Visual Arts

Ari Post • November 7, 2013

There are pictures of soldiers in “War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath,” whose faces are indelibly distant, hollow and weary. They are faces of otherwise healthy, beautiful men and women whose eyes have gone limp and whose jaws have gone slack, their minds detached from the distress that surrounds them in temporal acts of self preservation. The “thousand-yard stare” of a shell-shocked soldier is surely as old as warfare itself, but not until the invention of photography in the mid-19th century could its stark reality be captured to give a face to the perennial trauma of warfare. Only then did the human cost of war enter the lives of those so far removed from the source of conflict.

Perhaps more so than images of a trench-scarred battlefield, stacks of bodies aligned in a ditch or even the dreadful grandeur of a mushroom cloud: the face of an enervated soldier brings the lasting effects of war to the forefront of our hearts and minds.

In so many ways, “War/Photography,” on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art through Sept. 29, does just this, confronting its audience with the psychological brutality of war and its lasting physical and cultural ramifications.

To be honest, it is a hard-hitting show. There are many portraits of soldiers with mud-streaked faces looking somewhere beyond the camera’s lens. Others are seen only in silhouette, perceptible by the heavy slump of their shoulders. They are drinking from dirty tin mugs, leaning on the nose of their rifles, resting in trenches, holding frail children.

There are also images of triumph and respite, peace and camaraderie. There are pictures of refugees, fallen soldiers and war-torn streets, as well as memorials and reconstruction efforts. It is a portrait of war that spans 165 years and six continents—from the Mexican-American War through present-day conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing together images by more than 185 photographers from around the world. This is a landmark photographic exhibition, vast in scope and ambition, that shows us the world we live in, how we got here and where we are likely heading.

Walking into the exhibit, viewers are confronted with Robert Clark’s photographic sequence showing the second plane hitting the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. The four photographs are effectively inert. With the exception of their high quality and resolution, there is nothing visually unusual about them, like a flat tourist snapshot of the New York City skyline from across the Hudson River—except that it shows a Boeing passenger airliner crashing into the World Trade Center, an event that killed almost 3,000 unarmed civilians and instigated of one of history’s longest, deadliest, and most costly wars.

In this articulate plainness, we feel a shock, confusion and panic born from nothing that brings us back to that infamous and fateful day. Like a canvas ripped through the center from within itself, the awe and helplessness of the photographer’s experience comes through—what could he, or anyone, do amidst this instantly monumental devastation? In Clark’s case, he did all he could: he took a picture.

“The Advent of War,” the first chapter of the exhibit’s arc, takes us through this journey. It shows the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, as well as the sinking of the USS Maine off the coast of Cuba in 1898, which led to the Spanish-American War. Both convey with clarity the concept of war’s advent.

The photographs are thus arranged not as a chronological survey, but according to the stages of war: the progression of conflict from acts of instigation to recruitment and training of soldiers, to “the fight” and the fog of war, and to the aftermath of combat, with images showing prisoners and executions, refugees and the wounded, the memorials we construct, and our remembrance.

Part of the exhibit’s success is that it makes no effort at social activism. It is not a cry for peace or an admonition of war’s inevitable devastation. It is a very direct presentation that strives to present facts and context for its images, not its moral parables. With so much contemporary art that wants to point things out and espouse proverbial wisdom—glossary notions of depleting natural resources or the cultural impact of gentrification, for instance—it is incredibly powerful to walk through an exhibit that simply deals with realities head-on, allowing the power of the images to succeed on their own merit. There is no filter to the presentation of the material, and yet it is a body of work that is both profoundly beautiful and deeply impacting. We are immersed in the experience of both soldiers and civilians, prisoners and victors, which enrich our understanding of this momentous subject.

The unhinged gaze of a soldier amidst the chaos of battle is an immeasurably significant contribution to the portrait of modern times, a passing glance filled with profound exhaustion and sorrow. When we talk about war, it is not just history and information we are dealing with, but acts that force us to confront our humanity. And walking out of this taxing exhibit an even stronger feeling emerges: our humanity is worth preserving. To capture it, both at its highest and lowest points, is a sacrifice and a duty that many photographers perform amidst gunfire and civil destruction in order to help us understand our dignity and to bolster the consciousness of future generations.

