This article is part of our latest Fine Arts & Exhibits special report, about how art institutions are helping audiences discover new options for the future.
“Fighting for Change: Fist Full of Tears,” the title of one of the five works Jamel Robinson is showing at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, N.Y., encapsulates the artist’s love of wordplay as well as philosophy about what it means to be a Black man making art in America.
The piece is a pair of boxing gloves covered in black paint and pennies mounted on a large black, green and white canvas.
“As Black people we’re fighting for change, and as a Black artist, we’re always trying to move forward — it always feels like we’re fighting for change and sometimes literally for change,” said Mr. Robinson, 42, who was born and raised in Harlem.
He is the teaching artist-in-residence at the museum in conjunction with the “African American Art in the 20th Century” exhibition, which includes 43 works by some of the country’s most famous Black artists. Mr. Robinson’s first museum show and the 20th Century exhibition will run concurrently from Oct. 15 through Jan. 16.
The Hudson River Museum will be the fifth and last museum to host “African American Art in the 20th Century,” a smaller touring exhibition of a show that was originally curated and exhibited by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2012.
The Yonkers museum jumped at the chance to show such acclaimed artists as Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, as well as those lesser known to a broader community.
“We’ve been talking for three or four years, and when we were offered the opportunity to be a part of the tour, there wasn’t even a discussion — it was such a unique opportunity,” said Laura Vookles, chair of the museum’s curatorial department. “It’s pretty much a who’s who of African American art and really of major American artists in general in the 20th century, some of whom were greatly admired in art circles during their lifetime and others who have been rediscovered.”
When visitors first enter the two-room, 3,500-square-foot gallery space, they will be greeted by “Moon Masque,” a striking multicolored oil and collage work by Loïs Mailou Jones, who was born in Boston in 1905 and died in Washington in 1998. Created in 1971, it was influenced by her first trip to Africa the year before; in the center is a papier-mâché replica of a mask from Zaire, surrounded by mask-like profiles.
This piece touches on many aspects of the exhibition, Ms. Vookles said. Ms. Jones comes out of the Harlem Renaissance tradition and then, like many artists, she also turned to the art of Africa for inspiration.
The concept of masks also runs throughout the show, “things that are open and closed, hidden and protected and revealed,” Ms. Vookles added. “And I also really loved it that we could highlight a woman artist.”
The original exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum included 100 works, half of those photographs. The photographs couldn’t tour because of concerns about light exposure, said Virginia Mecklenburg, the museum’s chief curator; the catalog, including the photographs, however, is available with the Hudson River Museum exhibition.
“It was very important to me to include work by artists who were not household names,” Ms. Mecklenburg said. It was also vital that visitors see a wide variability of work, “so they will understand there isn’t any such thing as ‘African American art.’ There are African American artists who work in a huge range of medium.”
The Hudson River Museum show runs somewhat chronologically; one of the earliest pieces in the exhibition is Palmer Hayden’s “The Janitor Who Paints,” from around 1930. Mr. Hayden, who died in 1973, shows a Black man painting in a cramped apartment, a trash can in the foreground, while a woman nearby holds a baby. Mr. Hayden has said the subject is a friend who, like himself, was an artist who supported himself as a janitor.
“If you were Black and you were a painter and probably supporting yourself with another job, people were not calling you an artist — they were calling you the janitor,” Ms. Vookles said.
That work hangs next to Hughie Lee-Smith’s “The Stranger,” painted in the late 1950s, which features a lone man — his race is not clear — isolated in a rural setting of hillsides and farmhouses. “There is this dichotomy of the urban and rural and you can feel isolated out in the country, but can also feel isolated in the city,” Ms. Vookles added.
Much of the abstract art is grouped toward the end of the exhibition as “that was its own story,” she said. “A lot of people wanted to box artists in and say you should be painting Black subjects, and part of freedom for those artists was the freedom to do any kind of art that they wanted to do.”
That was true of Norman Lewis, whose 1962 painting “Evening Rendezvous” is both abstract and deeply political. At first glance, it is merely dabs and amorphous shapes of red, white and blue on a green-gray background, but a closer look reveals that the white smudges, are, in fact, hooded Klansmen.
One of Mr. Robinson’s favorite pieces in the show is by Renée Stout, one of the few living artists whose work is in the exhibition. “The Colonel’s Cabinet,” created between 1991 and 1994, is an installation piece — a cabinet filled with objects from a Colonel Frank, an explorer the artist created.
The cabinet contains what can be perceived as a jumble, but are items actually methodically made and placed by the artist, such as photos, maps, statuettes, a musical instrument, a small skull. “I wanted to evoke the same feeling in the viewer that I have when I encounter an ethnographic piece — a sense of mystery. What do these objects mean?” said Ms. Stout.
For Mr. Robinson, the work resonates deeply, reminding him of his grandmother’s apartment in Harlem and her collections.
“It might not look intentional at first glance, but you know everything is placed there for a reason, for you to ask questions about it,” he said. “I think that’s my favorite thing about art — does this thing leave me with the opportunity to ask questions, or is it already giving me all the information?”
Mr. Robinson’s show of five works includes “Fighting for Change: Fist Full of Tears” (the latter half of the name comes from the title of a song by his friend, the singer-songwriter Maxwell) and one made specifically for the exhibition, entitled “Beauty from Ashes”; the show carries the same title. It consists of sand, a small flag and cross, and 6,000 pennies all mounted on a 48-inch by 72-inch wooden canvas.
The work has multiple layers of meaning, Mr. Robinson said: the pennies represent the devaluation of African Americans, who are overlooked, much as pennies themselves are. Enslaved African Americans had to cross sand when taken to America and came to this country penniless, forced to work and labor and then left without resources. The flag and cross demonstrate how the country and religion have oppressed people, but “these iconic symbols are not all bad,” he said. “They’ve been used in the wrong way.”
Ms. Stout said Mr. Robinson’s work continues the Smithsonian show’s significance of nine years ago.
“He represents the reality that a younger generation of artists continues to embrace abstraction and challenge the notion of what ‘Black art’ is supposed to look like,” she said. “The ways we create and express ourselves are as diverse as we are as people.”
"artist" - Google News
October 19, 2021 at 04:00PM
https://ift.tt/3aO3lwW
‘Fighting for Change’: Life as a Black Artist - The New York Times
"artist" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2FwLdIu
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "‘Fighting for Change’: Life as a Black Artist - The New York Times"
Post a Comment