Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1917. His parents Jacob and Rosa Lee Lawrence divorced in 1924. Jacob and his two younger siblings grew up in Harlem with their mother. She enrolled him in the Utopia Children’s Center, an arts and crafts settlement house in Harlem, to keep him busy. He learned to use tempera paint, a water based medium, which he would continue to use throughout his career. As a child, he copied the rug patterns in his house: “people of my generation would decorate their homes in all sorts of colors…so you’d think in terms of Matisse.” When his mother lost her job, Lawrence dropped out of high school before his junior year and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, part of the New Deal, where he planted trees, drained swamps and built dams.

Returning to Harlem after his stint in the Corps, he enrolled in the Harlem Community Art Center, then under the leadership of African-American sculptor Augusta Savage. Impressed by Lawrence’s talent, Savage obtained a scholarship for him at the American Artists School and a paid job with the Works Progress Administration. Lawrence was able to continue making art, which he did at an astonishing rate. An important influence on his work was Professor Seifert, whom he met playing pool at the Harlem YMCA. Seifert had a large collection of books on African American history. He offered Lawrence the use of his books and encouraged him to go to the Schomburg Library in Harlem to read all he could about African and African American culture. He also took Lawrence to see the 1935 exhibition of African Art at the Museum of Modern Art.

Lawrence began his career with three series of works illustrating the lives of African American icons: “Toussaint L’Ouverture“ (1938) (41 images); “Harriet Tubman” (1938- 1939) (31 images); and “Frederick Douglas” (1939-1940) (40 images). The original “Toussaint L’Ouverture” series was created in 1938 with tempera on paper, but with age became fragile, and Lawrence recreated in the 1990’s fifteen of the original images in silkscreen. He recreated several images from many series in silkscreen in his later years

Raised as a slave on a plantation, Toussaint L’Ouverture had been educated and was literate. He was freed when he was given a position of trust as a carriage driver. He rose from there to become Commander-in-Chief of the Haitian army in service to the French. However he was aware of the horrendous living conditions of the black slave population, and led the slave revolt in 1800 against Napoleon Bonaparte’s occupying troops. He helped draw up Haiti’s democratic constitution. On August 29, 1793 Toussaint declared to the black population at St. Dominique, “Brothers and friends, I am Toussaint Louverture, perhaps my name has made itself known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want Liberty and Equality to reign in St. Dominque. I am working to make that happen. Unite yourselves to us, brothers and fight with us for the same cause. Your very humble and obedient servant, Toussaint Louverture”

“Deception, no. 13” (1997) (22’’x 34’’) (silkscreen) depicts the 1802 event when Toussaint was invited by French General Brunet to a parlay. It was a deception; Toussaint was captured and taken to Paris, where he died in prison in 1803. He is known as the “Father of Haiti.” Lawrence’s original title for the image of Toussaint from the 1938 series summed up his impressions of Toussaint and his achievements as “Statesman and military genius, esteemed by the Spaniards, feared by the English, dreaded by the French, hated by the planters, and revered by the blacks.”

Lawrence calls his style Dynamic Cubism. In “Deception” we see Toussaint attacked by five French soldiers, all with drawn swords. The colors are limited but effectively used. The black shapes of coats, boots, hats, chair, and wall panels surround and secure the edges and angle diagonally toward Toussaint. A brown floor panel in the center of the composition leads our eyes to the seated Toussaint. The remainder of the floor on which the soldiers stand is ochre in color, and it ends just behind Toussaint’s shoulders an effective contrast to the black and white uniforms of the soldiers. A dark green wall completes the room, and a small contrasting turquoise rectangle in the center of the wall effectively highlights Toussaint’s upper torso. By the position of his turned head we see the surprised look on his face. His is the only clearly seen face. Whether painted with brush and tempera or silkscreened, the of solid and simple, but elegant, shapes are easy to understand and highly effective.

Lawrence’s “Migration Series” (1940 to 41) (60 images) brought him to national prominence when it was exhibited in 1941 at the Downtown Gallery in Greenwich Village in New York City. Lawrence was the first African American to be represented by a New York gallery. The series was quickly purchased by the Philips Collection in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Fortune Magazine ran an issue with 26 illustrations from the series, and the series was also published in 1941 in a book funded by the Works Project Administration. Plate No. 1 of the series was named “During the World War there was a great migration north by southern Negroes” (1938); however in 1993, Lawrence changed the title to read “During World War I there was a great migration north by southern African Americans” (1993). In this image we again see Lawrence’s use of limited but effective colors. African American figures flood toward the three bright orange doorways labeled Chicago, New York, and St. Louis. The scattered use of orange shapes throughout the composition begin at the bottom and are strategically placed to lead the viewer’s eye to the three doorways.

