The Afro-Futurist Manifesto Blackness Reimagined Meet the Artist and…

The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined

Pastoral Scenes, Ralisha (detail) by Tawny Chatmon

On The Other Side Of Landscape Series #1 (detail) by Larry Cook

After All That We Still Stand When Black Lives Look Blue no.12 (detail) by Morel Doucet

We Outside (detail) by Monica Ikegwu

Tutnese Incantation, High John the Conquer & Deodate by M. Scott Johnson

Visionary (detail) by Delita Martin

Preach It (detail) by Arvie Smith

Door of the Cosmos by Falandus Thames

Tawny Chatmon, Artist
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Tawny Chatmon (b. 1979, Tokyo, Japan) is a self‐taught, award‐winning artist who has been working in the field of photography for more than 17 years. The primary theme that drives Chatmon’s practice is celebrating the beauty of black childhood. She is currently devoted to creating portraits that are inspired by artworks spanning various periods in Western Art with the intent of bringing to the forefront faces that were often under‐celebrated in this style of work.

Museum Collection:
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Microsoft Corporate Collection
Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art
University of Maryland Global Campus

Larry Cook, Artist
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Larry Cook (b. 1986, Laurel, Maryland) is an award-winning photographer and conceptual artist whose work spans installation, video, and photography. Cook’s work explores the cultural aesthetic of “club” photography to examine how urban culture and incarceration systems become entwined through backdrops. The backdrop is central for its relationship to the formal, social, and cultural aspects of photographic history.

Museum Collections:
Baltimore Museum of Art (promised gift)
Museum of Modern Art
Harvard Art Museums

Morel Doucet, Artist
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Morel Doucet (b. 1990, Pilate, Haiti) is a Miami‐based multidisciplinary artist and arts educator that hails from Haiti. He employs ceramics, illustrations, and prints to examine the realities of climate‐gentrification, migration, and displacement within the Black diaspora communities.

Museum Collections (selected):
Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM)
UK Contemporary Art Society, Plymouth Box Museum
Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art

Monica Ikegwu, Artist
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Monica Ikegwu (b.1998, Baltimore, Maryland) is a figurative painter. She presents her ideas of the figure in a way that is not only captivating, but also unconventional in her use of color, texture, and composition.

Museum Collection:
Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African
American Art

M. Scott Johnson, Artist
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M. Scott Johnson (b. 1968, Inkster, Michigan) is a New York City‐based artist and educator, has carved out a legacy as one of the most stimulating and unique artists of his generation. M. Scott has explored, both in his practice and through his 20‐year visual arts teaching residency at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York, a rich vision of contemporary Afro‐aesthetics.

Museum Collections:
The Hampton University Museum
The Schomburg Center Research in Black Culture
Embassy of Oslo Norway, Arts in Embassies Program

Delita Martin, Artist
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Delita Martin (b. 1972, Conroe, Texas) is a master printmaker, illustrator, and painter based in Huffman, Texas. Through the weaving of history and storytelling, Martin offers a new narrative on the power of women whose stories are not only layered in textures and techniques but also symbolism.

Museum Collections (selected):
Crystal Bridges Museum
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Minnesota Museum of American Art
National Museum of Women in the Arts
Library of Congress
The Studio Museum in Harlem
Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African-American Art

Arvie Smith, Artist
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Arvie Smith (b.1938, Houston, Texas) transforms the history of oppressed and stereotyped segments of the American experience into lyrical two‐dimensional master works.

Museum Collections (selected):
Delaware Museum of Art
Hallie Ford Museum of Art
Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art
Portland Art Museum
Reginald F. Lewis Museum

Felandus Thames, Artist
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Felandus Thames (b. 1974, Jackson, Mississippi) is a conceptual artist living and practicing in the greater New York area. Thames’ work attempts to transcend didacticisms that are typically associated with anachronistic understandings of representation and instead aligns itself with ideas around the taxonomy of human difference.

Museum Collections (selected):
Aspen Museum of Art
Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art
Smith Robertson Museum
Studio Museum of Harlem

Myrtis Bedolla, Curator
about myrtis

Myrtis Bedolla is the owner and founding director of Galerie Myrtis, an emerging blue-chip gallery and art advisory specializing in twentieth and twenty-first-century American art with a focus on work created by African American artists. Bedolla possesses over 30 years of experience as a curator, gallerist, and art consultant.

