Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Tribute to Black artists signals museum changes
In the fall of 1962, Black artist Jacob Lawrence made a 10-day visit to the then-newly independent West African nation of Nigeria. The American Society of African Culture in Lagos had mounted a retrospective of Lawrence’s work and invited him to lecture.
After his show closed, Lawrence briefly visited the city of Ibadan, meeting with local artists — particularly with members of the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, publishers of the influential literary magazine, Black Orpheus.
The Nigeria that Lawrence encountered — vibrant, chaotic, creative — intrigued him. He wanted to know it better. And so, to finance a more complete experience, Lawrence and his wife, artist Gwendolyn Knight, sold their New York apartment.
In 1964 — at the very moment when the civil rights movement was transforming the United States and when West Africans were feeling the hopeful beginnings of political independence — the Lawrences touched down in Lagos. They would stay eight months, absorbing the culture, visiting markets, giving workshops and talking politics with new friends. Plus, they sketched and painted.
The work that they and the African artists made can be seen in “Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence and the Mbari Club,” which recently opened at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Va. In February, the exhibit moves to the New Orleans Museum of Art and then in June to the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio.
According to the exhibit’s originator, Kimberli Gant, curator of modern and contemporary art at New York’s Brooklyn Museum and the former modern art curator at the Chrysler, “The show is about how much incredible artistic expression happens when people have the opportunity to be in a different environment and learn from each other.”
Gant and her co-curator, Ndubuisi Ezeluomba, curator of African art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, spent the better part of the last six years organizing the exhibition, locating out-of-print copies of Black Orpheus magazine and gathering artworks from other institutions and private collections.
Admirers of Lawrence’s work will find his African work familiar and
surprising. Some of it straddles the line between the representational and the surreal. The images he created are dense and overwhelming.
But the show also features the production of the artists whom Lawrence either worked with or learned about through his new friends at the Mbari Club. Notable are mixed-media pieces by a Nigerian painter named Twins Seven-Seven and the aluminum reliefs in counter-repousse by Asiru Olatunde.
“Lawrence wasn’t in Nigeria in a vacuum,” Gant said. “There was already this incredible artistic synergy and legacy happening. I wanted to try and really bring that all together in a larger narrative.”
FOUR EXHIBITIONS
The Lawrence show is one of four exhibitions opening this fall at different U.S. museums focused on African or Black themes.
For decades, the museum world has been critiqued for undervaluing the contributions of minority artists — particularly Black artists. That four different shows are being mounted in one moment could well signal a change in attitude — and priorities.
A complementary show to the Lawrence exhibit is Fisk University’s “African Modernism in America,” which just opened.
Intellectual giants like Earl Hooks, David Driskell and Aaron Douglas taught at Fisk, a historically Black university in Nashville, Tenn. And in 1967, when the Harmon Foundation, which had one of the best collections of African and African American art in the United States, closed shop, it transferred many of its holdings to Fisk.
The exhibition — organized by Fisk and the American Federation of Arts — opened Oct. 6 and will travel to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, the Phillips Collection in Washington and the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati.
“African Modernism” will introduce audiences to a vast and stunning variety of creations from the African continent. Many of the 70 objects that curators Jaamal Sheats, Perrin M. Lapthorp and Nikoo Paydar present smash stereotypes about Africa. There are luminescent icons from Ethiopian painter Skundar Boghossian and a Wassily Kandinsky-like work from Ibrahim El-Salahi of Sudan.
FEMALE ARTISTS REPRESENTED
Female artists are featured in the offerings. A stunning collage made in 2022 by Ndidi Dike of Nigeria, “The Politics of Selection,” pays homage to Africa’s sometimes overlooked female creators.
“With this show we are challenging the perception of what African art is — it’s so much more than ceremonial carvings and self-taught visionaries,” Sheats said.
On Oct. 22, “Art and Activism at Tougaloo College” opened at Amistad Center for Art & Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn. The exhibition, which features photos from the historically Black institution’s civil rights history and the most important pieces from its own collection, was organized by Tougaloo and the American Federation of Arts.
In the early 1960s, Dore Ashton, a New York-based art historian, decided that Tougaloo, in Jackson, Miss., should have what many wealthier schools in the North had — great art to enliven the educational experience. She and her friends assembled about 30 initial gifts, including oil paintings from Richard Mayhew and Francis Picabia and lithographs by George Grosz, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
Within a short period, the college had a substantial modern art collection. Sociologist Joyce Ladner, a Tougaloo undergraduate in the 1960s, said that the school became one of the only places in Mississippi where modern art could be seen and appreciated.
Later, a grant from the newly established National Endowment for the Arts permitted the school to acquire additional pieces by prominent Black creators such as Lawrence, Alma Thomas and Romare Beardon.
The curator of the exhibition is Turry M. Flucker, a Tougaloo alumnus, who is now a vice president of collections and partnerships at the Terra Foundation for American Art. “The art was used as a tool for the activism,” he said. “And, on top of that, the school was a space where whites and Blacks engaged as equals. This was noteworthy, considering the social landscape of Mississippi in 1963.”
ON TO OKLAHOMA
After its Hartford run, “Art and Activism” is slated to travel to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art; the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, Pa.; and the Figge Art Museum of Davenport, Iowa.
In Maryland, an exhibition opens today at the Baltimore Museum of Art, where 12 contemporary artists address an aspect of the nation’s racial past and examine its effect on their lives.
“A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration,” is an imaginative look at how, in the years between 1910 and 1970, approximately 6 million American Black people pulled up their roots in the South and transported themselves to cities in the North and West.
As with the exhibit’s subject, the show itself has migrated. It premiered at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson in April and has moved to Baltimore. It closes Jan. 29.
What its organizers, Jessica Bell Brown, curator of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum, and Ryan N. Dennis, chief curator and artistic director of the Center for Art and Public Exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art, did was to commission a dozen artists to create original work focused on their perceptions of the Great Migration. What they ultimately produced were more than 30 different works in a variety of styles and media.
“Every artist was open to unpacking familial histories with us,” Brown recalled. “We weren’t asking for them to make their stories legible in a way that removed nuance and texture. We were asking them to think about their connection to the South and their family stories.”
FAMILY STORIES
With such an open mandate, Jamea Richmond-Edwards of Detroit created a tryptic, “This Water Runs Deep,” based on her family’s flight from natural disasters in the South in the early 20th century.
Carrie Mae Weems produced a video installation, “Leave! Leave Now!” examining the disappearance of her grandfather, Frank Weems. He had been an organizer for the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, founded in 1934 in Poinsett County.
The experience of curating this show affirmed for Brown the idea that, “we don’t all have to tell our stories in the same way. Sometimes it moves us toward the space of abstraction or poetry even — giving voice to the experiences that we were collectively unpacking.”
Visitors to the Baltimore Museum can recount their own family’s Great Migration saga at a “Roots and Routes,” interactive display, which Brown said, “allows people to tell their own story.”