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James Williams-Statement

James Williams II

Art | Video | Statement | Resume
 

Statement

My work explores the experiences of childhood, at once personal and universal. I am creating a story set in the United States during the 1930’s, centered on the protagonist Little Rooster, a young energetic boy who lives with his mother and father. It is through his bodyguard, Red Rooster, that he learns how to fulfill the role of a hero.

I connect with the past through imagery inspired by artifacts from popular culture: vintage comic books, their bright color palettes and stylized figures; newspaper advertisements, selling items with distinctly dated promises; and finally, children books, with their lasting moral lessons.

 
The approach of my work is not to remake vintage elements but to transform them into my own meaningful world. My oil paintings invoke a sense of dramatic intrigue and reveal my appreciation for contemporary figure painting.

I narrate stories that depict personal moments or experiences in my life. It is through my work that I express my thoughts, my desires, my feelings and my fears. My paintings of Little Rooster parallel many scenarios from my life. Despite his longing to remain a child, events force him to confront the burdens of adulthood. An adult often sees the world as gray and monotonous, but a child sees color and endless possibilities.

Artist

Michael Gross – Statement

Statement

I have been painting and drawing for most of my life and, in recent years making prints. These creative efforts are a means of grappling with the impulses and struggles that make up the way I see my place in the world. In a work of art I am pleased with, I have succeeded in wresting a sense of order from the chaos of an incomplete and unbalanced piece. I create the chaos and then I resolve it.

Although much of my work is non-objective, in the sense that it is not representational, I also consider myself, in some way, to be a landscape artist. I have been inspired by what I see around me – a small bridge, my garden, a view – and have been moved to put onto canvas or paper a spontaneous expression of that experience in an abstract way.

For a number of years, I have been making intensely colorful, frenetic studies of light and movement that, at first, appear to be monochromatic: red, blue, yellow, brown, gray, white, or black. Up close, however, these paintings are teeming with layers of thrown, dripped, and smeared paint. Even the medium varies: I use acrylic, as well as oil. I also apply these methods to my works on paper.

Recently, I have moved away from the appearance of the monochromatic in the paintings and other work—exposing all of the color, shapes and lines (as well as collage) in the finished piece.

I work rapidly, pacing the studio to look at the painting up close, and then from a distance. I rotate the canvas, so I can see where there is imbalance. I take if off the wall and work on the floor, flinging paint to create lines and movement.

The energy I call up to work in this way is both physical and spiritual. I am wrestling with divergent forces: intensity vs. detachment, emotion vs. reason, light vs. darkness, and color vs. black. Every work is an attempt to capture a moment of equilibrium, a kind of elegant balance in time and space that is recorded permanently in the painting, drawing or print. I settle for a while, and then I seem to need to do it again.

My hope is that viewers will be drawn in, will want to look at the work for a minute or two because in this image I made gives them a vision of the incredible power, ambiguity, intricacy, and beauty of our lives.

Michael Gross was born in 1944 and grew up in Chicago.

Artist

Anderson Pigatt Bibliography

Anderson Pigatt (1928-2009)

artwork | video | statement | bio | bibl. | press | resume
 

Bibliography

"New Black Artist" Exhibition, Brooklyn Museum, 1969
“New Black Artist” Exhibition, Brooklyn Museum, 1969
Abdullah, Omanii. I Wanna Be the Kinda Father my Mother Was. New Readers Press: Syracuse, NY, 1993.

African-American Visual Artists – An Annotated Bibliography of Educational Resource Materials. Daniel Frye. The Scarecrow Press, Inc.: Lanham, MD, February 7, 2001

Almanac of African American Heritage: A Book of Lists Featuring People, Places, Times, And Events that Shaped Black Culture. Juanita J. Davis, Sharon E. Ferguson-Roberts, Rita G. Giles and Johnnie H. Miles. Prentice Hall: Upper Saddle River, NY, 2000.

Anonymous.”Harlem Unveiling.” New York Post: New York, NY, August 26, 1975.

Black Art – Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art. Robert V. Rozelle, Alvia Wardlaw and Maureen A. McKenna, ed. Dallas Museum of Art: Dallas, TX, 1989.

Bullard, C. “African Roots Nourish Universal Images.” Richmond Times-Dispatch: Richmond, VA, October 15, 1993.

Canady, John. ” Sculpture is the Strength of New Black Artists’ Show.” The New York Times: New York, NY, October 8, 1971.

