Author: Carol Knowles

In his half-century of creative output, Roy Lichtenstein produced
much more than the large-scale, comic-book inspired, eye-popping
paintings that brought him international fame in the 1960s. The nearly
70 drawings and collages that make up the Dixon Gallery & Gardens’
exhibition “Lichtenstein in Process” include ethereal Chinese
landscapes, fluid abstracts, and pop-art homages.

In Collage for Art Critic, Lichtenstein’s witty nod to
criticism as well as cubism, the critic stands with her nose pressed
against a painting and studies it from every angle. The features of her
face fracture into a Picasso-esque portrait in which her open mouth
moves to the side of her face, her left eye turns sideways, and her
other eye has moved to her forehead and pierces the frame of the
painting into which she peers.

Thousands of faint, nearly colorless Benday dots in Collage for
Landscape with Scholar’s Rock are transformed into veils of mist
and banks of clouds that appear to move, dissolve, and reappear across
a 7-foot-wide panorama that fills our field of vision. Stand in front
of Scholar’s Rock and, like the art critic, you may feel the
planes of the earth shift and boundaries blur as you are encompassed by
the most monumental (and most effervescent) collage in the show.

In another particularly powerful work, Collage for the Sower,
Lichtenstein pays homage to Vincent van Gogh’s 1888 painting which, in
turn, paid homage to Millet’s 1850 masterwork. Van Gogh’s brushstrokes
make his entire painting — sky and earth as well as the figure
striding across the landscape — come alive with energy. In
Lichtenstein’s work, the earth roils, seeds crack open, yellow melons
swirl across the top of the work, and spring-green sap oozes beyond the
thick, quickly gestured outlines of the figure. Lichtenstein captures
the sweep of the sower’s arm, the social unrest rumbling toward
revolution as peasants starve, and the boundless energy of nature as
powerfully as van Gogh’s and Millet’s more realistic depictions.

Through January 17th   For each of the 10 photo
composites that make up Clough-Hanson’s current exhibition, “Riffs on
Real Time,” Leslie Hewitt places a snapshot — often faded and
decades-old — on top of a page torn from a textbook or on the
cover of the book itself. Hewitt then photographs the two items on the
wooden floor of her studio. What perhaps is most remarkable about this
understated show is Hewitt’s ability to evoke the whole fabric of life
with 10 artworks constructed from the simplest materials.

An out-of-focus snapshot of a shrub (so severely cropped it looks
more like a hat box than a plant) lies on top of bright-red book in
Riff 4. Riff 5 is the textbook image of row after row of
large, immaculately kept homes with perfectly manicured lawns. An
overexposed snapshot, laid on top of this image, looks like the living
room of one of the homes where family members watch television.

Hewitt mounts her most poignant and unsettling works in a small
room, a sort of inner sanctum, inside Clough-Hanson. The faded photo of
a young man in a cap and gown in Riff 2 is backdropped by
another textbook image of a city, but here, instead of suburban sprawl,
homes and businesses are blown apart and engulfed in flames. A man in a
suit in Riff 10 carries a briefcase and strides up the steps of
a beautiful concrete plaza of some large metropolis. In one of the
show’s most surreal touches, the man’s upper body is superimposed with
a snapshot of arid, undeveloped earth.

The images in Hewitt’s inner sanctum show us a world in flux.
Sometimes the change is slow but inexorable, like erosion. Sometimes
change is sudden and violent like the race riots depicted in Riff
2. In an interview mounted on one of the gallery walls, Hewitt
explains that the work for this show was developed, in part, to help
her understand how the civil rights struggles of the 1960s inform her
current view of reality.

How apropos that Hewitt’s “Riffs on Real Time” are backdropped by
the scarred, stained, rich-hued, and deeply grained heart pine floor of
her studio. This New York-based artist takes us beyond the pruned and
the concretized into a richer, more textured space where we are
encouraged to explore texts we never quite found the time to read, to
look through family photos and replay memories, to enlarge our sense of
self and the world.

Masterpieces of European Painting from Museum de Arte de Ponce,” the
largest and one of the most accomplished exhibitions ever mounted at
the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, covers nearly 600 years and every
major movement of European painting including Gothic, Renaissance,
Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassical, Romantic, and Modernist art.

Complex symbolism, powerful storytelling, expressive brushwork, and
poignant, sometimes merciless, emotional realism make the paintings in
this exhibition masterpieces in every sense of the word.  

