Duluth showcases 5 artists of same race, very different media

Bottom line: Five black artists working in media from bronze to video installation but unique in approach make for an uneven show. Indulgent viewers may tease out connections between the artists while others may resist this random arrangement of five artists based on the connection of skin color.

“The Dream: Five Black Artists, Five Voices” at Duluth’s Hudgens Center for the Arts brings together five artists who some might argue have little in common save the color of their skin. The five assembled artists work in very different media and have approaches varying enough to suggest as much difference between them as commonality.

An arrangement of artists that might strike some as random may seem, to other viewers, to contain an inherent lesson: that “black” is not some uniform thing, but a far-ranging, varied notion with some surface similarities and some deep differences.

The work runs the gamut, from decidedly conceptual fare by Paul Stephen Benjamin, who uses paint and video installation to question learned racism, to work by longtime Atlanta artist Lynn Marshall-Linnemeier, who continues a line of inquiry the artist has been tapping for decades. Using old photographs, often ones centered on racial stereotypes, Marshall-Linnemeier’s work turns caricature back on itself. Her “This Ain’t No Paradise” (2006) takes an early photographic image of black children eating watermelon — the punchline of a racist joke — but upends it, in her mixed-media works, with the repeated iconography of doves and angel wings, beams of light and the transformative use of paint to add lively color and depth. Using fabric and weaving, Marshall-Linnemeier creates tapestries that transform abjection into adoration. In that regard there is a thin connective tissue between her artwork and that of the Nigerian sculptor Nnamdi Okonkwo, who creates bosomy, Botero-fleshy sculptures that celebrate womanhood in its many incarnations and attitudes.

Okonkwo’s work forces a confrontation with the Western cultural reflex of shock at such frank celebrations of unapologetic curvaceousness. In work ranging from 1997 to 2012 but wholly consistent in approach, Okonkwo offers, rather than the examination of race the show’s title might infer, a radical reassessment of the female body.

Paul Stephen Benjamin creates works that suggest nursery school flashcards re-imagined by a cultural critic. In place of “A” for Apple and “B” for Bat, Benjamin proposes a vocabulary of the Ku Klux Klan, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil War, the Kennedys and collard greens. A series of five vintage televisions placed on the gallery floor run a loop of pop culture images and alphabet letters. A series of paintings featuring alphabet letters are painted in home improvement shades from Sherwin Williams, Behr and Valspar — New Black, Well Bred Brown and Premium Watermelon — which Benjamin uses to comment upon culturally accepted knowledge about what black “is.”

In a series of linocut portraits, “Ghost in the Machine,” Jerushia Graham makes an image of a black man whose face has been welded together with rivets, into an image of fractured black consciousness. Graham also offers a charming suite of prints, “Spirit House,” which suggest faith as a sheltering refuge for her black subjects.

Deeply quirky work with one foot in the world of craft and the other in a lexicon so eccentric it’s hard to know what to make of it, Henry Leonard’s artworks use fabric to create wall-bound “paintings.” Quilting meets oil painting in Leonard’s collages of material from neckties to thick upholstery-style brocades, which he fashions into portraits and vignettes of daily life: a pool hall or a self-portrait of the artist against a kinetic checkerboard of pattern.

If there is a through-line evident in Leonard’s work and in “The Dream,” as a whole — and that is arguable — it is the shared interest in seeing the world differently, often in the simple act of documenting black subjects and black history in a culture that doesn’t always vive la différence.