Lunch and Lecture: African American Art in the NC Museum of Art Collection

Lunch and Lecture: African American Art in the NCMA Collection

Friday, April 1 | 11 am
East Building, Museum Auditorium
$20 Members
$25 Nonmembers

Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, draws on his curatorial experience and extensive research to chat about African American art and culture in the NCMA collection. Powell has written on topics ranging from primitivism to postmodernism, and his insights offer opportunities to reflect on work by African American artists and to place their work within the context of the broader Museum collection.

Discussion continues over a lunch catered by Iris, the Museum Restaurant. To register, for more information, or for special dietary requests, call (919) 664-6785. Registration and payment required by 4 pm on Wednesday, March 30.

Hank Willis Thomas: HOPE & QUESTIONS BRIDGE Exhibit Opens at Duke

January 21 – March 4, 2011
Hank Willis Thomas: Hope and Question Bridge

John Hope Franklin Center and Franklin Humanities Institute
Curated by Diego Cortez

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Hope Exhibition Opening Reception
Thursday, January 20, 7-9 pm, John Hope Franklin Center Gallery (2204 Erwin Rd.)

Left of Black: Mark Anthony Neal Interviews Hank Willis Thomas
Friday, January 21, 12:00 PM, John Hope Franklin Center (2204 Erwin Rd.)

Question Bridge Opening Reception
& Artist's Talk with Introduction by Richard J. Powell
Friday, January 21, 5:30 PM, John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute (Smith Warehouse, 114 S. Buchanan Blvd.)

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The John Hope Franklin Center for International and Interdisciplinary Studies and FHI will present a collaborative, multi-site exhibition of new and recent works by contemporary visual artist and photographer Hank Willis Thomas.

On view at the Franklin Center Gallery will be the exhibition Hope, a survey show of seven major large-scale photographic works by the artist. On view at the FHI will be Thomas’ collaborative video project which is a work-in-progress Question Bridge: Black Male, which features a question-and-answer dialogue between the diverse members of the U.S. Black Male population, including those from New Orleans, using video as the medium to bridge the various economic, political, social, geographic, and generational divides between Black Males. A second work on view tethered above the FHI will be a large, specially fabricated helium balloon that will be flown above Smith Warehouse for the duration of the exhibition.

Hank Willis Thomas is a contemporary African American visual artist and photographer whose primary interests are race, advertising and popular culture. He is the winner of the first ever Aperture West Book Prize for his monograph Pitch Blackness (November, 2008). His work was featured in the 30 Americans exhibition at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami as well as in the exhibition and accompanying catalog, 25 Under 25: Up-and-Coming Photographers. He has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad, including the Studio Museum in Harlem; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, Jamaica, New York; Artists Space, New York; Leica Gallery, New York; Texas Woman’s University; Oakland Museum of California; Smithsonian; Anacostia Museum, Washington, DC; Bronfman Center for Jewish Life at NYU; National Museum of American History, Washington, DC; and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, High Museum, Atlanta, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.

Hank Willis Thomas is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. Extensive information on his work can be found at http://hankwillisthomas.com. Diego Cortez is an independent curator based in New York. More information can be found at http://www.lostobject.org.

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.

Opening Barkley: The Birth of Cool

from CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

Critical Noir: Opening Barkley
by Mark Anthony Neal

Birth of Cool, a retrospective exhibition on the life and work of artist Barkley L. Hendricks recently opened at the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina. Conceived by Trevor Schoonmaker, the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum and Richard J. Powell, the John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, Birth of Cool is the first such retrospective of the Philadelphia native's work. According to Powell, the foremost scholar of Hendricks's work, the idea of a Hendricks retrospective was "beguiling, with the idea to encounter old friends, audacious strangers, and engrossing paintings, it seems, for the very first time." The exhibition's opening night was reflective of Powell's observations bringing together an eclectic group of people for a discussion between Hendricks and Powell, which was followed by an after-party that featured Grammy-award winning producer and DJ 9th Wonder.

Trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts and Yale University, Hendricks emerges in the late 1960s just as "Black Power" became synonymous with black vernacular culture via the agitprop of Black Arts Movement figures like Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal. Hendricks was primarily interested in figurative and life sized portraiture, thus his subjects, more often than not, were simply the bodies of everyday black folk. Hendricks's aesthetic commitment to the "folk" likely helped keep him beyond the radar of the mainstream art world. As Franklin Sirmans, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Mencil Collection in Houston, "these are black people who are rarely glimpsed outside their community (not art galleries), but within these communities they can easily be seen just as easily as symbols of vibrant everyday life." As such, over the past few decades, Hendricks has helped establish black bodies as sites vernacular culture--his influence seen in the work of younger artists such as Kehinde Wiley and even Iona Rozeal Brown.

Read Full Essay at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com