One of the show’s most honest and unforgettable works is Dutch
architect, poet, and painter Salomon de Bray’s close-up of three Old
Testament co-conspirators, Jael, Deborah, and Barak. The
commander of the Israelites, Barak, stands in the shadows watching and
waiting. At center, the fierce and determined prophet Deborah prays
without ceasing. In bright light at the front of the picture plane,
Jael narrows her eyes, twists her mouth into a scowl, and summons the
rage necessary to drive a tent peg through the temple of the Canaanite
commander who has taken refuge in her tent.

There’s nothing picturesque about the jaundiced, misshapen bodies
and brutish expressions of Two Boys with Pumpkins, Pedro Nunez
de Villavicencio’s compelling record of the constant struggle to stay
alive on the streets of 17th-century Seville.

The hero in John Everett Millais’ The Escape of the Heretic,
1559 is a man in a hurry and in love. He has bound and gagged a
priest who sentenced a woman to burn at the stake for heresy. With
awkward body language, the man frantically wraps the woman in the
priest’s robes. While the symbolism at first seems paradoxical, Millais
is getting at deeper truths as desperate young lovers defy men of the
cloth who have become instruments of torture rather than grace.

Other particularly iconic and accomplished works in the show include
Florentine painter Francesco Granacci’s subtle and graceful Madonna
and Child with St. John the Baptist, which brings to mind portraits
of the Holy Family by Leonardo da Vinci as well as Raphael. In the
Head of the Oldest of the Three Kings, Flemish baroque master
Peter Paul Rubens envisions the magus’ limpid eyes and long white beard
as rarified as the gift of gold he brings to a messiah whose message is
redemption instead of power.

Three of the Ponce collection’s most prized paintings are the panels
making up “The Briar Rose” series by Pre-Raphaelite visionary Edward
Burne-Jones.

In this sensual, languid triptych, a prince enters a woods and
discovers a king, his beautiful daughter, their knights, and
ladies-in-waiting all slumbering in what Burne-Jones describes as “a
beautiful romantic dream of something that never was … in a light
better than any light that ever shone … in a land no one can define
or remember, only desire.” The far-right panel of the triptych,
Sleeping Beauty, is one of the most luminous and delicate works
in the show.

Lovis Corinth’s 1909 oil on canvas Pregnant Woman marks a
pivotal moment in history and art when sexual attitudes were no longer
dictated by Victorian or religious ideals. You’ll find no intimations
of sin or shame in this image of full-frontal nudity in which a woman
touches her pubis and cradles her breasts. Nor is this painting
designed to tantalize. Instead, Corinth, one of the leaders of the
avant-garde group Berlin Secession, ushers modernism into Germany with
a portrait of his pregnant wife Charlotte savoring her own powers of
procreation.

“Masterpieces of European Painting from Museum de Arte de Ponce,”
at the Brooks through January 10th

In “Veda Reed: Keep Looking Up,” the current exhibition at David
Lusk Gallery, Reed demonstrates her mastery of glazed skyscapes as she
takes us on a journey across large, luminous Midwestern skies to
intimations of immortality to transcendence tinged with terror.

Color and tone seamlessly gradate from glowing lavender to deep
purple to midnight blue to a nearly black but still luminous sky
accented with a slender white arc above a single point of light in
Venus and the Crescent Moon. Nearly transparent swaths of
yellow-gold fade into softly glowing mauve in Clouds at Sunset,
and ember-orange puffs hover in a blood-red sky in Gathering
Clouds.

In addition to painting scenes of great natural beauty, Reed uses
skyscapes as a metaphor for the afterlife and for the
apocalypse. In Golden Clouds (Heaven’s Gate for “Beaver”),
narrow slits of light pierce a burnt-umber sky. A semifigurative,
stair-stepped bank of white-gold clouds fills the top left of the
painting. Painted in remembrance of her mother, Golden Gate
stands as a poignant metaphor for the felt presence of deceased loved
ones, for memories that can suddenly well up and cut to the quick and
for that broader connection we feel when someone we love passes through
heaven’s gate.

Instead of a picture-postcard sunset, Three Black Clouds
looks like the heads of large serpents or dark spirits or fierce
Buddhist deities closing in from all sides as they swallow up the sun
and sky. In Day’s End, a glowing red sun falls down the
center of a long, lean deep-blue canvas toward a pitch-black
abyss. Both transcendent and terrifying, these two paintings take
us into a vision not just of end-times but an ongoing apocalypse of big
bangs and black holes. Reed invites us to the dance of Shiva where
universes are continually created and destroyed. Through
October 31st Anne Davey’s exhibit of “New Work” at Perry Nicole
Fine Art captures both the outward appearance and the inner experience
of swimming underwater. Many of her figures look as fluid,
sinuous, and weightless as the undulating bodies of jellyfish. The
expression of the woman in Davey’s charcoal-on-gessoed-paper
Spin captures the look of a swimmer lost in her underwater world
as well as the focus required to navigate that world’s currents and
waves.

