Exhibit at American Jazz Museum ‘bears witness’ to the African-American experience

[Lois Gilbert]

Exhibit at American Jazz Museum ‘bears witness’ to the African-American experience

By ALICE THORSON
The Kansas City Star


AMERICAN JAZZ MUSEUM
“Trading Eights,” a watercolor by Lonnie Powell, is a portrait of celebrated Kansas City-based jazz artist Ahmad Alaadeen. It is one of several works inspired by black music in the “Bearing Witness” exhibit.


The Light in the Other Room group of black Kansas City artists makes its strongest showing yet in its third appearance at the American Jazz Museum.

There are many compelling works in this exhibit, which centers on black life and history. But part of the credit must go to Demetria Jones, a Kansas City native completing her master’s in art history at Virginia Commonwealth University, who signed on as curator of the Jazz Museum last spring.

She has been away 12 years, so much of this work and the artists were new to her.

“I didn’t have any preconceived notion; I looked at the art and picked what I thought exhibited wonderful technique and seemed to rivet me to a theme,” Jones said.

Jones’ installation of the show in the museum’s Changing Gallery creates a vibrant unity from its mix of paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures and textiles, through loose groupings of works that share themes and ideas.

She saw an affinity, for instance, between Lonnie Powell’s figurative charcoal, “Stony the Road,” and Darryl Chamberlain’s pair of chalk pencil drawings. Of the latter, one depicts a man, the other a woman performing a graceful, athletic choreography with a thick coiled rope.

“Darryl’s work referenced strength,” she said. “The way he modeled the figures is a very Herculean way to express strength. It made me think of Michelangelo.

“I set it next to Lonnie’s piece, which is similar in subject. To me they worked thematically — you think about strength, slavery, bondage, freedom being suppressed.”

Powell’s “Stony the Road” takes its title from “The Negro National Anthem,” which includes the lines, “Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod.”

It’s a ravishing piece, showing a black woman, barefoot and enveloped in white drapery, resolutely picking her way forward. Powell used an extremely light hand, such that the entire depiction is one of evanescent whispery strokes and erasures — with the exception of his detailed rendition of her bowed head.

“The head is what it’s all about,” Powell said, “the mind.”

A striking small oil painting by George Morris, “The Thief Comes,” hangs nearby. The scene is a historical one, of a white-suited pimp flanked by two boozy women beside a fire-engine red ’20s-era coupe. A row of shotgun houses stretches obliquely into the background; in the foreground, a black crow perches beside the car.

The piece takes its title, Jones said, from a New Testament Scripture: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.” Its subject is Jim Crow, the racist laws and practices that discriminated against blacks from the post-Reconstruction era to the 1960s.

“It’s not only a reference to Jim Crow, but what Jim Crow did to the African-American community,” Jones said.

Continuing the “historical progression,” she presents a trio of protest works on an adjacent wall, including Joseph Smith’s watercolor-and-collage lamentation for Emmett Till, the black teenager murdered by two white men for whistling at a white woman in Money, Miss.

References to African history and heritage recur in many of the works in this show, including the intricate pictorial quilts of textile artists NedRa Bonds and Sherry Whetstone-McCall and Ben Mercer’s graphite portrait in profile of a young African mother and child.

Sculptor Robert Powell invokes the continent’s long history of sophisticated civilizations in his carved wood sculpture “Before the Mayflower.”

The work’s title and its portrayal of regal Africans put Jones in mind of the prize-winning 1976 book They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America.

The past is an important touchstone for this show. But the dominant sensation is one of moving forward — in black life and in these artists’ ability to encapsulate it.

In her curator’s statement, Jones relates the exhibit, which she titled “Bearing Witness,” to the African-American tradition of “testifying” to the trials of life, but also to the beauty of humanity.

Yvette Williams’ charcoal “On the Grill,” a rear view of a man standing beside his grill in a sunny park, is an ode to simple pleasures.

Bonnye Brown’s large paintings pop with unbridled exuberance and joie de vivre. In “Coffee Love,” a man and woman hold oversized cups of coffee that emit entwining swirls of steam.

Brown’s portrait of Josephine Baker has a similar larger-than-life flair. In both works the artist uses passages of texture to describe her subjects’ hair, carving into the paint with a knife.

Many accomplished portraits are in this show. So intense and incisive is Henry Dixon’s “River Market Man,” one feels that the artist has penetrated the core of his very being. Margaretre Gillespie’s portrait of Josephine Baker, pretty in pink, captures her flair and femininity.

Black music and musicians are a recurrent source of inspiration, as seen in Anthony High’s “Apollo”; Lonnie Powell’s “Trading Eights,” an homage to Amad Alaadden. Joseph Smith makes a striking contribution with a depiction of the neon signs at 18th and Vine, in which he pushes the 1960s idiom of photorealism to encompass the black urban experience.

From the German Expressionist overtones of Ben Mercer’s pastel “Coquette” to the classical pedestal that supports the pensive and slightly sad black woman in George Mayfield’s oil painting “Now What,” the artworks here enrich and critique art history traditions.


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ON EXHIBIT

The show: “The Light in the Other Room: Bearing Witness”

Where: Changing Gallery, American Jazz Museum, 1616 E. 18th St.

When: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; noon to 6 p.m. Sunday. Closed Mondays. Show continues through March 25.

How much: Free

For more information: (816) 474-8463 or www. americanjazzmuseum.com