Lawrence continued his career creating such series as “John Brown” (1941-1942) (32 images); “Harlem”(1942) (30 images); “War” (1946-47) (14 image), during his service in the US Coast Guard during WWII; “Struggle? History of the America People” (1953-55) (30 images); “Great Ideas of Western Man” (1958); “Hiroshima” (1983) (8 images); and “Genesis” (1989), based on his memory of Sunday sermons given by Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr. at the Abbyssinian Baptist Church in Haarlem. Lawrence drew subject matter from his life and experiences in Harlem, from his extensive reading of history, and from his deep interest in current events.

“Men exist for the sake of one another. Teach them then or bear with them.”(1958) (21’’ x17’’) (oil on fiberboard) is a work from the series “Great Ideas of Western Men”. The title of this piece is a quote from Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, VIII: 59. A very large male figure of indeterminate race sits on a rock and is surrounded by children who reach out to him and listen to him. On first seeing the piece, we see three large black cracks running through the figures and the rock. After very close observation we see the man is holding a small tree with a root ball, ready to be planted. The title of the work tells us humans need to exist together, and we either need to be taught how to live together or to learn how to be tolerant of each other. The three tree branches create an interesting enigma; first they are hard to distinguish, and second they cross in front of the three of the figures as if creating divisions between the people and cracking the rock.

Lawrence was invited to create a work for the 1976 American Bicentennial celebration. “Confrontation at the Bridge” (1976) (19.5’’ x 26’’) (silkscreen) described the March 7, 1965, march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on route from Selma to the Alabama state capital in Montgomery. Led by Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lewis, the marchers were protesting for equal voting rights. To represent the brutal police attack, Lawrence has substituted a viscously snarling dog. Six hundred protestors were turned back. Lawrence does not elect to show the famous leaders of the march; he depicts instead the frightened mass of African Americans exerting their first amendment right to peaceful protest. Later in 1965 the US Congress passed and President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.

In 1976 Lawrence added to the “Great Ideas of Western Men” series a piece titled “In a free government, the security of civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other, in the multiplicity of sects.” a quote from James Madison’s Federalist Papers (1788). Lawrence’s works were carefully chosen to expose the viewer to vast set of images intended to be informative, educational, and thought provoking.

“Exploration” (1980) is a forty foot-long mural of porcelain and steel installed in the Blackburn Center at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The mural presents 12 consecutive images depicting the study of religion, political science, theater, law and agriculture, fine arts and philosophy, astronomy and music, medicine, math and history. Lawrence’s last commissioned public work “New York in Transit” (72 foot long, composed of Murano glass) was installed a few months after his death at the Times Square subway station.

Other Lawrence projects include children’s books containing his images. His first was Harriet and the Promised Land (1968), included in the list of that year’s best illustrated books by the New York Times and praised by the Boston Globe. Books John Brown and the Great Migration followed. He created a new series of work on eighteen Aesop’s Fables (1970) and another set of twenty-three Aesop’s Fables (1998). He was invited to participate in several community projects and received commissions from several private sources. Lawrence also taught at such prestigious institutions as Black Mountain College in North Carolina, The New School for Social Research in New York City, the Art Students League in New York City, the Pratt Institute in New York City, Brandeis University in Massachusetts, and the Skowhegan School in Maine. From 1971 until 1986, he taught at the University of Washington in Seattle.

After visiting Lawrence’s first exhibitions in 1938 at the Harlem YMCA, Charles Alston, one of his teachers wrote in an essay that Lawrence “has followed a course of development dictated by his own inner motivations…. Working in the very limited medium of flat tempera he achieved a richness and brilliance of color harmonies both remarkable and exciting…. Lawrence symbolizes more than anyone I know, the vitality, the seriousness and promise of a new and socially conscious generation of Negro artists.” Alston’s thoughts on Lawrence have proved accurate. Exhibitions of Lawrence’s art are numerous, and they continue to excite and enlighten us.

NOTE: The Mitchell Gallery, St John’s College in Annapolis is presenting free of charge an online exhibition of three of Lawrence’s series.
September 2 – October 6, 2020 -“Genesis” (1989) October 7 – November 1, 2020 – “Toussaint L’Ouverture” (1938, 1997) *******October 15, 2020: Online lecture “Toussaint L’Ouverture” series, FREE  November 18 – December 18, 2020 -“Hiroshima” (1983) *******November 18, 2020: Online lecture “Hiroshima “series, FREE.

Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years.  Since retiring with her husband Kurt to Chestertown six years ago, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and Chesapeake College’s Institute for Adult Learning.  She is also an artist whose work is sometimes in exhibitions at Chestertown RiverArts and she paints sets for the Garfield Center for the Arts.

Brian Jungen is a member of the Dane-Zaa tribe of the First Nations of Canada, historically referred to as the Beaver tribe.  His mother was Dane-Zaa, his father a Swiss immigrant.  Jungen was raised in the rural town of Fort St. John, British Columbia, until his parents died in a fire.  Afterwards, he lived with his Aunt, an unhappy experience. A loner and he spent much of his time outdoors. His parents recognized his artistic talent and had supported it.  Determined to see where his talent would take him, he enrolled after high school in the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design.  “That was pretty rough.  I was a small-town kid, and I didn’t know anybody my age.  I’d never lived in the city.  I did meet other 18-year-olds, but they were city kids and way cooler than me.”  He graduated from the Emily Carr Institute in 1992, with a degree in visual arts. He subsequently studied art history at Concordia University in Montreal.