Veda Reed, Three Black Clouds, at David Lusk Gallery

Countless subtle but satisfying touches include the young swimmer
who grasps her right ankle in Girl Underwater in a gesture that
looks like a movement in an underwater ballet. But Davey goes far
beyond the lyrical to create a postmodern dance that is undulating,
inventive, ambiguous, and unsettling.

Part human, part sea creature, part phantom, Girl Underwater
folds into herself, refracting and distorting her body to the point
that her right arm is reed-thin. Her right foot — broad,
flat, and as large as the rest of her leg — shape-shifts into a
paddle that can propel her body through the water and slap the surface
to warn of danger. A black shadow obscures the rest of her body
except for the sunlight that plays across her tiny, almost featureless
face.

Icy Depths 2 by Mary Long-Postal, at Perry Nicole

Davey’s fluid lines and forms extend beyond the water into the
bedroom. For example, the oil-on-board Under the Covers 1 is
dominated by a large, light-gray comforter that billows and folds back
like the waves in this artist’s waterscapes. Through October
31st Mary Long-Postal’s encaustic paintings, also at Perry
Nicole, work as expressive abstractions and evocative
cityscapes. Rectangles floating across modulated color fields
suggest the artist’s sensations as she cruises through drizzling rain
past saturate swatches of color in billboards that dot the
landscape.

Nearly transparent white rectangles float across her panels like
illuminated department-store windows in New City 1 and frigid
air in Icy Depths 2. Translucent layers of smoky gray look like
the haze of humidity and pollution in New City 2, palimpsests of
mind in Foggy Memory 3, and the haze of an even more atmospheric
centuries-old city along the Seine in Paris 3.

Add pink to the palette, childlike drawings of homes, and inventive
linework and Long-Postal’s layers of translucent beeswax provide
glimpses into the artist’s playful and passionate emotional makeup in
My Blood Runs Strawberry Quik 1.

The largest work in the show, Toto’s Geographical Cure Nearly
Killed Us All, reveals Long-Postal’s range of vision as her
signature gray background is replaced by five square feet of a luminous
Kansas sky. Outlines of tiny houses and larger ramshackle structures
remind us of the frailty of human architecture compared to the forces
of nature. This is the light before the storm, before Long-Postal
increases her cruising speed to warp-drive and hurls Toto and Dorothy
past all of earth’s farmsteads and cityscapes into Oz.

Who is Greely Myatt? How could he merit eight running art
exhibitions, an unprecedented event in the history of Memphis and the
Mid-South?

Explore some of his 80-plus installations and sculptures currently
on view at Memphis galleries, museums, and alternative spaces,
collectively titled “Greely Myatt and exactly Twenty Years,” and you’ll
discover that Myatt is one-of-a-kind. Part artist, part Buddha, part
son of the South, Myatt has produced a body of work that’s both complex
and laced with sly humor and homespun wisdom.

Iconoclastic, unexpected, and paradoxical are some of the
descriptors that come to mind when viewing work by an artist who makes
quilts out of street signs and replicas of Philip Guston’s bandaged,
disembodied head out of wire and styrene peanuts. In the installation
A Brief History of Modern Sculpture at the Art Museum of the
University of Memphis (AMUM), real soap bubbles spill over the top and
fall down the sides of a tall wooden plinth as Myatt spoofs his own
title, gets sculpture off its pedestal, and suggests that art is an
effervescent and ongoing process that can neither be briefly described
nor divided into discrete categories. Other mind- and material-bending
works include Sweetwater, an installation at the Memphis Brooks
Museum of Art in which an antique lawn mower rolls across the museum
wall lopping off cotton roots that have pushed their way through the
sheetrock.

