to five cities: the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, February 7 – May 16, 2004; the Dallas Museum of Art, June 20 – September 12, 2004; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, October 14, 2004 – January 9, 2005; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, January 29 – April 24, 2005.

A hardcover edition of the catalogue for The Art of Romare Bearden, as well as a smaller scale picture book, Romare Bearden: Collage of Memories, by Jan Greenberg, is published and distributed by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. A softcover edition of the exhibition catalogue is published by the National Gallery of Art.

A posthumously published children’s book by Romare Bearden, Lil Dan, the Drummer Boy, A Civil War Story, was recently published by Simon & Schuster in conjunction with the Romare Bearden Foundation.

The Romare Bearden Foundation, established by Bearden’s family to perpetuate the legacy of Romare Bearden and Nanette Rohan Bearden, contributed immensely to the current exhibit, catalogues and books. It is one of only a few foundations dedicated to a Black artist. More information about them can be found at www.beardenfoundation.org.

“Romare Bearden Revealed,” a new CD by the Branford Marsalis Quartet, with guests Harry Connick, Jr., Wynton Marsalis, Doug Wamble and the Marsalis Family, features jazz tunes that Bearden used as titles for his paintings, as well as works by jazz artists inspired by Bearden’s work. www.marsalismusic.com

“Showtime” by Romare Bearden
You see how Bearden takes scraps of assorted images and makes them into bigger and bigger images—a boy sitting on a stoop, a stylized mother and child, an entire altered cityscape, void of scale, that is very real. And you think you get it (and that you’ve gotten it first): Bearden’s technique of piecing together seemingly contradictory pieces of the world, and making them into a new whole, is nothing short of a metaphor for the African American experience.

But, on entering the show, you see that the writer Ralph Ellison had this same idea a long time ago. “Bearden’s combinations of technique is eloquent of the sharp breaks, leaps in consciousness, distortions, paradoxes, reversals, telescoping of time and surreal blending of styles, values, hopes and dreams which characterize much of the Negro American history,” Ellison wrote in 1968.

Oh well. So much for “getting,” in 2003, anything new about Bearden. Leaf through more than 300 pages of the exhibition’s catalogue, view the new 30-minute video or survey a list of the special programs associated with the show and it is obvious that few rocks have been unturned when it comes to this celebrated American artist and visionary. But what each visitor to this show can get that is new, in DC or in the five cities to which it will travel, is their own appreciation of Bearden’s grand metaphor, as well as seeing Bearden’s art as a story about his own remarkable life and vision. There are 130 works to see and maybe you will be taken by the artist’s repeated guitars and trains, the music and movement of African Americans in his era. Maybe you will be drawn to his references to traditional African religions. Maybe, knowing how we Black folks joke about the size and shape of the human cranium, you might laugh at his oft-repeated motif of half-melon shaped heads.

Romare Bearden was a husky, redbone man of many passions and joys. He was born Fred Romare Harry Bearden on Sept. 2, 1911 in Charlotte, North Carolina but, while still a toddler, moved to Harlem with his parents, Bessye Johnson Bearden and Howard Bearden. The family’s Harlem circle included artists and intellectuals of the day such as Paul Robeson, Charles Alston, Aaron Douglas and W.E.B. DuBois. His early roots in the South, in Harlem and at his maternal grandparent’s home in Pittsburgh, Pa., forever shaped his vision as an artist and man. He loved literature and loved to tell stories. He would eventually compose music and songs. While still in college, he pitched with the Boston Tigers from the old Negro baseball leagues and was offered a position on the Philadelphia Athletics baseball team—and a place in the major leagues—if he would pass for White. He declined. He took part in important movements of Black artists, including Harlem’s 306 group during the 1940’s and the Spiral group of the 1960’s. At the age of 43 he married Nanette Rohan, who was his partner and confidant until he died of bone cancer in 1988 at the age of 76. “The function of the artist,” he said, “is to organize the facets of life according to his imagination.”

The curator of the show, Ruth Fine, has organized it into nine manageable sections that naturally fit the flow of Bearden’s life. The first, “Origins,” begins with Bearden’s work in the 1940’s. Omitted from display, and only briefly referenced in the catalogue, are his social-realist paintings from the Depression, which covered subject matter such as soup kitchens. In the 1930’s, he also published political illustrations and cartoons in periodicals such as the Baltimore Afro-American, The Crisis and Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. By the 40’s, his work was less “realist” and moved closer to his signature style that married abstraction and representation. The influence of cubism, Picasso and African art is obvious but his subject matter and inspiration are rooted in the Black church of both the South and North. Most of the paintings in this section, including “The Visitation,” “The Family,” “They That are Delivered from the Noise of the Archers” and “Presage” have biblical references and, with their cubist influence, could easily be re-imagined as stained glass windows in a church.

