Kara Walker’s SLAVERY! SLAVERY!
San Pedro’s Gallery Azul has been celebrating Black heritage and Black History Month by creating and sharing posts about Black artists, their works and a few facts about them nearly every day during this month of February.
To date, artists include Los Angeles based artist and collage creator Mark Bradford, whose bio illustrates, “engages the discarded materials of urban life.” He graduated from the California Institute of Arts and his styles include abstract painting and performance art. Bradford has many striking works you can see locally at The Broad, many of which depict the abstract reality of life in Los Angeles.
Gallery Azul also highlights Kehinde Wiley, explaining, “perhaps his most popular piece to those who don’t follow art is the portrait of former President Obama” [Seated amid a verdant scape donning a dark suit]. Wiley creates portraits of everyday men and women with backgrounds inspired by paintings by Old Masters.”
Of course the natural response to Wiley’s Obama painting is another great artist, Baltimore based, Amy Sherald who painted a portrait of former First Lady Michelle Obama. For those who don’t know Sherald, Gallery Azul noted, she is the artist who painted Breonna Taylor featured on the [Vanity Fair] magazine cover this past September in a special issue edited by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Sherald added special details for the portrait like Breonna’s engagement ring, showing parts of her personal life in order to know the young woman better. On her portrait of Michelle Obama, draped elegantly in a black and white geometric print ball gown with a splash of red, pink and yellow, Sherald previously noted, “It also speaks to black culture. And it reminded me of the Gee’s Bend quilts that women made over the course of their lifetimes and were discovered later on in life. But quilting is a huge part of black culture.”
The gallery has also highlighted Nigerian born, L.A. based Njideka Akunyili Crosby whose work, Gallery Azul noted, is known for combining collage, printmaking, drawing and painting in cinematic large-scale works. The results are works saturated in rich coloration. She fuses Nigerian and American source materials, histories and cultural references. Akunyili Crosby also created a mural designed specifically to wrap the exterior of Museum Of Contemporary Art, or MOCA Grand Avenue.
For something different, the gallery highlighted BLACK COMIX — independent published comic books by Black Creators. These titles were shared in celebration of a new renaissance of young black writers and artists that are filling the void of black Superheroes.
Featuring Chicago-born artist Harmonia Rosales, Gallery Azul shares the artist’s words explaining, her art speaks to “the part of me that has been the least represented in our society.” The black female bodies of her paintings are the memory of her ancestors, these expressions are meant to heal and promote self-love. Rosales explores black female empowerment through art that challenges ideological hegemony in contemporary society.
Featuring Stockton, California born Kara Walker, in the early 2000s, Walker began making 16mm films and video installations that set her silhouettes in motion. Gallery Azul said her work is best known for exploring the raw intersection of race, gender, and sexuality through her iconic, silhouetted figures. Walker utilizes the traditionally proper Victorian medium of the silhouette directly onto the walls of a gallery. Her work was also featured recently in the summer 2020 at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She has gained national and international recognition for her cut-paper silhouettes.
February 10, featured Gallery Azul’s “hero and legendary artist Ernie Barnes.” Ernest Eugene Barnes, Jr., was born, July 15, 1938 in Durham, North Carolina during the Jim Crow era.
The gallery highlighted that Barnes attended the all-Black North Carolina College at Durham (formerly North Carolina College for Negroes, now North Carolina Central University). He majored in art on a full athletic scholarship. He played the football positions of tackle and center at NCC. At age 18, on a college art class field trip to the newly-desegregated North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, Barnes inquired where he could find “paintings by Negro artists.” The docent responded, “Your people don’t express themselves that way.” 23 years later in 1979 Barnes returned to the museum for a solo exhibition.
Gallery Azul noted a consistent and distinct feature in Barnes’ work are the closed eyes of his subjects. This idea came from his experiences with bias. He notes in part, “ … We don’t see into the depths of our interconnection. The gifts, the strength and potential within other human beings. We stop at color quite often.”
Most recently the gallery featured William H. Johnson, born in Florence, South Carolina, Gallery Azul informs, Johnson moved to New York at age seventeen. Working a variety of jobs, he saved enough money to pay for an art education at the prestigious National Academy of Design.
Johnson spent the late 1920s in France, absorbing the lessons of modernism. He exhibited his French-Corsican paintings in the Harmon Foundation show of 1930 and received the gold medal. He returned to the US in 1938. where immersed himself in the traditions of Afro-America, producing work influenced and inspired by the times. His work was characterized by its stunning, eloquent, folk art simplicity. He was also a well-established part of the African-American artistic community at a time when most black artists were still riding the crest of the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson died on April 13, 1970. Today he is considered one of the most important African-American artists of his generation.
Dedicated to art and the comprehensive inclusion of artists of color, Gallery Azul has risen to the ideal of Black History Month. And as importantly, it brings forward artists of note, who capture humanity and our shared world. Bravo Gallery Azul!
Details: www.facebook.com/GalleryAzul and www.galleryazul.com