Greely Myatt’s Shades, on view at the Art Museum of the University of Memphis

One of Myatt’s most personal and iconic pieces, A Fool w/ an Idea
or Two, hangs at the Brooks and graces the cover of the beautifully
written and printed catalog that accompanies the show. The “fool” in
the work is a figure made out of pieces of reclaimed wood and is the
height and size of the artist. It stands on a soapbox or pulpit or
podium — objects familiar to Myatt, a University of Memphis
professor who grew up in a small town in Mississippi in the 1950s. The
artist’s alter ego reaches out to grasp a light bulb that hangs from
the ceiling. The bulb is real and hot. Myatt could get burned. Like a
child, like the Buddha, Myatt’s willingness to take chances, to play
the fool, to see each moment anew enable him to create strikingly
original, often profound works of art.

Some of Myatt’s work is downright beautiful, like the nearly
8-foot-tall candelabrum titled Shades that hangs from the
ceiling at AMUM. One hundred or so light bulbs (some spent, some still
burning) are strung together with strands of wire that spew from the
top like a fount of electricity. While Shades elicits all kinds
of associations about the way ideas spark, illuminate one another, burn
bright, and burn out, this wild spray of wire that tops milky,
incandescent, and smoky-gray surfaces is, first and foremost, a
radiantly gorgeous work of art.

The empty speech balloons, question marks, and succession of window
frames at Memphis College of Art’s On the Street Gallery seamlessly
match Myatt’s work with a college-sponsored venue charged with teaching
students how to talk less, look more, ask questions, and explore as
many levels of meaning/materials/mind as possible.

Pie in the Sky, at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens

Myatt’s steel-rod and monofilament installation Pie in the
Sky flies high in the canopy of tall trees at the Dixon Gallery
& Gardens. Instead of the promise of a sweet hereafter, Pie in
the Sky is, indeed, the outline of a slice of pie with a scalloped
crust that also looks like the cockscomb and beak of a rooster about to
crow.

Much of Myatt’s art evokes thoughts just taking shape, ideas about
to be spoken (or crowed), something about to be revealed. Another
variation on this theme is a partially opened zipper embedded in the
sheetrock of one of David Lusk’s white gallery walls which suggests we
may glimpse something still deeper about the structure of art.

Roomrug, the installation at Rhodes College’s Clough-Hanson
Gallery, provides one of those glimpses. Four large black corner pieces
that nearly fill Clough-Hanson’s floor space bring to mind the
minimalism of Donald Judd and Robert Morris or a magician’s black box
that has been split into quarters. On the floor inside each corner,
Myatt has fashioned a section of a rug out of brightly colored broom
handles. Step into the center of Myatt’s house of mirrors. You’ll see
rugs proliferate in infinitely deep space as Roomrug shapeshifts
from minimalism into folk art into a vertigo-producing illusion that is
also resonant metaphor for Myatt, a Mississippi-born, postmodern
magician who spins objects and ideas into ever richer
configurations.

Alfred Thompson Bricher’s Twilight in the Wilderness (1865)

Bold, Cautious, True: Walt Whitman and American Art of the Civil War
Era,” the tremendously moving exhibition at the Dixon Gallery and
Gardens, is not a blockbuster. It’s a slow burn, the kind of burn that
incises heart and mind with images of civil war.

Dixon director Kevin Sharp wrote the catalog and curated the show,
which includes paintings, prints, and sculptures on loan from such
prestigious museums as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, and
the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburg.

Sharp weaves Walt Whitman’s poetry, Abraham Lincoln’s oratory, and
some of the most significant artworks created by mid-19th century
Americans into a compelling study of how a country torn apart by
slavery, secession, and civil war was able to survive and rebuild.

Acts of great courage and great crassness became the norm as
millions of Africans were enslaved and brother fought brother. A
wealthy landowner sells his mixed-blood son in Thomas Satterwhite
Noble’s The Price of Blood. In Winslow Homer’s oil on panel
Defiance: Inviting a Shot Before Petersburg, a Confederate
soldier, driven to distraction by carnage and the South’s impending
defeat, climbs the ramparts, clinches his fists, and offers himself up
as easy prey for Union sharpshooters.

One of three panels in Thomas Waterman Wood’s triptych A Bit of War History: The Contraband, The Recruit, and The Veteran (1866)

In the triptych A Bit of War History, Thomas Waterman Wood
paints a man as a runaway slave, a soldier, and a disabled veteran
whose left leg has been amputated. The man’s unwavering look of
gratitude, in all three paintings, is unnerving until we consider that
this former slave’s life is now filled with memories of a daring escape
to freedom, patriotic service, and the camaraderie of fellow soldiers
instead of endless, back-breaking labor.

