Everyday Grandeur: Remembering Artist Ernie Barnes

Left of Black

Everyday Grandeur: Remembering Artist Ernie Barnes

by Mark Anthony Neal

Though his name was rarely uttered in conversations of fine art and few in academic circles had more than a passing interest in his body of work, when Ernie Barnes died this past Monday, his art was arguably some of the most recognizable among African-Americans. Most known for his 1971 painting “Sugar Shack” and for his striking treatments of African-American athleticism, Barnes will be most remembered for bringing grandeur to the everyday lives of African-Americans.

Born in Durham, NC in 1938, Barnes first began to paint as a refuge from childhood peers who teased him about his boyish heft. Ironically by his teenage years Barnes became interested in fitness, so much so, that he received more than twenty scholarship offers to play college football. He chose to play for North Carolina Central, an HBCU, and though he didn’t graduate, he went on to play professionally in the now defunct American Football League (AFL). It was Barnes’s connections with professional football that led to his career as a full-time painter, initially as the “official” artist for the AFL before the merger with the National Football League (NFL). Later Barnes found support from then New York Jets owner Sonny Werblin, who paid Barnes a $15,000 salary to develop his skills and helped organize Barnes’s first major gallery show in New York City.

Barnes’s biggest break occurred, when television producer Norman Lear decided to feature the artist’s work in his series Good Times (ghosting the art of eldest son JJ, who was a painter on the series). “Sugar Shack” was featured in the series’ closing credits, a painting that highlights blacks in a local dance hall. The same painting was used as the cover art for Marvin Gaye’s 1976 recording I Want You, the album in some ways serving as a logical soundtrack for “Sugar Shack.” The painting not only reflected the beauty of African Vernacular culture, it was accessible enough to be enjoyed by the very folk who derived the most pleasure from that culture.

According to Duke University Art Historian Richard J. Powell, “Ernie was arguably a pioneer in the mass-marketing of his highly stylized paintings of African American life and leisure. As early as the early 1970s (when many artists turned up their noses at the idea of transforming their art works into posters or notecards), he sold beautiful, high-quality reproductions of his paintings that ordinary folks could afford.” By the end of the 1970s Charlton Heston, Harry Belafonte, Ethel Kennedy, Sammy Davis, Jr., Flip Wilson and Bert Reynolds were among those with Barnes originals in their collection while there was nary a black student dorm room that didn’t have a copy of Gaye’s I Want You cover adorning their walls.

Barnes’s signature pieces featured African-American subjects with elongated limbs—a metaphor perhaps for reaching beyond the limits of possibility. For Powell, author of the new book Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (University of Chicago Press), Barnes’s figures were “so intentionally sensuous and impossibly elongated, very much like Marvin Gaye's vocals on the classic album.” Barnes gained more recognition in 1984, when he was chosen as the official artist of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, despite being originally overlooked until former teammate and then New York congressman Jack Kemp brought Barnes’s work to the attention of Olympic officials. It was a fitting apex to Barnes career, as the artist told People Weekly at the time that, “without athletics…I don’t think my work would have the guts and fluidity that it does.”

Art historian Powell notes that Barnes “took the idea of being a ‘popular artist’ to an aesthetic apogee,” adding that “folks never grow weary of his beautiful and outrageous athletes, dancers, and other African American men, women, and children.” Indeed Barnes art resonated even for the hip-hop generation; When Camp Lo released their nostalgia laced 1997 recording Uptown Saturday Night (which features the classic “Luchini aka This is It”), the cover art paid homage to Barnes’s “Sugar Shack.”

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Mark Anthony Neal is the author of several books and is currently completing Looking for Leroy: (Il)Legible Black Masculinities for New York University Press.