Established in 2006, the mission of the gallery is to utilize the visual arts to raise awareness for artists who deserve recognition for their contributions in artistically portraying our cultural, social, historical, and political landscapes; and to recognize art movements that paved the way for freedom of artistic expression.

Ontology: Communal Expressions of Being About the Artists

Ontology: Communal Expressions of Being – About the Artists

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Lavett Ballard is a mixed media artist who describes her work as a re-imagined visual narrative of African descent people. Ballard’s use of imagery reflects social issues affecting primarily Black women.

Wesley Clark is a conceptual artist whose work challenges and draws parallels between historical and contemporary cultural issues. Clark’s primary focus surrounds blacks in America and the African Diaspora. He examines the young black male psyche and the feeling of being a target.

Alfred Conteh is a painter who presents visual explorations of how people from the African Diaspora societies living in the South are fighting social, economic, educational, and psychological wars from within and without to survive.

Susan Goldman is a printmaker whose “Squaring the Flower” series explores geometry and decorative form. Love of pattern and underlying passion for color and beauty informs playful layering and improvisation. The flower gets stripped away, covered up, and over-printed, yet it always finds a way back in, like a melodious refrain or a cherry blossom in springtime.

Michael Gross is a painter and printmaker whose intensely colorful works are frenetic studies of light and movement. For Gross, every piece attempts to capture a moment of equilibrium, a kind of elegant balance in time and space, and record it permanently.

Michael Gross
The Measure of a Man, 2018
Oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 48″

M. Scott Johnson is a photographer and sculptor. As a photographer, Johnson navigates and interprets light, space, and soul in his Landscape Astrophotography series, which represents a yearly pilgrimage to the dark sky of New York’s Adirondack Park, where he captures the rising of the planet Venus in the Northern Hemisphere. As a sculptor, Johnson’s aesthetic and philosophical explorations are shaped by the landscape of his atavistic memories.

Megan Lewis is a painter whose work is a visual series built on her curiosities, experiences, memories, and thought processes. Gathering what she has known to be true becomes the foundation and framework of her artistry. Lewis creates work to express and share her joys.

Delita Martin is a printmaker who portrays Black women as magical beings that possess the power to transcend their black skin and exist in a spiritual form. Through the weaving of history and storytelling, Martin’s work offers narratives on the power of women whose stories are not only layered in textures and techniques but also symbolism.

Arvie Smith is a painter who works transforms the history of oppressed and stereotyped segments of the American experience into lyrical two-dimensional masterworks. Smith’s work is commonly of psychological images revealing deep sympathy for the dispossessed and marginalized members of society in an unrelenting search for beauty, meaning, and equality.

Nelson Stevens is a painter and member of AfriCOBRA (African Commune for Bad Relevant Artists) whose aesthetic is rooted in activism and a commitment to create imagery that rails against racism through positive, powerful, and uplifting imagery.

Felandus Thames is a conceptual artist whose work transcends didacticisms that are typically associated with anachronistic understandings of representation and instead aligns itself with ideas around the taxonomy of human difference. Thames is also interested in the interplay between the personal narrative and the imagined, uses humor to allow the viewer to ease into disconcerting motifs.

UTA Artist Space – Literary Muse

UTA Artist Space in collaboration with Galerie Myrtis presents
Literary Muse curated by Myrtis Bedolla

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 4, 2-5PM
UTA Artist Space
403 Foothill Rd. Beverly Hills, CA 90210
utaartistspace.com

UTA Artist Space presents Literary Muse, a new group exhibition inspired by Black literary novelists, poets, and scholars, curated by Baltimore-based Myrtis Bedolla of Galerie Myrtis. On view from September 4 through September 25, 2021, the powerful presentation brings together paintings, photographs, prints, and sculptures by twelve contemporary artists working across the United States: Lavett Ballard, Tawny Chatmon, Wesley Clark, Alfred Conteh, Larry Cook, Morel Doucet, Monica Ikegwu, Ronald Jackson, M. Scott Johnson, Delita Martin, Arvie Smith, and Felandus Thames.