Ari Post •

Almost everything you should want to know about the monumental paintings of Kerry James Marshall is infinitely accessible in a way that the work of past masters could never be. One of the most celebrated painters currently working in the United States, Marshall makes work about African American identity and experience, and the narratives of their history that have been widely excluded from our country’s ever broadening patrimony. He also proves himself a discerning and eloquent ambassador to not only his own work, but to art history and an alternative American heritage.

There is no better explanation or critique of Marshall’s work than what comes from Marshall himself, and a quick Google search yields hours of interviews and video recordings—from a recent lecture at the Smithsonian, to documentary features, college guest talks and semi-formal conversations with museum curators. This is an artist who does not mince words. He holds forth on a vast array of topics—from the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the African American experience, to Hans Holbein, to the extant psychological turmoil of present-day Iraq—examining everything from an incisively self-aware, curious, and optimistic perspective.

And this isn’t even to talk about his paintings currently on view at the National Gallery.

I was scheduled to interview Marshall on June 27, the day before an exhibition of his work opened at the National Gallery of Art as part of their In the Tower series, which focuses on artistic developments since the mid-20th century. Over the past few years, the Tower series has featured Mel Bochner, Nam Jun Paik, Mark Rothko and Phillip Guston, to name a few. Marshall’s work fits uniquely within the series’ ostensible focus on the evolution of the Western artistic tradition.

His work speaks to art history, dealing with subjects from the Renaissance through modernism. But Marshall departs broadly from these institutions commonly featured in the National Gallery, drawing on his inordinate knowledge of African diasporic culture and iconography, as well as alternative and commercial visual languages. While it functions as art (and beautifully so), it also explores a tension between the historically gentrified privilege of fine art and a black American social history on the receiving end of severe economic and cultural exclusion.

“The history and the subtext of race is always present in the United States whether we recognize it or not,” Marshall says. “It’s part of the intellectual air that we breathe. But art has always occupied in a rarified social strata. Most of what we see in museums now was once in somebody’s house—these were all privately owned things that circulated among the aristocracy.”

Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1955, Marshall grew up in South Central Los Angeles, where he observed firsthand the social tumult brought about by the Black Power and Civil Rights movements. Strongly influenced by his experiences, he developed a signature artistic style in the 1980s that involved the use of figures that are essentially and literally black—flat shades of stark, inky darkness that recall Greek black-figure vase paintings—representing a culture of separation with distinct inner and outer appearances. To this day, his work continues to confront racial stereotypes within the United States, forcing his audience to consider a very basic but difficult question: how do we, individually and as a society, perceive the black experience?

Prior to our meeting, I spent a few hours alone in Marshall’s exhibit, which is composed of 10 paintings and more than 20 preparatory drawings, including the landmark canvas “Great America” which the National Gallery acquired in 2011. The paintings in the main gallery work together to form a patchwork of corresponding icons, figures and allusions. He employs painting techniques as a visual vocabulary, combining physical gestures of abstraction, modernism, pop art and Renaissance influence while stripping them of their inherent intentions. In “Great America,” for instance, a coarse block of blue-white paint that evokes the nonobjective abstraction of someone like Hans Hofmann becomes an antithetical mechanism for narrative erasure, leaving a vacuous hole in the middle of a seascape.

That seascape, however, is the territory of a piece that deals directly with the experience of African slaves forcibly transported by European investors from their homeland to the New World through the Middle Passage. This journey of inconceivable suffering, where nearly two million died at sea, is a great void in African American culture, as Marshall explains it, from which grew enduring cultural attitudes and dispositions. “We can only locate our point of origin at a ‘no place’ in the middle of a vast sea,” he says. “It represents nothingness.”

This abstract mark that floats over the water comes from the Western canon of art history, but Marshall links it to the lost cultural legacy of native African societies. It is an almost literal representation of the “nothingness” that remains, and so it also retains the essential principals of contemporary abstraction. It is a convoluted relationship to both art and history, and one that Marshall makes sure is impossible to understand without accepting them as a single, unified idea.

All of this discussion is about a series of brushstrokes in the corner of “Great America,” forgetting its banners of text, esoteric African symbols, figural allusions and other interwoven Western and African tropes that fill the canvas. As Marshall will be the first to admit, “The point is it’s complicated.”