Chandler, Dana. “Anderson Pigatt: A Self-Taught Artist.” Bay State Banner. Boston, MA, November 22, 1973.

Dorsey, John. “Pigatt Retrospective.” The Baltimore Sun: Baltimore, MD, October 20, 1998.

King Hammond, Leslie. Masters, Mentors and Makers.Pavsner Press: Baltimore, MD, 1992.

King Hammond, Leslie. The Intuitive Eye. Harbor Exchange: Baltimore, MD, 1985.

Masters, Barbara. “Integrity of the Message and the Medium.” AURA of the Arts: Baltimore, MD, August 1977.

Pigatt, A. “A Tree Returns to Harlem.” New York Voice: New York, NY, Aug. 29, 1975.

Preston, Malcolm. “Distinctly Black.” Newsday: Long Island, NY, December 24, 1971.

Sharp, Christopher. “Arts and Pleasures, Stories in Wood.” Womens Wear Daily: New York, NY, August 31, 1976.

Smythe, Victor. Black New York Artists of the 20th Century: Selections from the Schomburg Collections. New York Public Library Press: New York, NY, 1998.

Speaking Spirits: Nov. 18-Dec. 2, 1973: Sculpture by Anderson J. Pigatt: Museum of National Center of Afro-American Artists. National Center of Afro-American Artists, 1973

Stevens, Elisabeth. “Intuitive Eye is Artists’ Vision.” The Baltimore Sun: Baltimore, MD, June 6, 1985.

St. James Guide to Black Artists: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Thomas Riggs. St James Press: An Imprint of Gale: Detroit, MI, 1997.

Taylor, Edward. New Black Artists.Clarke and Way, Inc., 1969.

Taylor, Robert. “Anderson J. Pigatt Sculpture Seen in Speaking Spirits.” Boston Globe: Boston, MA, November 22 ,1973.

Artist

Anderson Pigatt Statement

Anderson Pigatt (1928-2009)

artwork | video | statement | bio | bibl. | press | resume
 

Statement

Red Stick for Columbus
Red Stick for Columbus
I don’t want to sound as though I’m a know-it-all because I’m still learning and life to me growing from birth to death, and living is my teacher from day to day to this very day. The people I met yesterday were helpers along life’s highway: some made me happy, others made me sad. The good I try to show; the bad I keep in the back of my head so as not to get hurt again, at least not that way again.

Most of us have lost the real reason why we came into this world, and believe me there is a reason, only known to you – not your mother, father, sister, brother or anyone on this earth – only you before your entry. But if we do as we were intended to do – that is to move around this world – we will find our path again, making us happy for finding the truth. Don’t wait for the truth to come to you; most likely it is a lie.

The path, when found, we must walk until death. If a man takes a wife, and he is of path, truth, love and good health, old age will come to them a happy death. For sickness is a lack of work, and work should be doing the things that make life better for you, your family and friends. If there are kids, they must grow free with only the teaching of truth, so they can keep moving toward their path. And in a lot of cases the son’s path will be the same as the father’s, for the father’s truth will shine bright in the eyes of the son.

Age to me means wisdom: how to move, where to move, what to do, what not to do, and to keep moving toward your end. The end could very well mean another beginning in another life. I often think of my father on his deathbed and the last thing he said that was understood. He said, “What has a man gained if he’s gained the world and lost his soul?” I guess this is why I’m a woodworker, for you see, wood to me is always alive.

These dead trees that I write stories on may last 1,000 years for the world to see. And even though they might become outdated, they are a part of our time. I feel as though some day others may laugh at them to know that man was so dumb. Yet we all work toward that day when killing and hating another man’s color will be a thing of the past, when work will be a thing of enjoyment for all man; the time when there will be no rich man or poor man, black man or white – only man. For when God made man, there were lights, color and sound, happiness all around, and my dream is to bring it about again by returning light, color and sound to the consciousness of mankind. And I will work until hate be replaced with love and greed is replaced with giving.

Powerful is the man of truth and love, taking nothing and giving eternal life.

Artist

Anderson Pigatt Bio

Anderson Pigatt (1928-2009)

artwork | video | statement | bio | bibl. | press | resume
 

Biography

Anderson_PigattAnderson Pigatt was born in Raeford, North Carolina, October 20, 1928. He received vocational training in general woodworking and carpentry at George Washington Carver High School. Pigatt served in the United States Army in 1950-55; studied cabinetmaking on the G.I. Bill after leaving the military; and apprenticed under James W. Leach, Baltimore, Maryland in refinishing and repairing period antique furniture.

