Exhibition Catalog

Although feminism was not a part of Bearden’s lexicon, he implicitly understood that this new/old image of his had to reside in the most appropriate personage: a figure recognizable as being the fitting vessel and vehicle for these changes to the standard racial script. And like Ralph Ellison’s largely silent, but all seeing/all knowing, apocryphal black folk critic, Bearden’s catalyst would also have to be an agency-filled representative of olde. That such an entity would ultimately be a woman meant that she was drawn from Bearden’s deep, deep memory reservoir of the women he knew or had known and considered elemental, powerful, and transforming in his life. His great grandmother Rosa, grandmother Cattie, mother Bessye, and his wife Nanette were all certainly forces of nature with which to contend, but the woman whom he repeatedly spoke of as his personal fomenter to rethinking his art was Ida, a prostitute-turn-cleaning-lady that Bearden met in 1940. After being rebuffed by Bearden following her suggestion that he paint her, Ida’s retort (which Bearden paraphrased in subsequent interviews) is telling. “‘I know what I look like,’ she said. ‘But when you can look and find what’s beautiful in me, then you’re going to be able to do something on that paper of yours.’ That always sort of stuck with me,” Bearden acknowledged. Placing this statement with Bearden’s Conjur Woman imagery drops Bearden’s (and Ida’s) words in a bubbling cauldron of ideas and possibilities: rethinking commonplace (and often racist) Western notions of beauty, the juxtaposition of desire and representation, revelations and self-discoveries as advanced from the social margins, and returning to one’s originary (female) roots as a way out of the artistic routine and into a new, cultural rebirth, among other thoughts. It is precisely the Conjur Woman’s corporeal detachment from the conventional male gaze (whose alternative was deftly articulated to Bearden by Ida) that empowers her and shifts her visual allure to the natural world and, on the cultural front, to the African diasporic principles of art-as-healing, art-as-metamorphosis, and art-as-spiritual-renewal. And Bearden’s methods for introducing this figure in his art – by distilling Cubist and Dadaist fracture through the deconstructive aesthetics of jazz composition and African American folk collage/assemblage – matched this new/old female subject perfectly.

Circle Dance traces John T. Scott’s creative output for forty years, relies on the art and aesthetics of the artist’s birthplace and a part formalist/part thematic approach for structuring this retrospective. Metaphors abound in the categorizing and designating of this work. One mental picture in particular — the previously referenced Congo Square “circle dance” — alludes to Scott’s performative engagement with three-dimensional object-making and the self-choreographed movements required by the viewer to fully experience his art (themselves gesturally comparable to the “ring dances” or “ring shouts” that were performed by peoples of African ancestry in the Caribbean and southern United States as late as the early twentieth century). But “circle dance” also refers to the city of New Orleans itself — a place whose anthropomorphic aspect routinely conjures in the mind’s eye bodies in motion.

John T. Scott’s passions — brilliant color, fluid movement, linear poetics, sharp commentary, social justice, among others — are the products of a lifetime of discerning and fashioning: pursuits that, in tandem with one’s personal genealogy, comprise an artistic performance of substantial proportions. That John T. Scott is both an artist of and from New Orleans is ideally acknowledged within the concept and meaning of a “circle dance” — artistic perambulations down real city streets and critical gamboling around theories of form and signification.

“‘Back to Black’ is a strident curatorial project bringing work by 47 artists, film-makers and photographers to interact over two gallery floors. It is an unusual partnership, combining those from the US, Britain and Jamaica, although artists that originated in various other Caribbean countries also take part. Collected together, its formally unorthodox display transformed the Whitechapel with a rich mixture of film and video, sculpture, print, text and image, photography and painting. An accompanying plush catalogue with gold-leaf lettering on an alluring black cover holds a compelling, imaginative essay by Powell prefacing two other curatorial commentaries, and six shorter essays by critics and historians from home and abroad. . . .”  Leon Wainwright, exhibition review of Back to Black: Art, Cinema, & the Racial Imaginary, Third Text, 13 February 2006.

“‘Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow’ . . . glows with this power. In these 26 paintings and drawings from 1943 to 1972, the artist explores the often shaky promise presented by this luminous color. Works ranging from portraits and cityscapes to abstractions are united by golden tones. And yet all is not carefree here. At times, Delaney’s yellow can appear joyous or jaundiced, gentle or glaring, transcendent or tortured.”  Joanne Silver, exhibition review of Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow, The Boston Herald, 28 February 2003.