By: ROGER CATLIN
NEW HAVEN — — Before Black History Month disappears next week, it’s worth noting a major show on the subject of African American identity that opened last week at the Yale University Art Gallery.
The 54 pieces in “Embodied: Black Identities in American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery” were chosen from the Yale collection by students from New Haven and from the University of Maryland, College Park, where the exhibit showed at the David C. Driskell Center last fall.
Organized around three large pieces, its centerpiece is Kerry James Marshall’s untitled 2009 acrylic of an African painter looking defiantly out from her work between the impressionist daubs of paint on a palette and a paint-by-number work behind her. From the no-nonsense gaze from the artist to the abstractions of her blouse, all manner of artistic possibility seem reflected.
That’s the case with the works near it, from a collage by Romare Howard Bearden to the geometric abstraction of Felrath Hines to the explosive color field expressionism of Sam Gilliam.