No one could accuse Daniel Minter of being a slacker.
The Maine-based artist, first to receive Hammonds House Museum’s Art Auction Merit Award, fills the West End facility to the rafters with drawings, paintings, prints, carved stone sculptures, assemblages and illustrations for children’s books in “A Heavy Grace, a Shallow Home.”
His influences are equally broad. Minter’s figures, with their pronounced African features, recall the work of social realist painters John Biggers and Charles White. Dreamlike landscapes in vivid colors suggest Haitian naïve painting. Patterning in the two-dimensional works and references to the minkisi altar tradition in the assemblages (the least successful body of work) are references to African arts.
The Georgia native’s oeuvre is linked and animated by his desire to embody emotional truths of the African-American experience through his particular fusion of history, myth and observed details of everyday life.
Longing for home is a pervasive theme. In the mixed media painting “Carry Me Home,” three block prints of a young woman in 19th-century clothing stand in ankle-deep water, posed, as are figures in Egyptian murals, with bodies facing front, heads in profile. The ritualistic gestures transform them to symbols -- of a dispossessed people looking across the sea to a faraway home.
In that spirit, the mural of tiny figures representing a wide swath of humanity that runs across the bottom might be figures of the Diaspora, who carry this memory through time.
“A Heavy Grace, a Shallow Home”
Through June 26. $4; $2, children. 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Tuesdays-Fridays; 1-5 p.m. weekends. Hammonds House Museum, 503 Peeples St., Atlanta. 404-612-0500, www. hammondshouse.org.
Emerging artist featured in group show
Lucha Rodriguez, who won the 2010 Forward Arts Foundation Award for emerging artists, will have a solo show at the Swan Coach House Gallery in August. Until then, the best opportunity to get a sense of her work is at Kai Lin Art, where she’s a participant in “Flora,” a group show.
Unlike many young artists, Rodriguez has settled on a theme, a vocabulary and even a color (pink). The Venezuela native has noted her intent to explore inner thoughts through the symbolism of our physical innards. Organic, looping forms suggestive of intestinal systems are her core image.
But the work is hardly a pink version of Gray’s Anatomy. Thanks to the artist’s craftsmanship and imagination, her pieces are elegant abstractions.
Rodriguez makes an etching for each constellation of loops and cuts it out of the paper. She affixes these fragile cut-outs, along with others in papers of different colors and sheen, to a sheet that she has embossed with other organic forms, sometimes further embellished with lines of hand-dyed thread. The layered forms are a dynamic play of positive and negative space.
As the gallery’s storefront installation attests, Rodriguez has deftly adapted her imagery to three-dimensional purposes. Scaled up, flopping off the wall, hovering in space, the lacy forms create a festive moment for Midtown pedestrians.
"Flora"
Through May 27. 10 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays; 1-5 p.m. Saturdays. Kai Lin Art, 800 Peachtree St., Suite D, Atlanta. 404-408-4248, www.kailinart.com.
Catherine Fox is chief visual arts critic of www.ArtsCriticATL.com.