Jungen’s early works were drawings.  His real inspiration occurred in 1998, when he visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.  He saw fossils and butterflies exhibited with Native American art “as though it was nature, not culture.”  He wrote that the museum displays depressed him.  Later he passed Nike Town, Nike’s New York City’s flagship store.  “I saw the Air Jordans in display cases, and that’s when it really all kind of made sense.”  The shoes were red, white and black, the colors of the Haida, the Kwakwaka’waka,  and the Bella Coola nations, the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest.  “Professional sports play a role in society that serves like a ritual and ceremony.  Having experienced that within my own family–the dancing and drumming that I participate in–I know how important that is.  So I wanted to use that–use things that people would recognize in their everyday world.”

Jungen says, “a lot of my exposure to my ancestry is through museums” where the confiscated items were displayed in glass vitrines (display cases), as were the Air Jordans in the Nike store.   At the time, he was reading books on his history and had discovered in1876, the Canadian government banned Indian art and seized masks, blankets, and other objects in order to suppress Indian culture. Coincidentally, he was reading Levi-Strauss’s The Way of the Masks. “I was doing a residency, which provided both money and time for art making.  So I bought these Air Jordans.  I started taking them apart and reassembling them.  But it was unplanned – the works evolved as I made them.”  

In 1999, Jungen had a one person show at Charles H. Scott Gallery in Vancouver, where he introduced the series “Prototypes for a New Understanding”.  The series consisted of original masks made from Air Jordans.   He believed sport culture has much in common with Indian culture.  Performance is a part of both cultures as both required the use of regalia in special events and ceremony.  “It was interesting to see how by simply manipulating the Air Jordan shoes you could evoke specific cultural traditions whilst simultaneously amplifying the process of cultural corruption and assimilation.  The Nike sculptures seemed to articulate a paradoxical relationship between a consumerist artefact and an ‘authentic’ artefact. I experiment until I can find a way I can manipulate them or take advantage of their iconography, without completely changing them.  I like the fact that people can still recognize what the source material is.”

Jungen’s choice of AirJordans was intentional; the sports industry had appropriated so many names such as The Chiefs, Braves, and Redskins.  “I felt that if these professional sports teams felt that they had every right to use this terminology, then I had every right to exploit their materials for my artwork.” Jungen certainly would applaud the Washington Redskins decision to change their name.  Air Jordans went on the market in 1985 and sold for $65.  Jungen made 23 masks, the same as Michael Jordan’s team number.  Jordan owns one of the masks.  “They became the iconic sneaker that everyone wanted, and they’re still like that.  I was interested in paralleling that with Native art and now Native art is bought and fetishized.”  Today a new pair of Air Jordans can sell for as much as $200.00, and Nike has produced 23 versions.  Collectors treasure and display their collections of vintage Air Jordans, some vintage shoes sell for as much as $31,000.

Another of Jurgen’s concerns is the trash we discard that helps to pollute our environment.  He remembers his mother: “She was constantly trying to extend the life of things, packages, and utensils.  Once we had to use the back end of a pickup truck as an extension for our hog pen.”  In 2000, while he was reading the history of whaling, the extermination of an animal significant in a variety of ways for the Haida culture, he happened upon a large number of broken white molded plastic chairs that were discarded at the curb. “Everything kind of clicked. “  Consisting only of white plastic chairs, “Shapeshifter “(2000)(57’’x260’’x52’’) forms the skeleton of a whale.  The whale sculpture was hung from the ceiling as if on display in a natural history museum.  Jungen referred to the whale as captured, “a parallel of the First Nations individual who is both marginalized and fetishized by mainstream culture.”

Jungen’s works go beyond his concern for the dispossession and appropriation of Native American arts to concerns for consumerism and the environment.  “Untitled” (2001) was a work of sculpture seemingly made of ten stacked cheap wooden palette’s used to move mass produced goods.  On closer inspection it is evident that they are not cheap palettes, but carefully and beautifully hand-made by the artists from red cedar, the wood used by Northwest Coast Indian carvers.  The piece questions our first impressions, and our response to common objects; and it asks us to further examine and change our understanding.  The work quietly suggests this understanding can extend to our judgment of people.  In the same year, Jungen produced “Isolated Depiction of the Passage of Time”(2001) (44’’x46’’x39’’) was indeed a dozen stacks of plastic food trays.  They were color coded to match statistics on the length of jail sentences given to First Nation individuals.  Inside the stack a video continually played The Great Escape.  “Court” (2004) was a life size replica of a basketball court made of 231 wood sweatshop sewing machine tables with hundreds of holes for attaching the sewing machines.  It is a reminder that Air Jordans are made in sweatshops in Indonesia. Jungen’s political statements are intended to make us think.  “Politically, I think persuasion is better than force.”