Pigatt performed free-lance work in New York after 1963, working for firms such as Worldwide Antiques, Leonard’s Antique Gallery, Knapp and Seigal Antiques, et al. Restoration experience includes work on Chippendale, Jacobean, Sheraton, Queen Anne and other types of collections.

Anderson launched his sculpture career late in 1960’s. A self-taught sculptor, his work is represented in a number of private and institutional collections.

“Nigger Chained” a seminal work is in the permanent collection of the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. Other sculptures are in the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York; Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore, MD; and the American Visionary Art Museum, Baltimore, MD.

Mr. Pigatt participated in exhibitions sponsored by the American Federation of Fine Arts, the Urban Center of Columbia University, the Harlem Council and Bell Telephone Company. From December, 1967-1976, his work was exhibited in such venues as the Empire State Building, Observation Tower, New York, NY; The Pam Am Building, New York, NY; the Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; Columbia University, New York, NY; Elma Lewis School of Fine Art, Dorchester, MA; University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; Milliken University, Decatur, IL; Reading Public Museum and Art Gallery, Reading, PA; University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI; and the Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL.

Significant exhibitions include: “Black New Artists of the 20th Century: Selections from the Schomburg Center Collections”, 1970; traveling exhibitions “New Black Artists”, 1971 and “Black Art – Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art”, 1989-91.

Anderson’s work was favorable reviewed and commented upon by such notables as John Canady of The New York Times on October 8, 1969, with a headline stating “Sculpture Is Strength of ‘New Black Artists’ Show” and Robert Taylor of the Boston Globe on November 22, 1973 with the headline “Anderson Pigatt’s sculpture seen in ‘Speaking Spirits’”. Other comments and accolades come from correspondence from Thomas W. Leavitt, Director of the Herbert f. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Joseph V. Noble, Vice Director for Administration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Dr. Robert Bishop, Director of Museum of American Folk Art in New York.

Mr. Pigatt was selected to participate in the exhibition and publication, Black Art Ancestral Legacy, sponsored by the Dallas Museum of Art, which showed at the High Museum in Atlanta, the Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art in Richmond. His work has been purchased by such notables as Singer Richie Havens, artists Andy Warhol and John Biggers.

Artist

Elizabeth Catlett – Bio

Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012)

artwork | resale art work | video
 

Biography

Elizabeth_Catlett-1Elizabeth Catlett was born in Washington, D.C. in 1915. Art historian Melanie Herzog describes Catlett as “the foremost African American woman artist of her generation.”

Her work is celebrated as a visually eloquent expression of African American identity and pride in cultural heritage. Catlett has lived in Mexico for over 50 years, as a citizen of that country since 1962, and she and her husband artist Francisco Mora, have raised their children there. For 20 years she was a member of the Taller de Grafica Popular (Popular Graphic Arts Workshop) and she was the first woman professor of sculpture at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.

Her extraordinary career has stretched from her years as a student at Howard University during the 1930s through various political and social movements-including the Chicago Renaissance of the 1940s, the Black Power and Black Arts movements, the Mexican Public Art Movement, and feminism-which have informed her art.

Catlett is a fascinating and pivotal intercultural figure whose powerful art manifests her firm belief that the visual arts can play a role in the construction of meaningful identity, both transnational and ethnically grounded.

In 1940 Catlett became the first student to receive an M.F.A. in sculpture at the University of Iowa. While there, she was influenced by American landscape painter Grant Wood, who urged students to work with the subjects they knew best. For Catlett, this meant black people, and especially black women, and it was at this point that her work began to focus on African Americans. Her piece Mother and Child, done in limestone in 1939 for her thesis, won first prize in sculpture at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago in 1940.

She studied ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1941, lithography at the Art Students League of New York in 1942-1943, and with sculptor Ossip Zadkine in New York in 1943.

In 1946 Catlett received a Rosenwald Fund Fellowship that allowed her to travel to Mexico where she studied wood carving with Jose L. Ruiz and ceramic sculpture with Francisco Zúñiga, at the Escuela de Pintura y Escultura, Esmeralda, Mexico. She later moved, to Mexico, married, and became a Mexican citizen.

In Mexico, she worked with the Taller de Gráfica Popular, (People’s Graphic Arts Workshop), a group of printmakers organized in 1936 and dedicated to using their art to promote social change. There she and other artists created a series of linoleum cuts on black heroes. They “did posters, leaflets, collective booklets, illustrations for textbooks, posters and illustrations for the construction of schools, against illiteracy in Mexico.”