Winslow Homer’s Defiance: Inviting a Shot Before Petersburg (1864), on loan to the Dixon for the exhibit ‘Bold, Cautious, True: Walt Whitman and American Art of the Civil War Era’

By the end of the war, all pretense and dross has burned away. We
see it in the posture of a soldier, lanky and no longer young, who
leans on his rifle next to his ruined mountain home in Henry Mosler’s
painting The Lost Cause. We hear it in “Oh Captain, My Captain,”
Walt Whitman’s outpouring of grief for a president who saw his country
through the war but did not live long enough to celebrate the victory.
And, although we can barely make out the figures on horseback in
Eastman Johnson’s A Ride for Liberty — The Fugitive
Slaves, we can feel their intense focus as a mother, father, boy,
and infant girl race across the countryside, getting as close to
freedom as they can by dawn.

Many of the other artists in the show had their aesthetic
sensibilities honed by war and created their most fully realized
artworks after 1864.

Eastman Johnson’s A Ride for Liberty — The Fugitive Slaves, March 2, 1862 (1862)

In Alfred Thompson Bricher’s 1865 painting Twilight in the
Wilderness, a setting sun lights the underside of a cloudbank with
what look like a series of small fires. Bricher repeats his touches of
red-gold in fall foliage and a small campfire that warms two women.

Twilight in the Wilderness is not as luminous as landscapes
painted by artists of the Hudson River School before the war. But the
ground isn’t frozen and the sky blanketed with red, as in Louis
Mignot’s Sunset, Winter, a painting that conjures up the harsh
conditions, intense emotions, and bloodshed of war. There is, instead,
just enough warmth and light in Bricher’s work to allow the
unaccompanied young women, widowed or orphaned perhaps by the war, to
begin to make sense of things, to go on with their lives.

Clare Torina, Matriarchy Series

L Ross Gallery’s annual show “Works on Paper” affords talented
newcomers and already accomplished artists an opportunity to play with
ideas and experiment with signature styles.

Chuck Johnson’s latest watercolors are brighter and more transparent
than his encaustics on panel and take us deeper into botanical worlds
that Johnson (an avid gardener) knows well. The iridescent insects,
burnt-sienna fronds, and opalescent-blue waters take us beyond polluted
rivers and depleted farmlands into still-teeming pools, still-fecund
tracts of earth.

Small ink-and-gouache portraits in Clare Torina’s Matriarchy
Series include a surly teenager, a blind child, a woman with
green-tinged skin eating a green ice cream cone, and a battered
middle-aged man. At the center of this challenged slice of humanity is
a large sleek dog, a healthy creature that adds a much-needed touch of
equanimity to Torina’s fierce, funny, and honest exploration of human
experience.

Bobby Spillman’s ink, gouache, and coffee paintings are
mesmerizingly detailed but never over-worked. Spillman keeps our eyes
moving across his pictures with flocks of birds that swoop in and out
of view and fly above the floods and whirlwinds that have roared
through earlier installments of this artist’s “Spillmanville
Series.”

Mountains of sweets are everywhere in Spillmanville. In Twin Cake
Towers, condos for the town’s fine-feathered citizens are layered
with irony as well as tiers of icing, strawberries, donuts, chocolate
cakes, and jelly rolls. Frosting coils like a serpent near the top of
the condo on the left. The penthouse is crowned with what looks like a
cherry bomb as well as a cherry. These touches of treachery, excess,
and explosives suggest that humankind, as well as Mother Nature, has
played a part in the imminent collapse of the condos that are about to
topple.

Carl E. Moore, American Economics

This show marks the return of Jeri Ledbetter, who has been
exhibiting in Santa Fe for the past five years. We can see the
influence of the Southwest in her new oil-and graphite works on paper.
We also see an artist moving toward pure abstraction. In Valensol
II, Ledbetter’s softly glowing, subtly modulated ochre-and-gray
color fields suggest sunlight’s reflections on sheer rock faces.
Ledbetter’s expressive, inventive linework evokes naked branches
struggling for life in an arid landscape. Somewhere between
representation and abstraction, Ledbetter’s elemental landscapes no
longer depict the forest or the trees but something closer to the
source of things.

Recent University of Memphis graduate Lea Alexander transforms
highly textured, silken, and transparent fabrics into images of weather
patterns, rolling black hills, and shifting sands. In her especially
evocative digital print August 20th, rays of light break through
a late summer rain pouring down the face of a mountain.

David Comstock’s sinister, sharply angled abstraction
Untitled looks, in part, like a mountain on the verge of an
avalanche or a hulking figure in cloak and top hat. The figure is
frayed in just the right places to also suggest a prehistoric creature
with fangs. Stay with this dark mass for a while, and it becomes a
compelling Rorschach that calls up any fears that need processing.