Jungen also incorporates arts and ideas from indigenous peoples around the world.  In 2008, he went to Australia and camped on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbor, with the Sydney airport nearby.  Influenced by looking at the night sky and hearing planes go over, he created “Crux” (2008)(26’ x 20’) a mobile made from luggage which he tore apart to create the animals seen in the constellations, observed for thousands of years by the Aborigines, “those who sleep on the surface of the earth under the night sky.” These constellations made from suitcases, were hung from the ceiling enabling viewers to see them in the sky.  Most easily identifiable are the large Alligator, a pink and purple Emu, a Shark (a gray Samsonite suitcase), and a Red Eagle.  An over-turned rowboat is included; Jungen used it to go back and forth from the Island to the mainland.  The work was made for and first displayed at Australia’s contemporary arts festival.

Jurgen has manipulated many different materials to create his unique works of art.  In 2016, Jungen returned to Air Jordans for an exhibition featuring masks that are more abstract.  Unlike his earlier masks, these can be worn.  “Performance Bonnet” (2019)(32’’x31’’x30’’) is one of several of this new type.  Masks traditionally were of animals and were worn as part of dance rituals asking the spirit world for help.  Each mask allows the wearer to become one with the animal represented and therefore enter into the spirit world.  

Jungen lives on his ranch near Vancouver in British Columbia, where he can hunt, raise animals and work.  He prefers the peace and quiet of living alone. He is still a hard working artist and continues to respond to the world around him.  Some of his latest works are “Plague Masks” (2020), which responds to our current COCID-19 pandemic. 

In a recent interview Jurgen commented, “A lot of young people, when they see my work in museums, they kind of lose it because at first all they see that I cut up all these Air Jordans.  There’s this kind of sacrilegious shock a lot of kids have.  And then they see what it’s become.  There’s this switch that happened.  I like that. I like that is happens.”

Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years.  Since retiring with her husband Kurt to Chestertown six years ago, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and Chesapeake College’s Institute for Adult Learning.  She is also an artist whose work is sometimes in exhibitions at Chestertown RiverArts and she paints sets for the Garfield Center for the Arts.

A previous article in the SPY on Faith Ringgold highlighted her art in support of civil rights and women’s rights issues that she continues to explore today.  This article for Chestertown’s Legacy Day celebrates the contributions of three African American legends:  Faith Ringgold, artist and writer; Sonny Rollins, jazz musician; and Josephine Baker, dancer and singer.   

Ringgold received her Masters of Art degree from The City College of New York in 1959:  “I got a fabulous education in art—wonderful teachers who taught me everything, except anything about African art or African American art, but I traveled and took care of that part myself.”  Visiting Europe in the 1970’s, she was inspired by African masks and Tibetan Buddhist thangkas (large cloth banners hanging from dowel rods). She embraced the idea of framing her painted canvases with cloth and hanging them from rods. This approach allowed her to introduce traditional cloth patchwork quilting she learned from her mother.  Cloth is much lighter than framed canvas under glass, can be rolled and shipped at less cost, and is easier to handle and hang. She acknowledges this approach has allowed her to exhibit in more galleries, because they were willing to accept work that was less expensive to ship and easier to display.  These “story quilts” were a distinct departure from the traditional woks on canvas, produced by white male artists. 

Walter Theodore Rollins (b.1930) and Faith Ringgold were the same age, and grew up together in Harlem’s Sugar Hill district.  She tells the story that when they were 12 or 13 they kissed in a game of Post Office.  Sonny came by with his saxophone and played, and “once or twice” she sang while he played.  “Sonny’s Quilt “(1986) (91”x72”), is one of several in Ringgold’s “Bridge Series.” From 1959 to 1961, Rollins was on a self imposed break: “I was getting very famous at the time and I felt I needed to brush up on various aspects of my craft.  I felt I was getting too much, too soon, so I said, wait a minute, I’m going to do it my way. I wasn’t going to let people push me out there, so I could fall down.  I wanted to get myself together, on my own.  I used to practice on the Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge because I was living on the Lower East Side at the time.”   Rollins went each night to the Williamsburg Bridge to practice the saxophone in order not to disturb his Grand Street neighbors. He would practice for 15 to 16 hours a day, no matter the season.  

Rollins’s nightly practice inspired “Sonny’s Quilt.”  On the quilt Rollins is high in the sky on the bridge and blowing tenor saxophone.  The girders and spans of the bridge direct our eyes up to him.  Ringgold has painted the sky and water a bright blue.  The Manhattan skyline is gray and the bridge spans are painted white, but glued on to these flat colors are brightly colored cloth patchwork pieces.  The frame is made entirely of cloth patches highlighting the colors in the quilt, especially the red.  We hear the notes and feel his passion as these color patches create a jazz rhythm.  In November 1961 he said, “I could have probably spent the rest of my life just going up on the bridge. I realized, no, I have to get back into the real world.”  Rollins’s comeback album in 1962 was titled “The Bridge”, and in 2015 the recording was introduced into the Grammy Hall of Fame, one of the many honors he received.  