She became the first female professor of sculpture and head of the sculpture department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, School of Fine Arts, San Carlos, in Mexico City, in 1958, and taught there until retiring in 1975. She continues to be active in the art community of Cuernavaca, Morelos.

She has received many awards including the Women’s Caucus For Art.The Graphic Arts Workshop has won an international peace prize because, of Elizabeth Catlett.An Elizabeth Catlett Week was proclaimed in Berkeley, California,and an Elizabeth Catlett Day in Cleveland,Ohio.She is an honorary citizen of New Orleans.She received an honorary Doctorate from Pace University,in New York and was accompanied to the presentation by fellow sculptor and good friend Manuel Bennett.

Artist

M. Scott Johnson – Bio

Biography

M. Scott Johnson
M. Scott Johnson (American, b. 1968) is a sculptor who cuts time open. His practice is not only an engagement with stone, but an insistence on the fugitivity of form—where material is sound, where chiseling is a form of drumming, and where sculpture becomes a vessel for the ancestral and the not-yet-seen. To speak of Johnson is to speak of one of the most adept sculptors of his generation, a maker who returns direct carving to its Black American urgency, reanimating intuition and memory as modes of critique. His work draws myth, ritual, and post-colonial fracture into the mineral body, revealing sculpture as a site where silence is not absence, but resonance.

Johnson’s passage into this practice was sharpened through his apprenticeship with Nicholas Mukomberanwa (1940–2002), the Zimbabwean sculptor and national hero, from 1996 to 1999. Under Mukomberanwa, Johnson absorbed a language of touch where stone was less medium than interlocutor, less surface than archive. This training was not a mere technical formation but a ceremonial induction into the Shona continuum of carving, extended into the improvisational urgency of Black America. Out of this nexus comes a body of work in which stone itself seems to breathe, to hesitate, to move fugitive.

Born and raised in Inkster, Michigan, Johnson came of age in the sonic laboratory of Detroit techno—a site where Black futurity learned to inhabit circuitry, loop, and pulse. That machinic rhythm permeates his sculptural vocabulary, as syncopation and repetition are transposed into line, cut, and void. His sculptures embody what might be called an Afrosurrealist materialism: objects that emerge from atavistic memory but feel like fragments of a dream projected into matter. Like Afrosurrealist writing and film, Johnson’s carving bends reality into myth, staging a refusal of the ordinary. His stone forms are simultaneously ritual artifacts and speculative instruments, collapsing the distance between ancestral invocation and futuristic speculation.

Johnson’s work has entered and disturbed the spaces of permanence: the collections of Hampton University Museum (VA), Kenkeleba House (NY), the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (NY), and the U.S. Embassy in Oslo, Norway. His exhibitions map the diaspora’s fugitive routes: Columbia University (NY); the Embassy of the Republic of Ghana (D.C.); Galerie Myrtis (MD); Harvard University; Hampton University Museum (VA); Kenkeleba House (NY); Fabric Projects Gallery (Los Angeles); United Talent Agency ArtSpace (Los Angeles); Wilber Jennings Gallery (NY); TransAfrica Forum; the National Gallery of Zimbabwe; Grey Gallery at New York University; the Museum of Contemporary Diasporan Art (Brooklyn, NY); Rush Arts Gallery (NY); the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (NY); the New York Botanical Gardens; Tafaria Castle & Center for the Arts (Nyeri, Kenya); the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History (MI); JELMA Museum at Morgan State University; the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History; the 13th Havana Biennale at Galeria Carmen Montilla, Cuba; and the 59th Venice Biennale Personal Structures: Time, Space and Existence at Palazzo Bembo. Each exhibition is less a placement than an unfolding: his objects act as portals, uncanny in their stillness, charged with a rhythm you almost hear.

Since 2002, Johnson has been an artist-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where pedagogy becomes sculpture, and youth become collaborators in an intergenerational installation. His public exhibitions with Black youth have appeared across New York City: at the Williamsburg Historical Society, Bronx Historical Society, Cork Gallery in Lincoln Center, and The Town Hall. This work extends the Afrosurrealist ethos into education itself, producing not only objects but collectives, not only forms but futures.

In Johnson’s hands, stone refuses silence, articulating memory through form, carrying ancestral weight while pressing forward into new futures of Black expression.