In Carl Moore’s serigraph American Economics, everything has
gone black and gray except for the searingly red figure that floats in
a pitch-black void above the American flag. A steel spike, pointed
toward the figure’s buttocks, suggests the man is about to be skewered,
broiled, and served up rare. The same startlingly red figure has been
stabbed in the heart in Pursuit of Happiness. In
Heartland, he floats helplessly above the sharply pitched roof
of his Midwestern home. Scene after scene of economic freefall grabs
our attention and makes us squirm. With some of the most sardonic,
beautiful, and terrifying artworks we’ve seen this year, Moore incites
us not to riot but to get off our collective asses and find a way out
of our financial and emotional morass.

(Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery)

No. 5 from Eight Studies for The Book of Genesis ‘And God created all the fowls of the air and fishes of the seas.’

Under the curatorial savvy of Marina Pacini, the Memphis Brooks
Museum of Art has mounted the stunning and comprehensive exhibit “The
Prints of Jacob Lawrence, 1963 – 2000.”  

Eighty-one lithographs, woodcuts, silk-screens, and etchings —
on loan from the Jacob Lawrence estate courtesy of New York’s DC Moore
Gallery — fill gallery after gallery with pure pigments, bold
shapes, sharply angled perspectives, and pitch-perfect storytelling by
Lawrence, the late Harlem Renaissance artist who took printmaking
to the level of masterwork and created a vision powerful enough to
speak to all people and all times.

You’ll find all of Lawrence’s best works here, including the
exhilarating and unnerving study No. 5 from Eight Studies for
The Book of Genesis, in which a preacher grips his marble podium
with his left arm while streaks of red flash from his right hand like
lightning. The preacher’s dark-red robe fills most of the silk-screen
as his parishioners gasp and crowd against the wall while water fills
their sanctuary and images of Genesis play across the alcoves and
stained glass windows.

At the center of the screenprint The Capture, from The
Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture series, Haitian revolutionary general
Toussaint rides a white steed and wears a cloak as deep red as the robe
of the preacher. Toussaint’s eyes are piercingly bright. His body leans
forward on the horse he rides straight toward the viewer. The print’s
pure-white and saturate-red color and the tall grasses that lick
Toussaint’s body like flames tell us his mission is full of passion,
danger, and purity of vision.

Lawrence tells story after story of courageous bids for freedom.
Harriet Tubman leads fugitive slaves north to freedom in Forest
Creatures, and Africans, being transported for sale in the slave
market, successfully commandeer a Spanish galleon in Revolt on the
Amistad.

(Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery)

The Capture, No. 17 from The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture series: ‘Toussaint captured Marmelade, held by Vernet, a mulatto, 1795.’

Placards accompanying these prints contain Lawrence’s reflections on
his life and worldview. We learn from these vividly written footnotes
that he moved with his family to Harlem at the age of 13, steeped
himself in books at Harlem’s Schomburg Library, and reveled in the
architecture and energy of the big city. This was the early 1930s.
While America was struggling through the Great Depression,
African-American creativity and intellectual thought was flourishing in
what came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. During those years,
Lawrence developed a passion for knowledge and social justice that
informed his life and art until his death in 2000.

The highlight of the show are the 22 prints in The Legend of John
Brown series, Lawrence’s undisputed masterwork. These are the
sparest, most abstract works of Lawrence’s career. They are also the
most poignantly apropos for our time. In screenprint No. 1,
Christ hangs on the cross back-dropped by what look like fast-moving
storm clouds or the wings and beak of a large raven or an omen —
readings that remind us Christ’s crucifixion is a dark drama about
government brutality, warring religious factions, and a friend’s
betrayal as well as the hope for redemption. Below Christ, a
figure in dark clothing turns his head down and to the side. This could
be one of Christ’s disciples, John Brown, or someone today making the
same tough choices, asking the same kind of life-changing questions: In
what shall I place my hope? To whom shall I give my
allegiance? 

No. 1 from the portfolio The Legend of John Brown

In the placard next to the final image of the series, Lawrence
succinctly noted that, “Brown was found guilty of treason and murder in
the 1st degree and was hanged.” Instead of a storm cloud, like the one
that backdrops Christ in screenprint No. 1, the shape that
coalesces behind Brown’s body is a soft pale blue. Jagged in some
places, softly curving in others, the cloud looks, in part, like the
profile of a lion or other large predator with a gaping mouth and thick
strong neck. Its color and shape are fitting metaphor for the spirit of
a revolutionary who was both a fanatic and a saint, a man who resorted
to violence when all peaceful attempts to help the slaves were
thwarted.