Sonny Rollins was mentored by Thelonious Monk and befriended by Miles Davis when they hung out together in Harlem.  Davis wrote, “People loved Sonny Rollins up in Harlem and everywhere else.  He was a legend almost a god to a lot of the younger musicians.  He was an aggressive, innovative player who always had fresh musical ideas.  I loved him back then as a player and he could also write his ass off…” During his career Rollins made over 60 albums, one of which was titled “Global Warming” (1997). He played Carnegie Hall (1957), won two Grammy Awards (2000, 2004), and received the Grammy Life Time Achievement Award (2004), among others.  In early 20ll, President Obama presented him with the Medal of Art “on behalf of the gods of music,” and in 2015, he received the Jazz Foundation of America’s lifetime achievement award.  On receiving the Kennedy Center Honors award in 2011, he said, “I am deeply appreciative of this great honor.  In honoring me, the Kennedy Center honors jazz, America’s classical music.  For that, I am very grateful.”

Freda Josephine McDonald (b.1906 St. Louis, Missouri – d. 1975 France), grew up poor with only her mother looking after her.  At the age of eight, she was in domestic service, and by age thirteen she was a waitress, living on the street, and dancing on street corners for money. Her first marriage at age thirteen ended within a year and in 1921 she married Willie Baker.  The marriage ended in 1925, but her career had gotten started, and she decided to keep the Baker name for the rest of her career.  That same year she was in a dance troop going to Paris.  One year later, in 1926, she was “the most sensational woman anyone ever saw” remarked Ernest Hemingway.  Ringgold’s quilt “Jo Baker’s Bananas “(1997) (80.5’’x76’’), illustrates her almost instant rise to fame.  In 1927, dancing at the Folies Bergere in Un Vent de Follie, wearing nothing more than a skirt made of 16 plastic bananas and a necklace of beads, she was a living icon.  

In the quilt, Ringgold repeats Baker’s figure five times as she shimmies and shakes across the quilt.  The original background for her performance was a tropical setting of greenery with yellow and orange flowers that Ringgold duplicates with the painted patchwork background.  Paris had fallen in love with American Jazz, African art and Jo Baker.  Two African American jazz musicians and a multiracial audience drinking complete the story.  The cloth patchwork frame complements the yellow bananas and the orange and greens of the background.  The quilt is full of movement and almost dizzying energy.  “Jo Baker’s Bananas” is on display at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and it is one of twelve in the series “The French Collection”, inspired by a recent visit to France.  Other titles in the series include “Dancing at the Louvre” (1991), and “Jo Baker’s Birthday” (1993).

The quilt is as vibrant and exciting as was Baker.  She was loved in Europe, but not in America.  Jo Baker and her bananas became an iconic image and a symbol for the Jazz Age.  In 1934 she took voice lessons and stared in the opera La Creole by Jacques Offenbach.  Shirley Bassey remarked, “I swear in all my life I have never seen, and probably never shall see again, such a spectacular singer and performer.” Baker came to American on tour in 1936, and she refused to perform for segregated audiences.  Most performances went well, but Americans were cruel to her.  She returned heartbroken to Paris in1937, and became a Naturalized French citizen.  “I have two loves, my country and Paris.” 

When WWII broke out in 1940, she joined the French Resistance.  Her star quality allowed her to attend parties and receptions for officials from many countries, and she was so charming they talked to her and told her things.  She could travel anywhere in Europe,  and she passed information written with invisible ink on the backs of her sheet music or pinned inside her underwear, betting no one would strip search her.  They never did.  In 1941 she traveled to the French Colonies in North Africa for her health. When she recovered, she organized and paid for an entertainment troop for the American, British and French troops stationed there.  After WWII she was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French Military and named a Chevalier in the French Legion d’honneur by Charles de Gaulle.  She was the only American woman to receive full French military honors at her funeral.

She never stopped loving America, and she donated to the Civil Rights Movement.  She stood with Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, and she made a short speech while wearing her Free French uniform and the Medal of the Legion d’honneur.  “I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents, and much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad. And when I get mad, you know that I open my big mouth. And then look out, ’cause when Josephine opens her mouth, they hear it all over the world.”  After Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, Coretta Scott King offered Baker an unofficial leadership position in the movement.  She thought it over carefully be declined, saying her children were “too young to lose their mother.”  She had one daughter and adopted 11 orphans whom she called “The Rainbow Tribe.”  Subsequent visits to America to play at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere were successful.  She received numerous awards from Paris and several American cities, streets were named after her, and she was honored by the NAACP and other African-American organizations. 