Artist

M. Scott Johnson-Statement

Statement

When shaping the stone I rely on the extremely physical process of direct carving, coupled with experimentation in natural and artificial lighting. In my most recent sculptures organic pigments are integrated to exploit symmetry and to empower their aesthetic integrity. I achieve the most visceral and focused statements through improvisation.

Improvisation allows me to snatch an image at birth, creating a balance between imposing and communicating with the natural life force resonating from within my materials. Line, configuration, texture and title are all combined to allow the spectator to respond both consciously and subconsciously.

My series, “Shadow Matter” is the inter-dimensional reflection of matter from the physical world – the space within space. Observing shadow matter, or negative space, gives us a truer understanding of the life and death forces of all objects. I believe atavism (bio-cultural memory) opens up the compendium of human knowledge and guides us through negative space. It makes us aware of the harmonies and vibrations of the darkness. Understanding these mysterious syntaxes, we can shape the void and harness the creative rhythm of these alter-realities.

My visual experimentation with rhythm of structure, repetition of pattern, light management, and the abstract organic has allowed me to peer into ways in which these forces influence my unconscious mind.

Shadow Matter Entity 2, 2008, Rhyolite w/Grout, 13″ x 25″ x 13″

Landscape Astrophotography

When working in the expression of landscape Astrophotography, I am constantly searching for ways in which to navigate/interpret light, space and soul. Humbled by the vastness of the cosmos, when I compose an image I seek to explore the limits and promise of my own physical mortality.

Capturing these images must be done with precise preparation, knowledge and trust of intuition. My background as a stone sculpture has trained my both my inner and outer eye to recognize the sacred geometry that exist throughout the universe. Still, often the utmost factor contributing to an outstanding image is the random gift of revelation from the subject itself. My prime inspiration behind this work is the opportunity to decipher the intellect of the galaxy, and express my devotion to the infinite.

The photographic series Venus Rising, represents a yearly pilgrimage to the dark sky of New York’s Adirondack park, there I record the rising of the planet Venus in the Northern Hemisphere. Venus goes through two phases. For 250 days the planet is known as the “Evening Star” as it follows the setting sun. After the Evening Star phase, Venus disappears for eight days before returning as the “Morning Star”. Like many of the ancients, for me visually, this is a celestial affirmation of rebirth, balance and immortality.

Venus Rising #1, 2015, Adirondack National Park, New York
Infrared photo printed on Canson Infinity Premium RC, 24″ x 14″

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Elsa Gebreyesus – Bio

Biography

Elsa Gebreyesus lived in Ethiopia, Kenya, and United States before going on to receive her BA from Brock University in Ontario, Canada. After Eritrea won its independence from Ethiopia, she lived there for five years, working as a Project Officer with an indigenous women’s organization. After leaving Eritrea, she came to the U. S. where she’s been pursuing her career and her lifelong passion for art.

In addition to her work and art, she also volunteers with organizations involved with human rights issues especially in Africa. She continues to learn from artists she admires and has been greatly influenced by modernist painters from both Africa and the West.

Elsa Gebreyesus currently lives with her husband and two children in Fairfax, VA.

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In The Beginning
Artist

Elsa Gebreyesus – Statement

Elsa Gebreyesus

view the exhibition | artist talk
 

Statement

Each of my paintings starts with a loose sketch, landscape or object and is built up with layer upon layer of paint. Often it will be in a state of chaos before the process of adding and subtracting begins. I do not start with an end in mind when I begin a painting, instead the challenge is to find the end. This process to me is a type of meditation – an intimate conversation between the materials and myself.

I am drawn to abstract compositions because they require us to stop and reflect, to ask questions. Abstract art is also open to multiple interpretations. Each viewer will bring his or her own experiences into play as they contemplate the work. This adds another dimension to the artwork, a sort of interactive communication that flows from the artist, to the painting and eventually the viewer.

In some of my paintings I use collage to enhance the surfaces of the canvases. I enjoy working with acrylic paint because of its versatility enabling me to work in light washes or thick applications. Drawing media in the paintings are caran d’ache and graphite. Some pieces incorporate text from my native language, Tigrinya. I also use sand and other texture media all part of the process of building visual stories that reflect experiences and internal states.

Tigrinya is one of the official languages spoken in Eritrea, a small East African country. It has a phonetic writing system consisting of symbols that represent syllables. Using these symbols in my paintings reflects my connection to my cultural heritage and enables me to express my views about the current situation in Eritrea.