The incisive writings of Black scholars, poets, and authors of fiction bear the weight of a complicated history, at times celebrated and at others, bemoaned. In Literary Muse, their words are the interpretive impulse for imagery that defines the architecture of the Black ethos. The result is a visual vernacular constructed in paintings, photographs, prints, sculptures, and conceptual works composed in hair beads and wood that interrogates the inherent complexities of race.

Steeped in the writings of authors such as Ta-Nahisi Coates, bell hooks, Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, Charles Sowell, Alice Walker, and Isabel Wilkerson, these artists draw from a lexicon of Black narratives. They create visual illustrations that probe the connection between the past and present, challenge the inequalities of structural racism, honor the traditions of the Black family’s devoted fathers and mothers, encourage Black economic empowerment and selfhood, and give symbolic meaning to poetry and fiction through visual tropes that explore Black plight.

Looking for inspiration beyond the prose of philosophers, economists, theorists, psychologists, sociologists, and historians, artists turn to the lyrics of Black composers and vocalists elucidating a truth—a gospel truth—bound-up in ancestry and spirituality rooted in the polyrhythms of Africa. Here, they find their muse in rhythms first laid down in African American spirituals which influenced the gospel, jazz, R&B, hip-hop, and rap music of today. These are the sounds that permeate the artists’ studios, consciously and subconsciously inspiring works that touch the depths of our souls.

Through the confluence of literature and artistry, Literary Muse contextualizes the Black experience through a non-Western lens. The notion of Blackness, its history, ancestry, and culture are presented as written and interpreted by its people. Scholars and composers who might otherwise remain obscure are placed at the forefront, as their words influence profound works that offer critical discourse on that which affirms and defines what it means to be Black.

— Myrtis Bedolla

“Myrtis Bedolla has a sharp eye for extraordinary artists. To wield their art and animate the words of these great Black authors and poets—to bring their narratives to life visually—is a phenomenal talent,” says Arthur Lewis, UTA Fine Arts, and UTA Artist Space Creative Director.

image
Oluma x Chimdi x Anwi by Monica Ikegwu, Oil on Canvas, 36″ in x 48″ in, 2021,
Literary Muse: Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
Image courtesy of the artist and Galerie Myrtis

Megan Lewis Statement

Statement

In 2015, I began a visual series built on my curiosities, experiences, memories, and thought processes; gathering what I have known to be true to me at that moment became the foundation and framework of my artistry. I began with a collection of murals that centered images of Black women, each depicting who I was, who I needed, and what I was learning at that time. The purpose is to express and share my joys, frustrations, and prideful moments with Black Women. My painting series depicts an array of Black Men and Women usually existing in a resting position, focusing on their facial features accent by swings of color and thick paint strokes. In this series of works titled the “Blk Women Period,” I see potential subjects and respond to them organically. Attracted by the subject’s gesture, I style the figure in thick texture and color patterns in a nonlinear imaginative scene. My goal is not to expose a range of emotions but to evoke feelings within the viewer.

My work is a reflection of my personality. It allows me to communicate meaningfully. I create the world I want to exist in through my paintings, where I can play, work out and express my emotions. To think outside of the intellectual and artistic ‘holding’ patterns and envision futures that are intergalactic in scope. I feel an obligation to untangle my imagination from Americanized history books and standards. By removing myself from these constraints liberates me. Therefore, my work is free. My thoughts and creativity cannot be marginalized by what society expects of me.

I am a Black Woman, disconnecting herself from the inherited constraints of society. I am unapologetic about letting my work be in tune with my feelings and no one else’s. And that, I believe, is revolutionary.

Twirl, 2020
36 x 36″
Oil and acrylic on canvas

Megan Lewis

Megan Lewis, through her vibrant narrative paintings, captures the essence of the leisure Black male experience and culture. Her use of bold colors, expressive brushstrokes, and captivating compositions breathes life into her subjects, evoking emotions and inviting viewers to engage with the stories within her canvases. With a focus on portraiture, Lewis explores themes of resilience, heritage, and the complexities of the African American experience.