But I cannot pretend to understand all the connections between Marshall’s cross-pollinated genius, and I cannot distill or communicate the information half as well as the artist himself, which he has abundantly done. His Q&A with curator James Meyer in the exhibit brochure is a wonderful and enlightening dialogue, and each painting in the show is accompanied by a panel with richly informative descriptions. It was all said before I even got to it. As a critic, my job is to hopefully get at the root of an issue, but these roots already seem so beautifully tended.

What do you talk about with a brilliant artist who so creatively and intelligently offers you every avenue into his life’s work before you even sit down with him? It becomes a surprising challenge to just think of anything to say.

Marshall is a leading contemporary artist who represents the future of our cultural inheritance, and leading up to the 4th of July at the end of a difficult and emotionally fraught year of political and cultural turmoil (even by today’s standards), it became an opportunity to reflect on the art and cultural legacy of our American heritage.

I asked him about his early artistic influences—mid-century black artists like Charles White who have been largely forgotten—and he described how he came to terms with the burdens of race in art. “I had to come to terms with the fact that this work is masterwork, but no one else seems to think that,” he said. “Is there a deficiency in the work or a deficiency in the people who validate it? And if my heroes as artists always ended up on the second or third tier, does that mean I am aspiring to be a second rate artist?”

He explained in our conversation the evolution of African American mythology in a way that tied in pervasive issues of violence and crime in black communities as a consequence of oppression, and how it became clear to him through the American invasion of Iraq.

He talked about the perception of primitive art by modern audiences as “less than art,” and the value of protest illuminated by Martin Luther King’s handwritten letter from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. What is most impressive in listening to Marshall speak is the way he is able to connect art and ideas from different eras and continents into a kind of ecstatic worldview.

Marshall’s exhibit is a landmark moment for the National Gallery of Art, and maybe for art in America. It is the first solo show by a living black artist in our country’s foremost museum of visual art, which is significant for the institution, for the city of Washington, and for Marshall’s own deserving place in history. The lessons in it are not always easy to take, but the exploration and discomfort is part of a process of growth we ought not and cannot avoid.

Kerry James Marshall
—-
A Conversation with the Artist

The Georgetowner sat down with the artist upon the opening of his exhibit and discussed a broad number of topics.

The Georgetowner: Do you try to reconcile a loss of personal history among African Americans in your work?

Kerry James Marshall: There’s a particular difference in the way African Americans experience things like personal history and individual legacy—the whole concept of whether you see yourself or operate as an individual in the world, or if you see yourself as part of a group that has a certain particular history as a whole. Because African Americans are not a part of the individual immigrant experience. Nobody in our group decided to come to America. There was no brochure on the wall that said ‘You would have better opportunities if you left here and went over to this place.’ They weren’t recruiting us for those kinds of purposes. We came here as part of a group with a particular group experience. So you were still an individual, but the laws that determined how you were able to operate within the United States under the experience of slavery were laws that affected the group.

GT: Your work deals with a specific area of cultural history, but it is not traditional history painting.

KJM: In the works in this exhibit there’s a kind of broad sweep of the historical implications of things, and there’s actually less specificity in most of these works than you would find in pictures like conventional history paintings which are usually about a single event.

GT: It takes a lot of class to stand up and simply talk about what your work is these days, which you frequently do, and give specific examples, concede certain metaphors and allusions and let people in. You really seem to want to give people the tools to be able to look at your work, as opposed to perpetuating some self-sustaining mythos of contemporary art.

KJM: I’m not trying to be mysterious, I’m not trying to be cryptic, I’m not trying to confuse people. There’s a way if you take note of all the elements of a picture and you think about what each one of those things are, you start to look at the relationships between those things and other things in the picture and start to assemble what my objectives in the picture are. But there really is no conclusion. My paintings don’t come to conclusion.

GT: I’ve always thought that’s why a lot of painters paint: it’s one of the few careers where you can succeed by simply presenting problems. You don’t have to solve a thing.

KJM: Painting really has no particularly transformative capacity. But it can show you stuff in a configuration you might not have seen it in before. So, my primary objective is to show people things and show them enough to make them think about the relationships between things, in history and in society.

GT: It can be hard to know where to start with your paintings. There is so much happening in each one. For instance: the banners of text throughout so many of the paintings.

