ART REVIEWS; 150 Years of African-American Art
Published: March 12, 2000
Walter O. Evans Collection
Heckscher Museum of Art, 2 Prime Avenue, Huntington. Through April 9. (631) 351- 3250.
Spanning a 150-year period, from the mid-19th century to the late 1990’s, the Evans collection highlights a wide range of artistic achievement. While it makes no claim to comprehensiveness, it includes examples by some of the most notable African-American artists, from Robert Scott Duncanson and Edmonia Lewis to Alma Thomas and Richard Hunt.
Established figures like Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Aaron Douglas are prominently featured. In addition to several of Bearden’s characteristic mixed media collages, with their visionary treatment of ordinary experiences, there are two early works that show his mastery of Cubist formal dynamics. Lawrence’s expressionistic distortion, also rooted in modernism, serves him equally well in genre subjects and grand narratives like ”The Genesis Creation Sermon,” a series of eight gouaches that bring the biblical story vividly to life. Douglas, one of the foremost artists of the Harlem Renaissance, specialized in bold stylizations that combine African-inspired motifs with black American themes. His gouaches and ink drawings — for example, ”The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a sinuously rhythmic silhouette — often relate to literary works, but amplify rather than illustrate them.