Making their own way: Mystic museum explores the ‘Unconventional Pathways of African American Artists’

July 28, 2024 12:00 am • Last Updated: July 26, 2024 1:26 pm

By Kristina Dorsey
Features Editor

Michael Gibson (b. 1962), Crowned in Her Glory, 2022. Serigraph on paper, Artist Proof 3/10. Collection of Raven Fine Art Editions.

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) Revolt on the Amistad, 1989. Screenprint on Masonite board. Collection of Bill and Paula Alice Mitchell

Curlee Raven Holton (b. 1951), Hands Up, Nimbus, 2020. Digital serigraph and gold leaf on paper. Collection of Bill and Paula Alice Mitchell.

Faith Ringgold (1930-2024), Here Comes Moses, 2014. Serigraph on paper, Artist Proof. Collection of Raven Fine Art Editions.

The Mystic Museum of Art has focused this year on a specific theme: pathways.

What does that mean? The museum’s exhibitions are exploring how people who had no traditional route open to them to pursue a creative profession nevertheless found a way to achieve a career in art.

Earlier in 2024, the museum examined how females of an earlier era did that in “Women of Mystic.”

Now, it is highlighting “Printmaking and the Unconventional Pathways of African American Artists.”

The exhibition showcases a glorious range of art. One piece, for instance, is an eruption of color in which a quartet of Black women are pictured mid-dance, their skirts swirling, their arms swaying. This 2009 serigraph, “Read My Hips,” is by Paul Goodnight — who graduated from New London High School and went on to great fame and acclaim as an artist.

Jacob Lawrence’s “Revolt on the Amistad,” a boldly colorful screenprint on Masonite board done in 1989, seems almost an abstract at first, until a viewer examines it closer and sees arms struggling against other people and hands holding what look like knives.

In Faith Ringgold’s “Anyone Can Fly,” an etching on paper created in 1981, two child-like figures, their arms extended forward like Superman, fly over a cityscape boasting apartment buildings bedecked with fire escapes and laundry hanging on the line.

The artists’ lives are often as fascinating as their work, as the exhibition reflects.

Lois Mailou Jones (1905-1998), whose 1996 “Menemsha — Martha’s Vineyard” dry point etching on paper is on view, was the first Black graduate of Boston’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1927. And yet, even as she was winning awards for her impressionist landscapes in the 1930s, she had to have white friends submit her work to places like the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (The Corcoran later threw an 89th birthday party for her and apologized for any racism in the past.)

Lawrence (1917-2000), the artist behind the previously mentioned “Revolt on the Amistad,” became the first African American artist to be represented by a New York gallery, in 1941. He was still, though, "deeply disturbed by the lack of recognition of other Black artists,” the exhibition notes. Lawrence studied at the Harlem Art Workshop and worked for the WPA. He did paintings about heroes like Harriet Tubman and John Brown.

Unconventional pathways

“Printmaking and the Unconventional Pathways of African American Artists,” which runs at MMoA through Oct. 13, “celebrates the creative practice of African American artists, whose histories and cultures have long been suppressed by mainstream convention. It asks how these artists forged their own pathways to distinguished careers despite discriminatory barriers, and finds answers in their innovative use of printmaking as a primary artistic medium, a forum for collaboration, and a democratic means of circulating their art,” as the exhibition’s wall text states.

The show is curated by artist, master printmaker and scholar Curlee Raven Holton and developed in association with Raven Fine Art Editions. As the Raven website notes, Holton’s “prints speak to our human experience, and through the lens of his African American heritage, he brings voice to significant personal, political, and cultural events.”

Holton selected the works included in the exhibition. Then, MMoA executive director and chief curator V. Susan Fisher, MMoA assistant curator Amelia Onorato, and MMoA director of visitor services Cara Lopilato were given creative control over how the works would be presented.

Fisher noted that the exhibition has thrilling colors, beautiful lines and bold imagery. They built the curatorial narrative for the exhibition with Holton’s guidance. They tried to carve the elements of the story into manageable bits and to identify the main message points.

“Curlee curated this beautiful selection of really, really lovely pieces that cover the gamut from just straight-up beautiful, abstract colorful imagery, to art for art’s sake, to using art as a means to confront generational trauma,” Onorato said.

There are pieces that seem more traditional, like Charles Salee’s Jr.’s etching on paper “Ballet Dancer,” which is a straightforward image of a ballerina posing at a barre.

