Sampling at the Mississippi Museum of Art

A trip to Jackson was the occasion to visit the temporary exhibition titled "The Walter O. Evans Collection of African American Art" at the Mississippi Museum of Art. With forty works on display, it could have been called "Sampling Walter O. Evans' collection...". The permanent collection is located at the recently refurbished SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. There are two ways of looking at the exhibition: a walk through the vast hall at the entrance of the museum, a fifteen minutes visit at the most or an in-depth look at the works and the artists in the context of the African American art movement. I chose the latter.

A dozen artists including Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlett, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White, Horace Pippin, Benny Andrews were represented by a work or two and a short biographical note.
"Dust to Dust" (The Funeral), 1938 was my preferred work, a gouache on paper from Jacob Lawrence, a reminder of his skills in using colors, compositions, subjects to capture the moment and give a sense of history to a simple street scene. The display of his epic work "Toussaint L'Ouverture" made for an unforgettable visit at the NOMA in the past.

Two collages represented the other star of the exhibition, Romare Bearden, who is in the spolights lately with the celebration of the centennial of his birth. In the Summer issue of ArtNews Gail Gregg reminds us of the artist's legacy in an article titled "Beardenmania" and provides a list of all the events related to the celebration.

Artists like Charles White are remembered for their political involvement, Elizabeth Catlett, who passed away a few months ago, for her social engagement. She was represented by an iconic sculpture in bronze "Black Women Poets", 1984 and one print "Head of a Nigerian", 1976.

If I had not seen works from Benny Andrews at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in the past, I would have gone by without noticing a small painting, not one of his bests. Abstraction was represented by one oil on paper from Norman Lewis, "Untitled" 1975, a blue composition.
Lois Mailou Jones was present, in the background with two watercolors, seascapes.  The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts  just presented a survey of her career "Lois Mailou Jones: A Life in Vibrant Color" with fifty five works. I had a chance to go through and discover the artist I did not know before.

The names of the artists echoed terms like Harlem Renaissance, activism, militancy, identity, protests... a period which paved the way for the next generations of African American artists and I would refer to the recently released book from Bridget R. Cook " Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum" to place their works in their historical context.

photograph by the author:
"Caribbean Forest", 1977, Romare Bearden

Painting the Blues

The Blues in New Orleans is played, sung. This month at the NOMA, "Beyond the Blues" is the title of the exhibition showing the paintings from the Amistad Research Center " specialized in the history of African-American and other minority ethnic groups".

One hundred and fifty works have been selected from a rich collection and are displayed in several rooms organized in five categories: Inhabiting our world, Believing in Divinity, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Living in the Moment and Seeing with Candor. I chose to wander from room to room and enjoy the paintings from known or unknown painters. I was discovering most of them.

The works cover more than 120 years from the late nineteenth century painters and early twentieth century like Edward Bannister and Ossawa Tanner who were exposed to European influence and studied there, to the painters from the "New Negro Movement" in the 20s and 30s followed by more modern painters like Vincent Smith from Brooklyn represented by "Annie Lou loves Bill" done in 1960. In this painting he mixes collage and graffiti on a rough red background. It was standing out among the other artists, most of them represented by non controversial subjects, depicting winter like Driskell with "Winter Landscape" 1974, "Triborough Bridge" from Aaron Douglas, "Carnival" from Keith Morrison 1966, with Caribbean colors.

Sam Middleton is the closest to Jazz, I thought, with his spontaneous colors, lines, movements, splashes, represented in "Still Life" 1970 and "Beyond the Blues".

For the women, Clementine Hunter, whose work is considered "Folk Art", was present in a corner. I found the sculpture "Target" from Elizabeth Catlett very powerful, with the bronze head of an Afro-American male in the sight of a gun.

Other painters were inspired by the naive style from Haiti, like Ellis Wilson with his famous "Funeral Procession", 1954.

The star of the show was Jacob Lawrence with his series on the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture and Haiti's history.
Forty one paintings, gouache on paper, from Jacob Lawrence, a painter, story-teller. It made me think of the" images d'Epinal", the colors were darker with stylized shapes. Each painting is depicting a chapter of Haiti's history. In parallel, it tells the story of Toussaint L'Ouverture's life. He was the leader of the slaves revolt and eventually became a General. He was imprisoned by the French and died one year later of a "broken heart". A medley of cubism, naive art creates flat paintings using the color to create some perspective. The painter himself stated that the colors came from his childhood, Harlem where he was born and raised. He was 21 years old when he painted this series.

The revolt of the Amistadt is also depicted by Lawrence Jacob. My preferred version is from Romare Barden made from a mixture of collage and painting : a map of Africa, a boat and the face of an African slave with red, black and other bright colors.

Of course , two sons from New Orleans should be mentioned, Jeffrey Cook who went back to his African roots to create the sculpture called "Dogon Box" 1996 inspired by the sculptures from Mali, and John Scott (1940-2007) with "Closest to Blues and Jazz". He made this statement:"what I have been trying to do...in my art is make a piece that would be similar to what African-American musicians have done with gospels, and blues and jazz, so that when you hear it , it wraps around your soul."

photograph NOMA from the author

General Toussaint L'Ouverture: danforthmuseum.org