KJM: You see that in a lot of early Renaissance and Medieval paintings. A lot of those banners floating around had text on them back then just because there was stuff the artist wanted you to know. You find that in a lot of painting in the 15th and 16th century, particularly in Spanish painting, a scroll or something.

A lot of my paintings start with other paintings. And it starts with a problem that some of those other paintings present. And a lot of the paintings I make are ways of coming to terms with or addressing or reversing in some ways a problem that was presented in another picture. It’s a motivation for making a picture in the first place. So take my painting “The Gulf Stream” in this exhibit. It is based on the Winslow Homer painting [of the same name from 1899, pictured in the panel beside the painting]. The Homer painting centralizes the figure of a black man lost at see in a boat surrounded by sharks.

My painting converges with Homer’s because the Homer painting is a painting about the Middle Passage and the slave trade. So the sharks and the boat in the water and the man sort of adrift, it’s the same kind of picture as mine, even though my painting depicts a pleasure boat. It’s a group of black people out on the lake, there’s a regatta out in the distance. But it’s still a middle passage picture.

GT: And the pelican in the front and storm in the background of the painting, are these then harbingers, though less direct than in Homer’s painting with a roiling sea full of sharks?

KJM: You can see them as a kind of harbinger. But it reduces all of the drama that’s in the Homer painting. There’s none of the drama that’s in the Homer painting, really. So it’s not out of the question to read the pelican as a harbinger, but it’s also a stupid goofy convention of maritime painting, to have a pelican sitting on a pylon. It becomes much more ambivalent in that way. I wanted to really strip away all of the modernist conventions from this picture, all of these gestural effects and the drips and the markings.

GT: There is an art historical phenomenon where artists from a dominant culture can draw inspiration from a less dominant culture and be considered innovative and groundbreaking, like when Picasso copied African masks. But an artist from a less dominant culture is judged as derivative for borrowing influence from a more dominant culture, and often accused of diluting their culture’s long-established artistic traditions.

KJM: That’s a pervasive idea that circulates among all of the people who are among the defeated people. People who have been colonized, conquered, enslaved. It’s part of that whole notion of belatedness. And it comes from the idea that whatever those societies were making before they had contact with the West, that it was not art. It may have been nice stuff, it may have been interesting to look at, we might really even appreciate it for some of its formal aspects. But because they hadn’t codified and theorized those formal developments, then it is not intellectual. It is considered as just simply habit and impulse, absent of any intellectual investment, and this is really the dichotomy between the West and everybody else. That the west was always intellectual, and everybody else operates on instinct and impulse. So even though it might be artistic, it’s not the same thing. When Picasso or Van Gogh or Gauguin borrows from Japanese or African traditions, they are borrowing because they’re making a break with a long history and tradition of Western intellectual investment in what a painting is supposed to look like. Those less dominant cultures, regardless of what the stuff looks like, they don’t have the institutional frame of reference to make their stuff read as intellectual. Black people deal with that all the time.

To that point, if you read the manifesto of Africobra [a Chicago-based artist collective committed to developing work that reflects African American and non Eurocentric cultural and aesthetic sensibilities], its Achilles heel is one line in which they say that black art is not intellectual, it is not art for art’s sake. It has a particular message that is meant to be disseminated among the masses. But that phrase, “It’s not intellectual, it’s not art for art’s sake,” is the Achilles heel. Because what they are really trying to do is set up a distinction between the way the white art world works and the way the black art world works. They are saying that we are emotional, they are intellectual.

GT: An early influence of yours was the black American artist Charles White. How was his work perceived in his time, and did that effect you?

JKM: He had great stature among the African American artists and community, but in the main stream he was almost nonexistent. This is one of the things I really had to come to terms with. When I was growing up I was so overwhelmed by his work. It’s masterful drawing. And I had to come to terms with the fact that this work is masterwork, but no one else seems to think that. If I go to a museum, if I open an American art history book and he’s not there, what does that mean? I had to figure out what that means, because I think this is as good as anything that anybody ever made. So is there something that I don’t know, or something they don’t know? Is there a deficiency in the work or a deficiency in the people who validate it? And if my heroes as artists always ended up on the second or third tier, does that mean I am aspiring to be a second rate artist? And if not, what’s the difference between that and the other level? Those are questions that have to be asked, because race is very complicated in America.

GT: Is that part of the reason why you paint black people that are completely black, with no distinction in the pigment of their skin?