But other pieces were spurred by horrible histories and reflect powerful themes. Onorato talked about Kevin Cole’s “beautiful, three-dimensional” piece that’s part of a series related to lynchings. He did the series because, when he was a young man, he told his father he wasn’t going to vote. His father said that when he and his own father were younger, living in the South, they’d put on their suits to vote. A lot of other Black men did the same, but some of them were lynched afterward, hung by their own neckties.

“So these pieces Kevin Cole makes are very abstracted but it’s all about twists and knots and neckties and twigs,” Onorato said.

A piece by Holton called “Bred for Pleasure” is, at face value, just four beautiful profiles of Black women, with the portraits created in gradations, from a contrast black and white on the far left to light grays, like inkwash, on the right, Onorato noted. What it’s about, though, is how slave masters would impregnate the Black women who were their slaves, creating a generational shift toward whiteness.

The importance of printmaking

The exhibition explains that, during the Great Depression, a lot of artists took up printmaking for a number of reasons. It was inexpensive. The results could be shipped easily. And the artists could promote their work through multiple original images.

“These qualities suited the interests of African American artists, who also found affirmation in working together in the print studio, learning through shared experimentation, and inspiration in the versatility of the medium,” the show text says.

They also used printmaking as a means of social activism.

The section of the exhibition housed in the Mystic Museum of Art’s Halsey Gallery focuses on the fundamentals of printmaking. It explains the details of engraving, serigraphs, lithographs, etchings and more.

Holton, who with his daughter has a printmaking studio, provided a silk screen for one of the prints on display. There are transparent films as well, showing how a four-color print would work.

Printmaking tools have been placed next to the kinds of prints they can be used to create. Onorato said that” “helps contextualize the process for folks who aren’t familiar with how much time, love, and effort goes into making them.”

‘It was their own’

With the exhibition, Fisher said, “we then needed to connect the nature of printmaking with the way that African Americans found it possible to accomplish their art. They couldn’t go off to the academy; they wouldn’t be accepted. They couldn’t afford separate studios. They would never make a living by making masterful pieces to submit to the salon. And they wouldn’t get high-level commissions anyway because all the rich folks know each other.

“So what do they do? They work in groups and they work in settlement houses. … During the Depression, they worked in workshops funded by the Federal Art Project of the WPA. Then, having gotten that much of a foundation — it was fascinating to us, and we will build this into the speaker series that’s coming up — how many of these artists went on to found artists collaboratives and printmaking workshops of their own. Because it was their own, it was something they could do.”

Fisher noted that Holton said since no one was buying these artists’ works anyway, they would work together in print workshops and decide the theme they were interested in. They could be experimental and affirm each other.

Fisher said, “A white male mainstream artist in the academy does not have to justify his importance to our culture. A Black woman or man working in a neighborhood settlement house does. So much of the artwork we see on these walls and we discussed with Curlee has to do with simply asserting an identity. ‘I’m here. It matters that I’m here.’”

She references artist/author Faith Ringgold’s quote: “You can’t just sit around and wait for someone to say who you are.”

Part of the American canon

Holton had worked a great deal with David Driskell (1931-2020), an art educator, historian and painter, and the MMoA exhibition features Driskell’s art and touches on his activism. It mentions how he implored the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to do an exhibition focused on two centuries of Black American art in conjunction the U.S. bicentennial in 1976. He finally convinced white museum leaders that it was important to do the show, because while he knew their history, they didn’t know his. Fisher noted that the exhibition ended up having a huge impact.

What Driskell really wanted was for Black artists and their works to be seen as what they are: part of the American canon. That’s why he would close his lectures at exhibitions about African American art with this statement: “It’s time for these shows to end.”

A new opportunity to connect

Onorato said her goal with all of MMoA’s exhibitions is to show visitors something they’ve never seen before. Even though she loves American Impressionism, she tries to avoid the echo chamber of coastal scenes, boat paintings and so on.

Onorato said, “As someone who has worked as an illustrator and cartoonist and has done comic books, it always kind of riled me up that people looked down on that art form, because so much work goes into it. So being able to display these beautiful, powerful, colorful, masterful works of art and talk about, yes, they are not what we have all, whether we realized it or not, been trained to think of as good art, high art, fine art, these are works of art all on their own. (It is important) to really be able to appreciate not only the beauty and the stories that they have to share but the amount of technical expertise that was required to create them.”

Fisher said she hopes that visitors “discover story after story and identify with it. … I can’t think of anybody who doesn’t have some experience of having been excluded or having been denied an opportunity, and that is the clearest connection between the artists on display and the viewers here. I want the whole question of race and discrimination and American history not to be cast as an accusation but as a shockingly new opportunity to connect. Like (artist) Mel Edwards said, ‘We’ve got a whole lot of work to do.’”

k.dorsey@theday.com