The National Black Arts Festival always inspires a spate of related art exhibitions. Even in this year of belt-tightening, there’s plenty to see.
As in years past, it’s a multigenerational, multimedia mix, from paintings by the late Benny Andrews at Mason Murer Fine Art to Charles Huntley Nelson’s sci-fi video, a work-in-progress at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.
Behind the variety, however, lies shared impulses and themes that go back at least to the Harlem Renaissance. African-American thinkers of the day propounded art as a vehicle to assert and self-define African-American identity. Here are two cross-generational examples.
Doris Derby and Whitfield Lovell
An exemplar of civil rights-era activism, Derby moved from New York to the Mississippi Delta in 1963 to work as a community organizer and educator. Along the way, she began taking the black and white photographs on view at Hammonds House Gallery.
These images of rural poverty suggest that life had not improved since the WPA photographers had passed through in the ’30s, but Derby’s intent was not to document shacks and rags. Her photos of spirited children and unbowed adults put a human face on the abstraction of poverty or race. Similarly, photographs of sharecroppers in the fields, of women sewing and workers at vegetable cooperatives communicate dignity and action rather than passive victimhood.
The same aura of dignity pervades Lovell’s exhibition at the ACA Gallery at SCAD. Lovell, 50, is a documentarian of a different sort. He does not make photographs, but, in a strategy common to his peer group, works from them. His sources of choice are the studio portraits taken in the early 20th century, which he transposes onto time-worn wooden planks and boards in feathery charcoal drawings.
Each work in the show is accompanied by an object or objects — a spinning wheel, a radio — to create a three-dimensional tableau. These scavenged objects reinforce the votive quality of these portraits. Perhaps more importantly, they contribute a certain intimacy: What’s striking about these portraits is the sense of an inner life they convey, so that the notion of humanity, which itself can become an abstraction, becomes very individual.
Susan Ross and Jennie C. Jones
Ross call herself a griot. Indeed, as photographer for the city of Atlanta mayor’s office and the National Black Art Council, she has had a front-row seat to her native city’s cultural and political life, and she’s made the most of it. The majority of photos at Hammonds House focus on the musical talent that has performed on the city’s stages.
Music figures large in African-American art. It’s both a celebration of this important cultural contribution and a reflection of its personal importance to artists. Images and portraits of musicians run through the work of Romare Bearden, Africobra and Jack Whitten, for example, and abstract artists find inspiration in the rhythms.
This theme continues to engage contemporary artists, even those of a conceptual bent. Jones, whose drawings, sound and wall installations are at the Contemporary, situates her work at the intersection of two radical movements, modernism and jazz.
She riffs on Ellsworth Kelly’s cool, clean, color-rich aesthetic in works on paper in which solid blocks of color interact with the geometry of white CD sleeves. In a witty riff on Mondrian, the Dutch painter’s interlocking geometric shapes appear to soften and cut loose, and lines morph into wires to microphones or speakers.
Jones’ installation is ripe with visual and verbal puns that make reference to Blue Note Records, Kelly’s comment that bird-watching inspired his interest in color, and jazz saxophonist Charlie “Bird” Parker. Look for the red birdhouse carefully sited out the gallery window.
ART PREVIEW
“Doris Derby and Susan Ross: Photo-Griots.” Through Sept. 13. 10 a.m.
to 6 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; 1-5 p.m. Sundays. Hammonds House Museum. 503 Peeples St. S.W. 404-612-0500. www.hammondshouse.org
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