Everything begins with a thought, 2023
Oil and acrylic on canvas
48 x 60 ″

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Megan Lewis Bio

Biography

Megan Lewis (b. 1989, Baltimore, MD) lives and practices in the city of her birth. Lewis graduated with a BFA in Illustration from the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida (2011).

Lewis is an figurative painter and muralist. As a painter, she wields a palette knife with the precision of a surgeon. Her fantastical subjects are rendered in bold colors and geometric patterns and enlivened with beautiful textiles, some sourced locally and others embellished with Ankara fabric acquired during Lewis’ trip to Johannesburg, South Africa.

There is a physicality to Lewis’ subjects, who appear poised to leap from the canvas. Their outward gaze and gestures beckon the viewer to contemplate their thoughts and emotions. But there is a greater question, who are these individuals? That will always remain a mystery because Lewis draws inspiration from chance encounters, a passer-by, and her imagination.

Embedded within Lewis’ beautifully layered canvases are conversations on the social and historical portrayals of the Black body and particularly those inhabited by Black women. Her bright hues are laid down intentionally and purposely, as serious discourse lies within. One that examines “critical views on Black beauty, fashion, body image, and their linked histories.”

As a muralist, Lewis’ has made a profound imprint on the city of Baltimore. She is the first Black woman commissioned to design artwork for Baltimore’s Penn Metro Station. Her murals appear on the walls of Orioles Park “City Corner”, Target’s “Mini Pitch”, Reginald F. Lewis Museum “inside mural “Reflections of Baltimore: Arabbers” and beyond. Recent concept commissions include Doritos-Solid Black, Dicks Sporting Goods, HBO Max, and the US Open BLM exhibit that transformed the front-row seats of Arthur Ashe Stadium at the 2020 opening. Lewis’ multi-talents also extend to her furniture making.

Lavett Ballard – Videos

Videos

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Tea with Myrtis: Artistically Speaking with Lavett Ballard
Galerie Myrtis Artist's Short with Lavett Ballard
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Lavett Ballard – Biography

Biography

Lavett Ballard (B. 1970, East Orange, New Jersey) holds a dual Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art and Art History with a minor in Museum Studies from Rutgers University and earned an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Ballard is an adjunct professor at Rowan College of South Jersey.

To mark the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, Time Magazine commissioned Ballard to create artwork as one of its regional covers for the “100 Women of the Year”, 2020 edition. Ballard’s subject was civil rights activist Rosa Parks (1913-2005), whose peaceful and history-making acts of resistance, in 1955, initiated the Montgomery Bus Boycott. “The Bus Riders,” a portrait honoring Parks, graced the March 16, 2020, double issue. Ballard was featured within the magazine’s pages.

Black Art in America named Ballard as one of the Top 10 Female Emerging Artists to Collect. Her work is in the permanent collections of the African American Museum of Philadelphia, Colored Girls Museum, Jules Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, and Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art. Ballard is a participant in the Department of States’ Arts in Embassies Program.

Photo courtesy of Jonathan Kolbe

Lavett Ballard – Statement

Statement

Ballard is a mixed media artist who describes her work as a re-imagined visual narrative of African descent people. Her use of imagery reflects social issues affecting primarily Black women. Her current body of work uses collaged photos adorned with paint, oil pastels, and metallic foils.

Personal family photographs and imagery sourced from historical archives are deconstructed and layered on sliced wood and reclaimed wood fences. The fence pays homage to playwright August Wilson. And symbolically, it serves as a metaphor for barriers, such as racial and gender discrimination that keep black people physically in and out of segments in our society.

The fusion of wood and photography offers artwork that explores Ballard’s southern roots and visually speaks volumes to continuing themes within her community.

More Than A Pretty Face, 2018
Mixed Media/Collage on Hand carved Birchwood Panel
18h x 24w in

Lavett Ballard

Lavett Ballard is a mixed media artist who describes her work as a re-imagined visual narrative of African descent people. Her use of imagery reflects social issues affecting primarily Black women. Her current body of work uses collaged photos adorned with paint, oil pastels, and metallic foils.

Dark Princess, 2020
11 x 9 ″
Collage/Mixed Media on Wood Slice

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