Special attention is given in the next section, “Circa 1964,” to the small-scale collages Bearden created while with the Spiral group, to comment on the Civil Rights movement and struggles of African Americans. Using cut-outs from magazines like Ebony and Jet, and combining them with other paper and materials such as paint, graphite and ink, he created a signature style that would evolve with ever-more complexity to include assorted papers, original photographs, photostats and manipulations of scale, proportion and color.

His collages grew in size after this period as he reconnected, as he would throughout his life, with his Mecklenburg County roots in North Carolina. Dedicated to the county, the show’s next section includes large-scale collages such as the warm and welcoming “Old Couple,’ rhythmic, complex works such as “Three Men” and “Three Folk Musicians” and the well-known “Palm Sunday Procession.” The exhibit is housed on two floors at the gallery and as your climb the stairs from one to the next, you sense a blossoming of ambition and confidence in his approach. In the next sections, “The City and its Music” and “Stories,” the emphasis has moved away from printed images in magazines and toward the creation of images with various vividly colored papers. He also began to intersperse images of African masks with Black faces, referencing both our African roots and the root that modern art has in African sculpture.

There are still fewer “found” images in the sections “Women,” “Monotypes” and “Collaborations” By the time the show winds up with his late work, completed primarily when he and his wife relocated to St. Martin, the canvases of water-colored fragments are brilliantly alive with a dense, breath-taking landscape. Bearden worked up until the last months of his life. In this final section, the works “In a Green Shade,” a glorious rendering of the earth’s splendor, and “Mecklenburg Autumn,” which references again his place of birth, are like the artist closing the circle on his vision and world, which this exhibit captures for us all to see.

This article first appeared on www.BET.com.

— October 20, 2003

Negro art “made in America” is as non-existent as the widely advertised profundity of Cal Coolidge, the “seven years of progress” of Mayor Hylan, or the reported sophistication of New Yorkers. 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. Eager apostles from Greenwich Village, Harlem, and environs proclaimed a great renaissance of Negro art just around the corner waiting to be ushered on the scene by those whose hobby is taking races, nations, peoples, and movements under their wing. New art forms expressing the “peculiar” psychology of the Negro were about to flood the market. In short, the art of Homo Africanus was about to electrify the waiting world. Skeptics patiently waited. They still wait.

True, from dark-skinned sources have come those slave songs based on Protestant hymns and Biblical texts known as the spirituals, work songs and secular songs of sorrow and tough luck known as the blues, that outgrowth of ragtime known as jazz (in the development of which whites have assisted), and the Charleston, an eccentric dance invented by the gamins around the public market-place in Charleston, S. C. No one can or does deny this. But these are contributions of a caste in a certain section of the country. They are foreign to Northern Negroes, West Indian Negroes, and African Negroes. They are no more expressive or characteristic of the Negro race than the music and dancing of the Appalachian highlanders or the Dalmatian peasantry are expressive or characteristic of the Caucasian race. If one wishes to speak of the musical contributions of the peasantry of the south, very well. Any group under similar circumstances would have produced something similar. It is merely a coincidence that this peasant class happens to be of a darker hue than the other inhabitants of the land. One recalls the remarkable likeness of the minor strains of the Russian mujiks to those of the Southern Negro.

As for the literature, painting, and sculpture of Aframericans—such as there is—it is identical in kind with the literature, painting, and sculpture of white Americans: that is, it shows more or less evidence of European influence. In the field of drama little of any merit has been written by and about Negroes that could not have been written by whites. The dean of the Aframerican literati written by and about Negroes that could not have been written by whites. 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 American painters in Paris and has been decorated by the French Government. Now the work of these artists is no more “expressive of the Negro soul”—as the gushers put it—than are the scribblings of Octavus Cohen or Hugh Wiley.

This, of course, is easily understood if one stops to realize that the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon. If the European immigrant after two or three generations of exposure to our schools, politics, advertising, moral crusades, and restaurants becomes indistinguishable from the mass of Americans of the older stock (despite the influence of the foreign-language press), how much truer must it be of the sons of Ham who have been subjected to what the uplifters call Americanism for the last three hundred years. Aside from his color, which ranges from very dark brown to pink, your American Negro is just plain American. Negroes and whites from the same localities in this country talk, think, and act about the same. Because a few writers with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion that the black American is so “different” from his white neighbor has gained wide currency. The mere mention of the word “Negro” conjures up in the average white American’s mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappey, and the various monstrosities scrawled by the cartoonists. Your average Aframerican no more resembles this stereotype than the average American resembles a composite of Andy Gump, Jim Jeffries, and a cartoon by Rube Goldberg.