January 18 – February 24, 2007
The notion that Black artists produce something that is particularly Black art is held up for examination in this exhibit at the Flomenhaft Gallery. This stellar assemblage of artists includes: Emma Amos, Benny Andrews, Romare Bearden, Beverly Buchanan, Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold, and Carrie Mae Weems. What is particularly obvious is that Black artists share no artistic program; each has a special voyage and song to sing. All create with unique visions whether about their Black heritage, their American heritage or political or societal influences. However, one ingredient or thread can be felt that does weave through all the work and it is an undertow of the kind of loneliness that will come from a loss of contact with one’s ancient roots and that penetrates beneath the surfaces. Surely you will see that out of this alienation, isolation and deprivation and through heroic struggles have come some glorious art.
The ink drawing from 1974 that we include by Benny Andrews was done ten years after Congress gave President Johnson the right to do whatever he deemed necessary to defend South East Asia, after ten years of bloodshed in Vietnam, after more than 57,000 American servicemen were killed, and American pilots and crews of downed aircrafts were taken to horrific prisons. Benny Andrew’s drawing of a mother’s scream for her son lying dead in a pool of blood across a cavernous emptiness is as passionate as any American mother could feel today for her sons as they are killed daily in Iraq. The chasm between mother and son provides the space for viewers to contemplate and share every mother’s loss.
What makes Emma Amos’s art so powerful is the sustained tension which follows her alternation between references to a lifetime of memories, an intellectual rigor, a glorious handling of figurative and abstract painting, her excitement about Black American heroes, a love of music, and her bittersweet take on life. And with an undaunted spirit, she takes ready shots at assumptions about skin color and privileges of power and whiteness, often tweaking prejudices and societal notions. Many of her paintings and prints are bordered with African fabrics, sometimes collected, others that she weaves since she is a master weaver herself. “Beauty” is printed on velvety fabric with lithography inks using a hand-cut relief plate and African fabric borders.
What more can be said about the cynosure of this exhibit, Romare Bearden? And what more can we say except that it is worth making the pilgrimage if only to see “Up at Mintons?” This is a collage with painted elements for which Bearden was the absolute master. The work offers a microcosmic view of the jazz musicians’ life after their gigs, when they came to Minton’s during the Harlem Renaissance days and played their hearts out by the light of the moon and until daybreak. This is more than a work of artistic excellence. It has a brevity of statement, a chromatic impact, and a sure hand in the way the elements respond to each other, structuring space, emotion and mood. No wonder it is the work chosen by the Bearden Foundation for a picture puzzle sold in many museums and for their 2005 engagement book cover. Another, “Maternity/Ancestral Legend” 1972, is a metaphor for motherhood with a compelling power that freezes the image in our minds. When UNICEF was searching for the perfect Madonna and child for Christmas cards, at least 15 years ago, they asked to reproduce this one and it is no wonder they still use it as one of their holiday images.
Beverly Buchanan’s shack architecture in paintings and sculpture are poetic works as rich in dignity as they are in complexity. They evoke the spectra of people, places, and a culture that was fast disappearing in the byways of North and South Carolina, of people that could neither read nor write but raised children who became doctors, lawyers and all forms of creative adults. The pastel paintings of shacks are vibrant with the vitality and the dignity of the poor farmers who lived in the shacks and raised families in improvised lives. The works are abstracted with emotions emphasized with rhythms created by unruly brush strokes and a childlike scribbled overlay. She says of her work that “it is as much about evoking the state of mind of undaunted spirits as defining an opposition in space.” And each of her makeshift sculptures, created out of scavenged materials, she calls a “portrait,” in homage to an artist who lived in a shack or a friend she made along her trek.
Whereas we know Jacob Lawrence’s art best by his harsh reminders of social and political injustices, the work on view here is a nostalgic ink drawing. Done in 1961, it is entitled, “Chess On Broadway.” Lawrence was born in 1917 and at age thirteen came to live in Harlem. At Utopian Children’s House, a day care center, he learned from Charles Alston the idea of representing his ideas in a personal language. The way he came to emphasize shapes, lines, patterns and movement became his hallmark. It is certainly apparent in the drawing in our exhibit. We would not have to say the author of this work for it to immediately call out his name. The preoccupation of the players is so perfectly depicted in his boldly distinctive style and the groupings so carefully orchestrated with a perfection of angular austerity, that it is hard to imagine any artist besting this work to communicate that time, place or involvement in a game.
Faith Ringgold is a quintessential story-teller and a remarkable artist. The work in our exhibit, “Double Dutch on the Golden Gate Bridge,” 1988, is one of four quilts about being free to go and do whatever one can wish for. In this case it is being free to play a favorite after-school street game of black girls in Harlem but transferred to the Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco. Of course, it is Harlem in the background where Faith grew up, not the Golden Gate which opens into the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean. Being free is the basis of Faith’s philosophy and foundation, “Anyone Can Fly.” It originates with her most famous storybook and quilt, “Tar Beach,” so named for the roof of the apartment houses in Harlem where people went at night in summers to cool off and relax. In Faith’s story eight-year-old Cassie Lightfoot will take her brother for a flight over an ice cream factory and she assures him that ‘anyone can fly.’ What is true of Cassie is also true of Faith. She is impervious to melancholy thought. Determined to create her own life, when confronted with a challenge, she never backs down.
How fortunate are we to exhibit the works of photographer, Carrie Mae Weems in a show that asks What’s In a Color? She says it all and uses a graphic device which gives the photographs that added punch. No equivocation here as “Blue Black Boy,” “Chocolate Colored Man,” and “High Yella Girl,” with texts Silk-Screened on mat in editions or 3, each serves up memorial salvos of anti-bigotry. Contrasted with this grouping is a Weem’s remarkable four-part suite, two gelatin silver prints plus two text panels in a photo edition of 10, entitled the “Sea Island Series.” They evoke the superstitions of the Gullah people of Georgia’s Sea Islands. It is an important storehouse of African American history because people living there were cut off from the melting pot of the mainland and retained a more pure version of customs, language, games and song.
All of the works in this exhibit are orchestrated to view humanity with a fresh eye.