Art for Sale Page 2

By ROGER CATLIN

It’s the season of David C. Driskell in Connecticut museums.

In New Haven, a student-chosen exhibit “Embodied: Black Identities in American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery,” which includes Driskell’s 2002 screenprint, “Dancing Angel,” continues through June 26 at the Yale gallery. It was curated by students from Yale and from the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland in College Park, where the exhibit originally was shown. It opened at Yale last month with a lecture from Driskell, who is known as much as an educator, curator, scholar and collector as he is an artist.

But the big Driskell event has been happening at the Amistad Center for Art & Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford. The massive show of his prints over a half century, “Evolution: Five Decades of Printmaking,” with its 75 pieces, proved too large for the center, so it was broken into two parts. The first, which opened back in October, ran through early this month. The concluding half opened last weekend and runs through August.

A run of more than nine month makes “Evolution” in its two parts one of the longest-lasting shows in the state, and at more than nine months in length, the longest in Amistad history.

And yet, it is also one of the most popular exhibits in Amistad history, according to Alona C. Wilson, assistant director and curator for the Amistad Center.

Driskell is recognized as one of the most respected names in African American art and culture. His curating of the 1976 exhibit “Two Centuries of Black American Art: 1759-1950” laid the groundwork for the field of African American Art History.

He’s become a cultural advisor to stars including Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey, who consult with him on buying African and African-American works. He was also chairman of the Department of Art from 1978-1983 at University of Maryland, where he is now professor emeritus.

Driskell was given a National Humanities Medal by President Bill Clinton in 2000 and was elected National Academician by the National Academy in 2007. And yet for all these accomplishments, he still turns out an amazing array of art work.

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By David Greisman

The obvious, cliched route in starting off an article about a gallery exhibit featuring artwork and poetry alongside each other would be to begin with the familiar refrain of a picture being worth a thousand words.

The obvious, cliched route is not always the right route to take.

Artwork, on its own, has meaning. So, too, does writing. And when placed side by side, artwork and poetry not only can complement each other, but can combine to have new meaning.

This is what one finds while scanning the “Poets and Painters” exhibit at the Artists’ Gallery in downtown Columbia.

“It is a collaboration of the image and the word,” said Diane Dunn, a member of the artists’ cooperative who has two photographs and one painting in the show.

“When I saw them hanging there with a poem next to them, it made me think about the work in a whole new way, things I wasn’t necessarily thinking about when I created them,” Dunn said.

Some of the pairings at the exhibit are a product of the poets and artists getting together and seeing whether any of their writing or artwork there with something others had done. Others, meanwhile, found inspiration and created new works.

Linda Joy Burke wrote “Listening to One Black Bird” in response to Deborah Maklowski’s color pencil piece, “Blackbird,” according to Dunn. And Tara Hart saw Debbie Hoeper’s painting, “The Plains,” and decided to rework an old poem into “Plain of Gladness.”

“The most exciting thing about a show like this is the synergistic effect of reading a poem alongside a piece of artwork,” Dunn said.

“Whether the poem was written specifically for a painting, or whether the artist created a work in response to a poem, or whether poets and painters just found one another’s work and decided to put them together for the show, it makes both poem and painting something more than when experienced alone.”

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By Culturekiosque Staff

NEW YORK, 27 MARCH 2011 — The American artist Romare Bearden’s oeuvre of more than 2,000 known works in many media reveals the diverse influences of earlier Western masters ranging from Duccio, Giotto, and de Hooch to Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse, as well as his fascination with African art (particularly sculpture, masks, and textiles), Byzantine mosaics, Japanese prints, and Chinese paintings. They also reveal the places where Bearden lived and worked: the rural south; northern cities, principally Pittsburgh and New York’s Harlem; and the Caribbean island of St. Martin. They also reflect his wide range of interests and explore often overlapping themes of religion, ritual practice, everyday life, jazz clubs, brothels, history, mythology, and literature.

On view until 21 May 2011, the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York presents its second solo show of Bearden’s work and the first to focus exclusively on collage, the medium through which Bearden arrived at his mature style. Created between 1964 and 1983, the twenty-one works in the exhibition exemplify Bearden’s exceptional talent for storytelling as well as his mastery of the medium’s fragmentation of form and space.

While Bearden’s early work consisted of figural paintings inspired by the social realism that dominated the 1930s, a trip to Paris in 1950 inspired him to move closer to abstraction. In the early 1960s, he turned to collage in “an attempt to redefine the image of man in terms of the black experience.” Cutting and pasting photographs, paper, fabric, newspaper, and magazines, Bearden often added gouache, ink, pencil, and oil to his kaleidoscopic surfaces, creating dazzling compositions that focused on themes as expansive as his own talent. He redefined the image of humanity not in terms of “the black experience,” but black experiences — rural and urban, African, American, and Caribbean. Timed to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of Bearden’s birth, Romare Bearden: Collage, A Centennial Exhibition offers a thrilling array of histories, identities, activities, and locations — from the African kingdoms referenced in King and Queen of Diamonds (1964), to the migration north evoked in Sunset Limited (1974), to the multiple city lives that appear in The Tenement World (1969).

Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, the seat of Mecklenburg County, on 2 September 1911. About 1914, his family joined in the Great Migration north, settling in New York City, which remained Bearden’s base for the rest of his life. Hr studied at Boston University before receiving his BS in Education from New York University in 1935. The following year, he attended the Art Students League, where he studied with George Grosz.

