PRESS

Robin Rice on Visual Art: Salon Joose's "Surface Politics" by Robin Rice  Published: Nov 23, 2010

"Surface Politics" is a piece of installation art in the form of a group art exhibit. At Salon Joose, curator Theodore A. Harris combined the work of nine highly respected African-American artists with his own, adding elements like yellow "caution" tape much like he inter-layers images from art history, news and advertising into his collages. "For me," says Harris, "this show is like John Coltrane improvising on 'These Are a Few of My Favorite Things.'"

Although the show might feel like a single work, the materials and mediums range from video to painting to sculpture, and individual concepts are equally disparate. Two minimal Quentin Morris "6-foot circle" black paintings are the first thing visitors will see. Their uncompromising humanistic object-ness, allied with a sense of the infinite, seems fresh even though — or maybe because — Morris has been exploring it for four decades.

Harris' addition of two small ship models and coins referencing the slave trade undermines the impact of 13 22-inch-tall crosses by sculptor David Stephens that run along one wall. A video documents the action in which the crosses were burned in Fairmount Park as a response to the 2003 Supreme Court ruling legalizing cross-burning.

Sophisticated and ominous, Tanya Murphy Dodd's dreamlike mixed-media painting Embracing Light is inescapably about race and history. In contrast, the sensuous, abstract surfaces of Jared Wood's unfinished black wood diptychs may well have a socio-political aspect, but it's understated. LeRoy Johnson's layered cube wrapped in wire resonates with the struggle and tenacity of life in Philadelphia.

Joan Huckstep's video documentation, Ancestral Women, anchors the show. Choreographed by Huckstep (also a dancer in the performance) and projected in a separate darkened space, it is a testament to the survival of the spirit.

More than Meets the Eye?
By edward m. epstein | November 1, 2010

How do you make ordinary art into Black art? Surface Politics, [Salon Joose, October 8-November 20, 2010asks that question by juxtaposing a series of works in the context of a black-owned gallery. Organizer Theodore Harris, who is well-known for his overt statements about war, religion, and politics, has invited artists of varied ages and media to participate. Harris collaborated with aesthetic philosopher Sharon Chestnut on this show; Chestnut and Harris will lead a dialogue on November 5th, 6-9 pm at the gallery, under the aegis of the Institute for Advanced Study in Black Aesthetics.

Tanya Murphy Dodd, "Embracing Light;" photo courtesy the artist, Looking at Dodd’s work reminded me of Mother’s Birthday by Kara Crombie, a video on view at Vox Populi (see my post Not the Brady Bunch, 10/27/2010). Both artists deal with race, but Crombie, who is white, has no family members who experienced Southern race discrimination. Crombie’s plantation-era spoof is about how race issues have filtered down to her through popular culture. In Crombie’s art, race is a subject; in Dodd’s, the race of the artist is also a subject.

 

On the Seen in Philadelphia ( By Anne Bouie)
 

New Narratives and Reinterpretations was the theme of an informal　panel discussion that explored the trend among African American artists to use historic text and images in their narratives, examine new perspectives and utilize new creative formats. I first learned of the event from George-McKinley Martin‘s blog, The Black Art Project— a great place to keep up with all that’s going on across the country. 　The moderator of the panel was Professor Keith Morrison, Tyler School of Fine Art, and included Tanya Murphy Dodd, of Philadelphia, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum from Baltimore, Leticia Huckaby from Ft. Worth, and Nsenga Knight of Brooklyn.　

August 7 was one of those “this-is-why-we-live-in-Philadelphia summer evenings”---immensely walkable and enjoyable: people on the street strolling, with great energy which flowed right into the Glass Lobby Gallery at Brandywine Workshop’s Print Shop and Archive. Located in Philadelphia’s Avenue of the Arts District at 728 South Broad Street, the Workshop opened its printmaking studios to guests and participants, who had come to mingle, share and incorporate new knowledge, meet new folk, and reconnect with old friends. I finally remembered the old Woody Allen quote: “eighty per cent of life is just showing up!”　 Allan Edmunds, the Executive Director made the evening sound so exciting that I could not bear to have said I could have gone and didn’t; good friend Aziza Gibson-Hunter asked that I make sure to tell her about it.

So… I got the bus schedule, checked around for hotels, and booked a room at the Latham that beat the price at the Holiday Inn— nothing like cash flow as a sign from the Universe! I felt even more at home upon seeing Otis Robertson, a long-time Board member at Brandywine, and frequent presence here in Washington, DC. He is a regular at the Millennium Arts Salon, and worked with Lynn Sylvester and Margie Bates to establish a Friends of Brandywine chapter here as well. John E. Dowell,Jr. Professor at Temple University was in attendance, as was A.M. Weaver, who is curating a retrospective of E. J. Montgomery’s work at Morgan State University’s James E. Lewis 　Museum in October, 2010.
Keith Morrison, the former dean and currently a professor at the Tyler School of Fine Art provided context for the panel, stating that the convergence of the artists at Brandywine prompted organizing the panel around the notion of the past is not really the past at all—it’s all around us. He stated that we cannot avoid history and that our definition of self shifts as we reengage with historical documents.

Tanya Murphy Dodd, shared it was the realization that all the elders of her family were passing which stirred her to “want to know who these people were”, and document their existence before it was forgotten and lost”….One strain of her work incorporated her photography—she “still uses film” and actually makes her own cameras! She was interested in, and motivated by “the recovery of history”, and felt that being a storyteller she presented an “evolving definition of truth” in her work.

African Heritage Show (By Victoria Donohoe)
 

Tanya Murphy Dodd's 84-piece exhibit, "Private Visions: Shadows of a Journey 2010," at Widener University is directed toward rediscovery of the African heritage, the depiction of the black experience in America.

A Philadelphian, Dodd goes about this quest by reaching into her family's past in rural South Carolina, and trying to reconnect with a disappearing legacy. The painter/photographer takes up the subject with an eye to blending together photography and painting techniques. (And she gives the advantage here, I'd say, to painting.)

Dodd intends to freight this mixed-media approach with as much meaning as it can take in subjects ranging from figures near dilapidated houses, old barns, passing shadowy figures, fields ripe for harvest, "one-room" churches, vestiges of a Southern plantation and references to ancestors, to the slave-ship era.

Her most effective technique among several is to place cutout relief figures onto the surface of the environmental photos she takes. She then uses acrylic paint and polymers to join the past with the present, generally keeping things shadowy.

Such an approach seems to represent the steady, unhedging voice of reason in assembling historic pictures. But beyond that, this handsome, rather mystical, yet modest work is presented like enduring footnotes that reinforce today's increasingly lively discourse about African American heritage.