Faith Ringgold is widely known for her art, but she also is a well known writer. In an interview in 1999, she stated that the story quilts grew from the many rejections by publishers who refused her autobiography: “I figured, I can’t get anything published, so I might as well write my story with my art.”  Many of the story quilts were painted with acrylic on canvas and included text, often telling a story from her life or one she made up.  Not all of the story quilts include written text as can be noted from the three pictured in this article, however, each still tells a story without words.  “Tar Beach” (1988) (74.5’’x68.5’’), is setting is on a tarpaper roof top of an apartment in Harlem.  Laundry is drying on a line, a few potted plants are scattered about, and a nearby table contains food, including a watermelon and wine.  Two families are playing cards and two children are stretched out on a quilt and looking up at the stars.  In the background is the lighted Manhattan skyline, and above it is a large lighted span of a bridge.  At the very top is a girl in a white dress flying with the stars in the sky.  As the title indicates, they are pretending they are at the beach.          

Tar Beach is the title of one of Ringgold’s best known books, and the series of bridge quilts and the book were both inspired by “Sonny’s Quilt.”  “I will always remember when the stars fell down around me and lifted me above the George Washington Bridge.” Tar Beach tells the story of Cassie Lightfoot an eight year old girl who lived in an apartment in Harlem in 1939 during the depression.  Cassie has the ability to fly and has big dreams.  When she and her brother Be Be, are flying one night they meet Harriet Tubman and find out about slavery and Aunt Harriet’s underground railway.  Still  in publication, Tar Beach remains a resource for teachers and guides for teaching it are on-line today. The book received the Caldecott Medal (1992), the Coretta Scott King Award for Illustrators (1992), the Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award, a New York Times Best Illustrated Book, and winner of the Parent’s Choice Award among others. In all Ringgold has authored and illustrated 17 children’s books.  In 1995 her autobiography We Flew Over the Bridge was published.  She is the recipient of over 75 awards and 23 honorary doctoral degrees.   

Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years.  Since retiring with her husband Kurt to Chestertown six years ago, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and Chesapeake College’s Institute for Adult Learning.  She is also an artist whose work is sometimes in exhibitions at Chestertown RiverArts and she paints sets for the Garfield Center for the Arts.

Lin comes from a cultured Chinese family.  Her father emigrated from China in 1948; he was a ceramicist and became Dean of Fine Arts at Ohio State University. Her mother emigrated in 1949; she was a poet and Professor of Literature at Ohio State.  Lin grew up among the members of the university and had access to the schools many cultural and artistic offerings. “I was always making art and my parents encouraged us to follow our passions. Hence, my brother is a language poet and I am still making things”.  Her parents brought Maya and her brother up to assimilate:  “Typical with immigrant families, they didn’t talk about what they left behind. We were brought up without either parent teaching or wanting to teach us Chinese. It was a conscious decision on their part.”  Lin’s mother’s advice was “to do what was challenging and what you were passionate about.”  For Maya Lin that was art and architecture.

Maya Lin was one of nine artists invited to participate in the inaugural exhibition (2015), for the re-opening of the restored Renwick Gallery in Washington D.C.  The overall title and concept for the exhibition was “Wonder.”  Lin chose to do an installation about the Chesapeake Bay.  She often incorporates water into her work. “The Chesapeake is one of my favorite waterways, partly because people outside of the area aren’t as familiar with it. But if you know the area and know how significantly it’s changed ecologically speaking since we settled the area, it’s huge. It’s an incredibly beautiful form.”  “Folding the Chesapeake” (2015) (318’’x391’’x273”), is composed of 54,000 clear marbles that she glued to the walls, floors, over a fire place, and onto the ceiling, to form and fold the shape of the Chesapeake Bay.  Her intent was to make the viewer aware of the ecology of the bay as an extensive waterway.  Those who live on some part of the Chesapeake rarely envision it as a whole. Lin does extensive research for all of her projects, and gained significant knowledge concerning the Bay and the 2,700 species of plants and animals which are supported by its ecosystem.  “This piece allows me to give people an idea of the totality. You see it as a single organism, as a living system.”  

Lin’s choice of subject and material for this work had several influences.  When she was eight years old, Lin remembers that her father brought home a box of artisanal clear marbles, the type glass blowers employ.  “It was like opening a box of water. They capture light in a way I had never seen.”  She also was inspired by the Renwick.  “The Renwick Gallery is probably one of the more historic buildings that I’ve ever installed in and so taking something and being able to, in a way, transform a room without necessarily becoming physically overbearing or overly large was very important.”  Perhaps most significant, is Maya Lin’s continuous interest in saving the environment.  From her childhood she recalls Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring from1962, the passing of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, and the Clean Water Act of 1972. “I’m very much a product of the growing awareness about ecology and the environmental movement. I am very drawn to landscape, and my work is about finding a balance in the landscape, respecting nature not trying to dominate it.” 