KJM: It’s all tied into the notion that being dark skinned has always been stigmatized in the United States. It comes down to that.

GT: Zora Neale Hurston’s book, “Mules and Men,” told a lot of firsthand accounts of black American mythology, and the heroes of these stories always triumphed through deception and trickery.

KJM: This happens when you develop a culture around the lack of capacity to address things head on, which goes back to the oppression of slavery, Jim Crowe. Everything you do is a feint. That is reflective of a fundamental weakness, and you recognize it. When you can’t employ power and force in the same way as somebody else, you know you’re weak.

If you think about the way crime runs through black communities, I argue that this is also a consequence of this pervasive feeling of weakness and powerlessness. You can beat up the people next door, but if you go outside your neighborhood trying to do that stuff, the force that’s able to be mobilized against you is always overwhelming. Within black communities, the violence rarely migrates outside.

It became clear to me after the invasion of Iraq. What we were witnessing there in the crumbling of societal structure was destruction of the country’s patriarchy. Think of how old those American soldiers were—mostly early twenties, they were kids. The authority of the father was completely undermined by someone who was younger than him, who came in from outside. The reverberations of that through the culture from that moment on are incalculable. If you are a child and see your father being treated like that by another kid, what is a father now? And we ask what is wrong with those people, and we tend to think they are crazy. But they’re not—there’s always a precipitating factor.

GT: Your portrait of ‘Nat Turner with the Head of his Master” [Turner was an American slave who led an infamous slave rebellion in 1831] is your most recent painting in the exhibit, from 2011. It is a pretty gruesome piece, with the dismembered head of Turner’s master lying on a pillow behind the grim looking central figure of Turner. James Meyer, the curator, mentioned that you pushed to have that piece in the show. Why?

KJM: The larger selection of works were chosen by James, and thematically organized. And it works very well. But it leaves out a dimension of the implication of what these pictures all refer to. It’s a certain kind of historical agency that pushes against the notion that black people were simply passive victims of the slave trade and accepted the condition without resisting. I always want to have a space that indicates they didn’t accept it. They never did. There was resistance from the start. It is represented by people like Nat Turner, though he wasn’t the first to rebel like that.

There are also paintings in National Gallery’s collection that have a parallel reality to that picture. Think of David with the head of Goliath. So it’s a way of drawing these distinctions between this painting with a black figure and thematically similar historical paintings that have white figures that do the same things. So you have to figure out: Why do I feel differently about this than I do about that?

When you’re dealing with the history of Jim Crowe and segregation, this notion is something you have to consider. It’s part of it. Which is the precipitating factor for Martin Luther King’s letter from the Birmingham jail. It responds to a letter from white ministers and religious figures that were saying, “Come on now, stop all that protesting, it’s not the way to go right now. Just be patient and eventually it will all work itself out.” But eventually doesn’t have a timeline. Sometimes things have to happen now.
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Ari Post •

This Friday, June 21, the Parish Gallery will open its doors to host its final exhibit, with a reception from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Norman Parish, the gallery’s owner and director, who has meant so much to Georgetown since he opened his gallery doors more than two decades ago, is closing the book on a remarkable career in the arts and community service.

The final exhibit, “Norman Parish: The Artist,” will highlight Parish’s career as an artist and a painter, which is a unique departure for the gallery.

“Norman never used his gallery as a showcase for his own work,” said Alla Rogers, a close friend to Parish and owner of the neighboring Alla Rogers Gallery. “His business was dedicated to focusing on underappreciated groups of artists.”

Parish, however, has always been an artist. As a young man in Chicago, he worked alongside many of the founding members of the AfriCOBRA art movement, including Jeff Donaldson and Wadsworth Jarrell. He helped paint The Wall of Respect in 1967, an outdoor mural on the South Side of Chicago by a group of artists from the Organization of Black American Culture. In the late 1990s, his work was selected as part of a traveling art exhibit with the Smithsonian, “Seeing Jazz.”

The Parish Gallery opened its doors in June 1991, after Parish came across a “Gallery Space for Rent” sign in Georgetown’s Canal Square one Saturday afternoon. He long had aspirations to open a gallery, and when the opportunity came he seized it.

It was important for him to continue his work in Chicago, he said, promoting the work of artists from the African diaspora alongside artists from other walks of life, “artists missing opportunities because nobody was looking out for them. Nobody was out their promoting their work.”