While much of Lawrence’s art reveals what can be accomplished when
people work in concert with courage and conviction, The Legend of
John Brown series is a darker tale that plays out again and again
in a world where slave-trafficking still thrives and millions live in
refugee camps, in bondage, and in poverty. People in desperate
circumstances, The Legend of John Brown reminds us, resort to
desperate measures.

On a more positive note in screenprint No. 14, sharply angled
images of Mary holding the baby Jesus and Christ-crucified thrust our
point-of-view through a long and narrow room out into a piercingly blue
sky. Beyond ego, beyond narrow concerns — like Toussaint, Tubman,
and Christ — Lawrence inspires us to explore the big ideas, to
trust the redemptive power of love, and to make a difference. 

Rehema Barber’s Director’s Choice exhibition at Power House,
“Everywhere, Nowhere, Somewhere,” packs multiple existential,
emotional, and visceral punches. Five talented local artists and six
nationally noted painters, sculptors, and videographers explore our
increasingly complex world and the often overwhelming sensory stimuli
flowing through its cell phones, cables, and cyberspace 24/7.

The words “Real Niggas Don’t Die” are hand-stenciled across the face
of RNDD: Tupac, Charles Huntley Nelson’s large acrylic painting
of the car in which Tupac Shakur was killed. Mounted nearby are
Polaroid images of tourists posing in front of the painting. The hollow
braggadocio of Nelson’s graffiti and the photo-ops of Tupac’s fans
suggest we are more titillated than moved by the death of this
multitalented rapper, actor, and philanthropist.

Red vinyl ribbons flow out of Joel Parsons’ 3-foot mound of latex,
acrylic, oranges, and incense work titled A Secret I Wouldn’t Know
How To Tell. In the exhibition’s most evocative site-specific
touch, the tattered ribbons cross the floor and trail into one of Power
House’s singed, crumbling furnaces.

The rich textures and colors of Keith Anderson’s burned-and-broken
phonograph record As Africa Turns remind us that nature’s decay
can be beautiful. Anderson’s unorthodox and formally satisfying
sculpture is also richly metaphoric. As Africa Turns (as the
world turns, as the music industry turns) evokes royalties that have
been lost, African-American recording artists who have been burned, and
lives that have been broken by the world of entertainment.

Keith Anderson

Jack Dingo Ryan explores what happens when we stop listening to
ourselves and each other. At first glance, Ryan’s delicately fluted,
ivory-white polyurethane ears (hundreds of them) seem out of sync with
the work’s title, Blood and Guts Forever. By adding two
noticeably turned-off light switches to the piece, Ryan’s installation
becomes, in part, an unsettlingly original metaphor for what happens
when we stop communicating, stop valuing creative output, and, instead,
measure success with military power, including the time-honored
tradition of tallying battle kills with piles of severed ears.

The show’s allusions to Greek gods and biblical figures remind us
that the desire to make our mark and find our place in the world is an
ancient one. In Mary and Jonathan Postal’s montage of antique photos,
Vulcan Forging Wings, an African-American blacksmith forges
metal in his workshop next to images of a precariously tilted tenement
and a large bin of tires, worn-out and discarded like the blacksmith’s
ancestors who worked the plantations, chain gangs, and backbreaking
jobs of industry. 

broken As AfricaTurns

The image of an African American just coming into his own as a
skilled artisan poignantly parallels Vulcan’s refusal to return to
Olympus to serve the gods, choosing instead to remain in the underworld
forging works of great beauty. Pigmented beeswax heightens the
intensity of the narrative. Sweat on the blacksmith’s nearly naked body
glistens. The red that oozes into the bottom of one of the iridescently
white wings looks as fresh as blood just spilled, somewhere in the
world, in the ongoing struggle for freedom.

The videos in the show provide important insights for understanding
and surviving our multicultural world. Tall, lean Massai warriors
dancing and models slinking along a catwalk in Brendan Fernandes’
digital video Aya Mama demonstrate humankind’s desire — in
every country and culture — to adorn itself, to strut its
stuff.

The two teenagers in Kambui Olujimi’s video Night Flight
create a room (or rooftop) of their own by rendezvousing in the middle
of the night on top of a Brooklyn apartment. They make their own music
and create their own dance steps as one of the teens, ebony body
swaying with boom box in hand, moves in tandem with
his fair-skinned roller-skating partner.