Water has played a significant part in Maya Lin’s work.  Her Civil Rights Memorial (1989), in Montgomery, Alabama, commissioned by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is a large fountain in the shape of an asymmetrical upside down cone.  Water flows over the top of the cone.  The cone is inscribed with 41 names of martyrs who were killed from 1954 to 1968.  In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled segregation of schools was unlawful and in 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated.   Lin chose a water memorial after researching the history of racial segregation, and read King’s speech “I Have a Dream” in which he said “…we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The water flows in a gentle but solid stream across the top, and visitors are encouraged to touch the water and the names of the dead, which momentarily interrupts the flow of water, but it returns quickly to a steady and calm stream.

         

 

During her career, Lin has maintained a balance between earthworks that create wave patterns with grass and hills, memorials, architecture, and museum pieces.  Lin is prolific in all of these areas.  Some further examples of her works relating to water are “Bodies of Water” (2006), a series of sculpted birch plywood bases, shaped to scale, of the Caspian Sea (19”x58.5”x33”), the Black Sea, and the Red Sea.  Lin states these bodies of water are “unseen ecosystems that we pollute” and are “endangered bodies of water.”  “Disappearing Bodies of Water “(2013), are marble sculptures carved to scale, that illustrate the loss of water due to overuse in Lake Chad and the Aral Sea.  “Pin River Yangtze (2015), located in the lobby of the U.S. Embassy compound in Beijing, is composed or 30,000 steel pins tightly grouped and tacked into a backing.  “Pin River- Hudson Watershed” (2018), is one of twelve works in the Hudson River Museum. It is a time line of the Hudson River from the past to the present, with art and text that illustrate the changes in population and species over time. Lin does extensive research into each of her projects using available twenty-first century technology.  These include micro and macro views of the earth, solar resonance scans, and aerial and satellite mapping systems.

Since 2014, Maya Lin is creating a series of works called “What is Missing?”  She refers these as her last memorial.  “In all my memorials, time has been a huge driving, underlying structure. For Missing, there is the past — what we have lost, but more importantly, pointing out things you don’t even realize are missing like the sounds of songbirds, the scale of species, the abundance of species.  In fact, in the 1890’s the Atlantic Cod fish was as large as man and New York coast oysters were 12” in diameter.  Lin has set up her own not-for-profit organization and plans to contribute to it for the rest of her life.  There are 40 conservations groups working with her to look at what has been lost and what can be done to correct the situation.  The group is also thinking about how conservation and climate concerns can generate both jobs and climate change.

From the beginning Maya Lin’s has been involved in politics.  Her choice, by a blind jury, to create the Viet Nam War Memorial (1981), raised many alarms.  She was too young and therefore inexperienced, she was a woman, and she was not American but an alien, an Asian, despite that fact that she was born in America.  Today it is thought by most to be a singular monument and a moving testament to the soldiers lost in the war.   In 2003, she was asked to serve on the jury for the World Trade Center Memorial.  In 2016, President Obama awarded her the Presidents Medal of Freedom.  

Most of her work has been involved with the environment and climate change.  “What is Missing?” is dedicated to continuing the efforts to save the planet from disaster. “It is a very dark moment in history. Sixty-nine percent of Americans agree that climate is changing. The good news is that cities, states, and countries are moving, they have been moving, and will continue to move towards a sustainable future. I think nature is resilient – if we protect it – and with my background I wanted to lend a voice to the incredible threat we are under from climate change and species and habitat loss.”  

Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years.  Since retiring with her husband Kurt to Chestertown six years ago, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and Chesapeake College’s Institute for Adult Learning.  She is also an artist whose work is sometimes in exhibitions at Chestertown RiverArts and she paints sets for the Garfield Center for the Arts.

Beatriz Milhazes was born in Rio de Janeiro and lives and works there. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother was an art historian who encouraged her daughter’s artistic talent. Growing up in a repressive Brazilian regime where access to contemporary art was rare, her mother was able to get access to some contemporary art.  Mihazes studied journalism at school and took art classes at night.   From 1978 until 1981, she studied Social Communication at Helio Alonso University and completed a two year course at Paque Lage School of Visual Arts from 1980 until 1982.  While making art and getting her career started, she taught and coordinated art activities at the School of Visual Art from 1986 until 1996.  Her schooling, current home, and two studios, are in the neighborhood of the Botanical Garden and the Tijuca Forest in Rio.  Early in her career she found her direction. “I am an abstract painter and I speak an international language, but my interest is in things and behaviors that can only be found in Brazil.”

An example of her early work is “The Year We Lived Dangerously” (1995) (77’’x77’’). Her work draws on Brazilian, Latin American, American, and European influences combined with her interest in the decorative arts, ceramics, Rio Carnival decorations, laces, ruffles, colonial architectural details, opera, classical and Brazilian music, specifically Bossanova, and the richly colored flowers and foliage of Brazil. Her use of vibrant colors is an antithesis to traditional and contemporary Brazilian art favoring dull colors that are considered the colors of the upper class and therefore “high art.” Bright colors found in Carnival and the pleasures of common people are associated with “low art.”  Milhazes explains, “There is no special interest in color.  Brazil is a colorful country, but its art isn’t.  That is why people get confused.  I use elements from my culture, and color is one of them, but I’m the only one to do this.”