From 1933 to 1937, Bearden also worked as a cartoonist, publishing drawings in The Crisis (the journal of the NAACP) and the Baltimore-based Afro-American. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army and then used funding from the GI Bill to study art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. Bearden’s achievements as an artist were matched only by his energy as a scholar and arts activist at a time when art history was defined almost exclusively in terms of whiteness. He was a founding member of Spiral group (1963), a co-founder with Norman Lewis and Ernest Crichlow of the Cinque Gallery (1969) — a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of work by artists of color — and an active founding member of the Studio Museum in Harlem (1968). In 1970, Bearden became one of the fifty founding members of the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, established to “define, preserve, promote, and develop the arts and letters of black people.”

His many awards and honors include the National Medal of Arts he received from President Ronald Reagan in 1987, one year before he died in 1988.

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By Rodger Mullen

Growing up, artist Kadir Nelson was not a big baseball fan.

Considering that he has devoted much of his career to the sport, it’s a little ironic.

“I’m still not a huge fan in that I don’t follow any particular team, although I do enjoy going to games,” said Nelson, 36. “I’m more of a fan of the history of the game.”

A big chunk of that history will be on display in “We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball,” an exhibit chronicling the leagues that flourished in the years before Jackie Robinson integrated the game in 1947.

The display features 33 original paintings and 13 sketches that were featured in Nelson’s book of the same name. The exhibit opens Friday at the Arts Council of Fayetteville/Cumberland County and continues through April 16.

Nelson’s oil paintings, some of them 8 feet in size, capture the grandeur and grit of the leagues that produced such legendary players as Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson and Cool Papa Bell. The artist – a two-time Caldecott Honor Award winner – shows both the on-field heroics the players accomplished and the off-field discrimination they had to endure.

Some of Nelson’s images were used on stamps issued by the Post Office last year to commemorate the Negro Leagues. The award-winning book, which can be found in local libraries, was named one of the best illustrated children’s books of 2008 by The New York Times.

The exhibit is currently on tour throughout the country. After it closes in Fayetteville, it will move to Chicago.

Calvin Mims, art services director at the Arts Council, said the exhibit is the third in an annual series the council has presented in collaboration with The Friends of African and African-American Art.

“We had no idea when we planned the exhibit that the U.S. Postal Service had selected him to do a commemorative stamp on the Negro Leagues,” Mims said. “That sort of really kicked the excitement up into high gear because we figured we had picked a winner. It was just a home run, no pun intended.”

The Arts Council has scheduled a series of events in connection with the exhibit. Nelson will appear at a grand opening Friday from 7 to 9 p.m. to talk about the exhibit and sign copies of his book.

The Observer recently spoke to Nelson by phone from his Los Angeles studio. Here are some excerpts from that conversation:

Observer: How did you come up with the idea for “We Are the Ship”?

Nelson: When I was in college, I was asked to do a painting on the Negro Leagues. It was something I knew relatively nothing about. In my research, I came across the Ken Burns documentary “Baseball.” In that documentary, there was an African-American man named Buck O’Neil who told the story in such a charming and compelling way that I became hooked on the subject. That painting grew into several paintings. Over 12 years, it grew into almost 50 paintings.

Observer: Where does the title come from?

Nelson: When the leagues were formed in 1920 by Rube Foster, he made a very bold declaration that the Negro Leagues are the ship, all else are the sea. I like to explain that as the Declaration of Independence from the Major Leagues.

Observer: How has the exhibit tour been going? Have you been getting good response?

Nelson: The tour has been really popular at every stop. I attended the opening in Muskegon, Mich., the beginning of February, and it was really well received. Almost 1,000 people visited opening day, and we had 500 at the reception. They gave me a standing ovation when I got up to talk.

Observer: What did you try to convey in your paintings?

Nelson: My intention was to show the strength and integrity and dignity of the players. To use the mantra of independence in each of the paintings, in the stature of the players. It’s an epic piece of history, even though a lot of people don’t know about it. The players and owners formed their own league, a very successful league, out of sheer will and their love of the game of baseball.

Observer: What interests you about the Negro Leagues?

Nelson: I was interested, I think, by the story. It’s a really great story of African-Americans who were barred from playing in the Major Leagues but didn’t give up. Out of their love for the game and their talent for baseball, they basically created something from nothing. I think it was an inspiring story. They created the league with the intention of integrating the Major Leagues, and they were able to do that in a bold and successful way. The Negro Leagues became one of the most successful African-American business ventures up to that time.

Observer: Do you have a favorite Negro League player?

Nelson: I don’t have a favorite player, I like many of them for many different reasons. They all made their invaluable contributions to the game. If I have a favorite picture in the portraits, it’s probably Josh Gibson. Josh Gibson is the embodiment of the triumph and the tragedy of the Negro Leagues. He looks very confident, but if you look into his eyes, you also see sadness. Josh was one of the greatest Negro League players, but he wasn’t able to play in the majors. He died just before the majors were integrated. The triumph is that he helped form and sustain a successful Negro League that made it possible for African-Americans to play in the majors.

Observer: Do you think baseball has dropped in popularity among African-Americans?

Nelson: Baseball has dropped in popularity across the board. Certainly, African-Americans have not played the game in the number they did in previous decades. There has been speculation about why that is that we don’t have time to go into here. My intention is really to share this great history with people of all ages, particularly young people. To share a great history and spark an interest in the great game of baseball.

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