“It was his passion,” said his wife Gwen, who was there when he opened the Parish Gallery and who runs it with him today. “He was an artist, and he understood the difficulties artists encounter in trying to get their work out.”

Over the years, the Parish Gallery has exhibited works by artists from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa and Morocco, alongside those from Greece, Turkey, Brazil, Spain and France. Parish brought together international and cross-cultural traditions with a harmony and ease of diversity that most galleries never achieve. The gallery hosted hundreds of exhibitions and artists over its storied career, and its memory will live on in Georgetown’s memory.

In May of last year, a malignant tumor was discovered in Parish’s brain, and he underwent surgery immediately to have it removed. It has been a slow road to recovery over the following months. He and his wife Gwen have decided, with great difficulty, to close the gallery and focus on his recovery. The Parish Gallery will be dearly missed, but we wish Norman and Gwen a happy, prosperous and healthy future. [gallery ids="101353,152360" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner • October 24, 2013

In the catalogue for the exhibition “Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis,” a photograph shows the painter at the opening of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Gallatin Collection in 1943. Age 62 at the time, Léger stands in front of his 1919 masterpiece, “The City.” He looks like a working-class Frenchman, a veteran of World War I, who has carefully parted his hair, combed his moustache, and put on his best jacket and tie for the occasion.

Fernand Léger was such a man, but he was also one of the most sophisticated artists of his generation—and it was quite a generation. Born in 1881, he was less than two years younger than Matisse and about nine months older than Picasso.

We are far less familiar with Léger than with these 20th-century superstars. Fewer examples of his work are owned by American museums and retrospectives are rare (the last, at MoMA, was in 1998). But this is also because, trained as an architect and designer, much of Léger’s artistic activity extended beyond easel painting to mural painting, sculpture, set and costume design, and even filmmaking.

Curated by Anna Vallye, the Philadelphia exhibition centers on this range of activity, much of it collaborative, in the Paris of the 1920s. Parts of the show, which runs through January 5, evoke the urban vibrancy of the Machine Age that inspired Léger and his colleagues.

At the entrance, on a large screen, is a captivating—if gray and grainy—two-minute trip up the Eiffel Tower, filmed by Thomas Edison and James White in 1900 at the Paris Exposition Universelle. This is one of half a dozen films playing continuously in the exhibition, several with modernist soundtracks.

One, the landmark “Ballet Mécanique of 1924,” is a 16-minute experimental film co-directed by Léger and American filmmaker Dudley Murphy, accompanied by a score by another American, George Antheil, for percussion, pianos, player pianos, propellers, electric bells, and a siren. The images, in rapid alternation and succession, include smiling lips, a peasant woman climbing stairs carrying a sack, parrots, automobiles seeming to run over the viewer, and kitchenware in motion.

Those who have visited the Ballets Russes exhibition at the National Gallery will find a sidebar in the Philadelphia show, as Léger designed sets and costumes for Ballets Suédois (Swedish). An abstract backdrop designed by Léger for that troupe’s 1922 production of “Skating Rink”—inspired by Charlie Chaplin’s film “The Rink”—dominates the rear wall.

But the centerpiece of the exhibition, though it comes early on, is “The City,” on view along with three good-size oil studies. Nearly ten feet wide and seven and a half feet high, “The City” demonstrates a mastery of color and composition that is hard to grasp. You could imagine it being cut up to make eight great, mostly abstract paintings, or more, except that it is seamless, a thrilling and beautiful whole.

Other paintings on view have this quality of being somehow both challenging and beautiful, including, “Disks of 1918,” “Mechanical Elements of 1924,” “Composition of 1923-27” and the extraordinary post-Cubist café scene “Composition with Hand and Hats of 1927.” There are also works by artists such as Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Lissitzky, Man Ray, Metzinger, Mondrian, and Murphy (his wonderful, very “American Razor”).

The only reference to Léger’s later career is the seven-part “Study for a Cinematic Mural of 1938-39,” a commission for Rockefeller Center that was never carried out. Though the informality of these works is partly due to their being studies on cardboard, they also have a Rousseau-like vitality, incorporating an almost cartoon-like Statue of Liberty. They remind us of another artist from Normandy, Raoul Dufy, and of Léger’s importance as a precursor of the Pop artists of the 1950s and 1960s [gallery ids="118757,118761" nav="thumbs"]

Ari Post • September 25, 2013

Walking through “Fusion,” the recent exhibit of modern Latin American paintings at the Art Museum of the Americas, art historian and exhibit curator Adriana Ospina spoke to me about rice.