Dwayne Butcher’s digital video Partagas both lampoons and
pays homage to his redneck heritage. Instead of a hot tub, Butcher
mellows out in a makeshift pool in the back of his pickup drinking Dos
Equis and smoking fine cigars.

At one point in the video, Butcher places his feet flat on the bed
of his red truck, hoists his body, and pours golden liquid from two
cans of beer across his torso to the slow measured sounds of classical
music.

With his signature mix of stand-up comedy, confessional poetry, and
absurdist theater, Butcher describes his worldview in his artist’s
statement for the show:

“I think I will be okay as long as I can keep making digital videos
with the personality of a redneck hillbilly drinking beer naked in the
back of a truck.”

The current exhibition at the Dixon’s Mallory and Wurtzburger
Galleries, titled simply “Beth Edwards,” is the most complete gathering
to date of Edwards’ emotionally complex portraits of the
mid-20th-century American dream of owning shiny new convertibles and
ranch-style homes furnished with Danish modern divans, potted plants,
and modern artworks, or, if original work was out of the question, good
reproductions.

Instead of human models, Edwards uses vintage rubber toys as
stand-ins for the proud homeowners. In Happy Day, an
anthropomorphic mouse with a frozen smile and huge lidless eyes stands
proudly in his spic and span living room. The shape of his moist black
nose is repeated in the fractured face of Picasso’s portrait of his
mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter. In Good Morning,
another happy homeowner — in this case, a beautiful, young golden
retriever — is backdropped by a royal-blue divan and Philip
Guston’s painting of a huge pile of worn-out footwear (horses and
humans), an allusion perhaps to the labor required to build beautiful
homes for the well-heeled.

Pinkney Herbert’s Delta Series L

The glossy surfaces, controversial masterworks (that elicited
outrage when they were first unveiled), and the frozen-faced dolls that
populate Edwards’ “happy paintings” suggest the search for happiness is
a slippery slope layered with complex feelings that can exhilarate or
undo us.

Like Edward Hopper, Edwards handles color with such mastery that her
artwork achieves a kind of transcendence. The iridescent-green baby
doll in Annunciation looks out a window at a blue sky feathered
with clouds. The figure’s chubby cheeks and huge brow are framed inside
a Hopperesque square of lavender light.

Ultimately, Edwards’ art is about the power of light to consume all
color and form, to absorb all paradox and pain into visions of
paradise. Edwards understands Hopper’s desire to do nothing but paint
light on the side of a house. 

Through September 6th

Pinkney Herbert’s Jig

In David Lusk Gallery’s current show, “Floating World,” Pinkney
Herbert’s paintings no longer blast our point of view across
30-square-foot surfaces. Neither are they as spare as the paintings in
Herbert’s 2007 exhibition, a show in which softly curving lines,
wide-open spaces, and the quiet authority of works like Wing
seem inspired as much by Zen Buddhism as 20th-century
abstraction. 

Instead, Herbert’s “Floating World” works are by turns fluid,
syncopated, celebratory. Their open and buoyant compositions, inspired
in part by the elegant woodblock prints of Japan’s Edo period
(1603-1868), invite us to take our time, to explore their textures,
colors, and shapes, and to realize that, though they are more subdued
than Herbert’s explosive earlier work, these paintings are as evocative
and original as any in his long and varied career.

Beth Edwards’ Annunciation

In “Floating World,” we feel the rhythms of New York as well as
Memphis, the two cities where Herbert lives and paints. Deep-red spiked
flowers surrounded by scumbled umber at the heart of Herbert’s pastel
on paper Delta Series L look as rich as Mississippi bottomlands,
as fertile as the Southern soul. In Buoy, a figure eight
accented with red-and-yellow lozenges wafts on air currents that twist
in unexpected directions like New York City’s improvisational jazz.

A cartoon-like hand with triple-jointed fingers and attenuated wrist
lies at the center of the nearly 6-foot-tall painting Jig. We
can almost hear the sound of one hand clapping in this crisp-edged,
bright-orange shape backdropped by a wash of pure yellow.

Two years after his last show, Herbert returns to David Lusk with
his sense of humor intact, with a new zest for life, with a mindset
similar to what 17th-century Japanese novelist Asi Ryoi described in
Tales of the Floating World as “refusing to be disheartened,”
turning one’s attention to the pleasures of the beautiful, impermanent
world.