[“My paintings are never improvised, but about a process.  Nothing is there by chance – my work is very rational.”  Milhazes developed her process early in the 1980’s when she intensively studied printmaking processes. First she paints with acrylics on a shaped plastic sheet which then she glues, paint side down, to the canvas.  When the paint has dried she peels the plastic from the canvas leaving the paint attached.  The shaped plastic sheets can be used again.  Her working process allows her to use colors with a variety of sheens, and she is careful to leave no visible brushstrokes.  However, since 1989, when small parts of the color design flake and look like decay, she has decided to keep them.  Above all, the structure of her work was influenced by geometry:  “I am seeking geometrical structures, but with freedom of form and imagery taken from different worlds.  My challenge has always been the same. I’m interested in life and my surroundings, but to make it work as a painting, I do need to think as a geometric and conceptual artist in my studio.” 

Milhazes has a large output of work including both large and small acrylic works and silkscreen prints, and she has been commissioned to create a number of large installations.  In 2005, the Circle Line of the British Metro commissioned her to paint 19 vaulted arches in the Gloucester Road Tube Station.  The theme of the paintings was “Peace and Love”, intended to generate a peaceful and happy environment for the thousands of passing commuters. It is a time when people can be rushed and harried, contented or frustrated, whether waiting for the next train patiently or anxiously.  In all instances the brilliant colors and exuberant forms should help them pass the time. Approximately 13 million persons get to enjoy these murals each year.  In 2008, Milhazes was back in London and installed a mural, Guanabara Bay, on the wall of the Tate Modern Museum’s cafeteria wall.  It is joyful to behold and is a bright and happy place for lunch, if the beer is warm.

Her process of gluing colored sheets and other items onto canvas is a form of collage.  “Collages have a kind of dialogue with an imaginary journal. Collected papers come from a variety of interests: sometimes it’s an aesthetic attraction, but other times they’re part of a routine, such as with chocolate wrapping paper or cuttings remaining from existing impressions. That’s why composition in collage creates a dialogue that’s exclusive to collages.”  Collage is also a response to the repressive Brazilian government (1964-1985), when Carnival was a quiet revolt against oppression.  Artists of all sorts used paper, plastic and other recycled and cheap materials to make their art.  For example Milhazes Gamboa I, (2009), was hung from the ceiling of the Old Mint Building in New Orleans. “So I link the carnival in New Orleans with the Carnival in Rio.  It will make this kind of dialogues between two cities.”  Gamboa II, (2013-15), displayed in the Jewish Museum in New York City in 2016, is a “composition of shiny, candy-colored paper and plastic (which) recall this history with forms that seem playful, but are rooted in Brazil’s recent political history.”  

Milhazes has work is in museums and private collections world wide.  She makes eleven to twelve paintings a year, and collectors wait for eighteen months or more for one of her works.  She made a site-specific work called “Moon Love Dreaming” (2016)(1311×102’’) in collaboration with Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima. Kazujo’s pavilion is at Grace Farms in New Canaan, Connecticut.  Her 108 foot-long installation, extends the entire inner length of the west wall of the West barn. Influences for the work were the river and hills on the site and the title references Australian Aborigine paintings known as “dreamings.”  “I want your eyes to move, and of course, circles don’t have an end. I don’t want your eyes to stop anywhere.  I want to use my surroundings. I don’t want to forget them. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t.”   The new design influences in her works are never ending, but always include her original reference, Brazil.

Milhazes’s work has taken several forms over the years.  Her sister Marcia Mihazes runs the Contemporary Dance Company for which Milhazes has designed several sets.  She has made prints with the Durham Press in Eastern Pennsylvania for over twenty years, frequently as an artist in residence.  For the Pinton Mill in France, she has worked with master weavers to design tapestries, as have other famous artists such as Alexander Calder and Sonia Delaunay.  She has two studios on the same street, one for acrylic painting and one for collage.  She feels the paintings and collages “start exchanging language between them.”

In 2016, Jane Morris wrote in “The Economist” that Beatriz Milhazes was “Brazil’s most successful contemporary painter.” In January 2020, Milhazes joined the Pace Gallery in New York:  “It is with great enthusiasm that I join Pace Gallery, particularly in this special moment of renewal. The journey has been long and exciting from the moment I first showed my work in North America, at The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, in 1993, to now. Pace’s impact on art history, with their strong program in abstract art, is well established and their aim to continue its legacy with a new concept of global contemporaneity attests to their commitment to artists such as myself. It is fascinating, and I am excited to be a part of it!”

Beverly Hall Smith was a professor of art history for 40 years.  Since retiring with her husband Kurt to Chestertown six years ago, she has taught art history classes at WC-ALL and Chesapeake College’s Institute for Adult Learning.  She is also an artist whose work is sometimes in exhibitions at Chestertown RiverArts and she paints sets for the Garfield Center for the Arts.