“In the United States, Cuba and South America, we consume a lot of it,” she said. “Rice in the Americas grew through the influence of Asian immigration in the 19th and twentieth centuries, and now it is just a part of us. No one talks about it, but that cultural influence is always present.”

After centuries of human migration throughout the world, history has long proven that the cross-pollination of coinciding cultures is basically inevitable. When two groups come together, they react by forming a new group built from their combined history and experience. Call it symbiosis, call it obvious, call it anything, but this occurrence is in many ways the engine behind a profusion of anthropological and historical knowledge.

Perhaps most obviously apparent in language, food and religion, this active cultural evolution bubbles beneath the surface of our everyday lives. There are infinite examples around the world, from the consumption of Indian tea in England, to the ever broadening and diversifying reach of the Catholic Church in South America, to the heavy influence of European justice systems on the United States Constitution.

With a focus on Latin American art during the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries, Fusion traces Asian migration to the Americas through art, generating a dialogue on cultural diversity by exploring its resonating effects on specific artists and their ancestors who relocated to the Americas from Japan, China, India and Indonesia. The exhibit enhances our perception of the complex and interwoven tapestry of modern Latin American and Caribbean societies, highlighting the exchange of ideas that this multiculturalism has generated.

In addition to (and aside from) the ambition of its social and cultural mission, it also functions strikingly as an exhibit based purely on the merit of its artistry. An audience can walk through admiring the paintings for their sheer aesthetic splendor, or take away a broader message of the rich and diverse societies of the Americas.

What is most interesting about the paintings on display in the exhibit is perhaps their conspicuous absence of political or social agenda. Many of these paintings are collegial equals of the more prominently known work of their day. The expansive canvases of Manabu Mabe (1924 – 1997), a renowned Japanese-born Brazilian painter, are truly on par with the groundbreaking work of the 1950s and ’60s. His paintings evoke the bravura brushwork of Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and even Frank Auerbach, (with a surrealist tang of Dali or Miro), but with a unique expression that weaves a fluid and graceful line amid bursts of color and monochromatic backgrounds, which can be traced to Mabe’s practice of Japanese calligraphy.

Mabe, like many great artists (as a few mentioned above), was an immigrant, whose clash with multiple cultural institutions seems to have caused a creative eruption born from a natural inclination to codify environments and experiences. The difference is that Mabe is foremost considered as a Latin American artist in the European tradition, as opposed to an “artist,” unburdened by a genealogical addendum.
As Michele Greet, a Ph.D. in Modern Latin American Art, writes, “The tendency… has been to isolate Latin America as a geo-political entity in the conception of exhibitions, university courses, and scholarly texts… Studies of Latin American art thus tend to explain images produced in this region as motivated by a desire to promote an ‘authentic’ national or cultural identity and avoid in-depth consideration of migration, mixed racial heritage, and global interchange…”

She goes on to write that our understanding of this art is a “part of a global network of artists and ideas, rather than an isolated development,” for that is precisely what art in the modern era is. On the whole, modern art is not an overtly political vessel. It is a venue for exploration, analysis and interpretation that simultaneously sets us apart and brings us together. A work of art does not have to display a political message in order to incite cultural sentiment or political debate.

Communicating this idea so effectively is where Fusion ultimately succeeds. From the influence of Indonesian heritage on Surinamese-born artist Soeki Irodikromo (b. 1945), whose painting of an Indonesian dragon incorporates local motifs of the Surinamese jungle, to the faint connotation of Chinese ancestral veneration in the surreal lithographs of Cuban-born artist Wilfredo Lam (1902 – 1982), this exhibit shows us how our multifaceted pasts effect us as an undercurrent, influencing our lives without taking precedent over our personal progress and collective cultural evolution.

The Organization of American States, the parent organization of the AMA, has long upheld their mission to implement democracy, development, human rights and freedom of expression throughout the Americas, promoting the benefits of immigration and offering positive, enriching examples through community outreach, political discourse and, with the AMA, through art.

“Fusion,” as much as an art exhibit can, fulfills this mission.

And like the spread of rice throughout the Americas by way of Japan, most of us can agree that it is quite a good thing. [gallery ids="101461,152993" nav="thumbs"]

Georgetowner • September 19, 2013

The Georgetown galleries on Book Hill are one of the few true gallery clusters in the city. Along a few blocks of Wisconsin Avenue, audiences are surrounded by art, free to walk into galleries that call to them from their vibrant window displays. This group of galleries offers us a great variety of works to explore, from renowned glasswork to classic landscapes and the contemporary and avant-garde.

This Friday, Sept. 20, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., each of the six galleries will launch a fine art exhibit and host an evening stroll, welcoming the breezy autumn art season with the Fall Season Art Kick-off. Here?s a look at what?s happening on Book Hill. For more information on the Georgetown Galleries on Book Hill visit www.GeorgetownGalleries.com

**Heiner Contemporary**

Heiner Contemporary will present ?Rachel Farbiarz: Take Me With You,? an exhibition featuring new drawing, collage and installation by the DC-based artist. The exhibit, which will be on view through November 9, reflects Farbiarz?s interest in the personal, idiosyncratic resonances that course through shared public, historical and political events. Using various media, she explores subjects including formal apologies, migration, war and burial and investigates how the emotional reverberations of words, objects and ideas linger and mutate throughout generations. For more information visit www.HeinerContemporary.com

**Susan Calloway Fine Arts**

An outdoorsman who explored the wilderness in search of inspiration, Larry Chappelear (1945-2011) created paintings as a visual diary of his experiences. His landscape paintings contain intimate enclosures of nature and accomplish what many landscape painters before him have sought to do: achieve a compositional balance among form and open space, color and light. A collection of landscape and abstract works by Chappelear will be featured in the exhibition, ?Dynamic Spaces,? through October 19. For more information visit www.CallowayArt.com

**Maurine Littleton Gallery**

Maurine Littleton Gallery will host ?Glass Sculptures & Vitreographs,? an exhibition featuring three-dimensional glass works and prints by artists Dale Chihuly, Erwin Eisch, Richard Jolley, Harvey K. Littleton, and Therman Statom, through October 19. Vitreography is a printmaking process that uses glass plates instead of traditional materials such as metal, wood, or stone. Developed in the mid-1970s by Studio Glass Movement founder Harvey Littleton, vitreography has been opened up to a wide range of possibilities by artists working in sculpture, painting, and printmaking. Over one hundred artists, including those featured in this exhibition, have created more than seven hundred print editions at Littleton Studios. ?Glass Sculptures & Vitreographs? offers a unique opportunity to view sculptures and prints by master glass artists side by side, giving insight into their individual creative processes. For more information visit www.LittletonGallery.com.

**Addison/Ripley Fine Arts**

Addison/Ripley Fine Arts will feature ?John Borden Evans: Solitude,? an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper that explore the old farmhouses and surrounding rural area of North Garden, Virginia. Evans depicts rural landscapes and animals in his thickly painted works, creating texture through build up and scrape away techniques. Through October 26. For more information visit www.AddisonRipleyFineArt.com

**Neptune Fine Art**

Neptune Fine Art will host ?Objects of Desire? through October 26, an exhibit that celebrates contemporary artists and the extraordinary work they create. Featuring ten established artists, the exhibit is a tantalizing glimpse into the work of these respected artisans: William Adair, Raya Bodnarchuk, Jeff Chyatte, Will Clift, Tazuko Ichikawa, Elaine Langerman, Laurel Lukaszewski, Jimmy Miracle, Wendy Ross and Foon Sham. The exhibited works delve into a wide variety of media, reflecting each artist?s finely honed talent, producing exquisite sculpture, editions and drawings. Sculptures in steel, bronze, aluminum, wood, and wax; porcelain wall reliefs, and intricate silver point drawings combine to fill the gallery. Come by for a chance to meet the artists. For more information visit www.NeptuneFineArt.com.

**Robert Brown Gallery**

Robert Brown Gallery will exhibit the photographs of Roger Ballen, an award winning photographer who has been shooting in black and white film for nearly fifty years. Part of the last generation that grew up with the media, Ballen sees black and white as a very minimalist art form and unique from color photography in that it ?does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive. Black and white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.? For more information visit www.RobertBrownGallery.com.