Art Tells the African American Story with Mountains and Trains

The Martin Luther King Memorial is One of Many Black History Narratives

WASHINGTON D.C.—At the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, unveiled here this week, the “mountain” and “stone” have become the metaphors for black history. Elsewhere in the capital city, other artistic metaphors—such as the “railroad” and the “schoolgirl”—also have been telling the African American story.
            At Union Station, the city hub for Amtrak, the emblem of black history is the train. The station is displaying a portable photo exhibition on “The Great Migration” of blacks to the North between 1910 and 1930. The exhibit occupies the Gate D foyer, and Amtrak plans to show the display at other stations through the autumn and winter.
            The railroad carried hundreds of thousands of southern migrants to the Northeast and Midwest. For example, blacks from Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas mainly headed for Chicago “because the railroads had direct lines to the Windy City,” states the exhibit, a mix of text and historic photos. This migration explains the origin of jazz and the blues in Chicago and Detroit.
            The migration also helped fuel the “New Black Movement,” soon to be called the Harlem Renaissance in New York. Its leaders believed the migration would change American cities and black identity. Writing in 1917, the black intellectual W. E. B. Dubois said that the war in Europe, having curtailed Atlantic migration, would “mean increased demand for colored laborers in the North,” leading to a “social change of great moment,” according to the Amtrak exhibit.
            In 1917 also, Jacob Lawrence, the future artist, was born in New York City to parents who had migrated from South Carolina. He would be inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and by the tempera paintings of the Italian Renaissance. While attending public schools, Lawrence also ventured to the Harlem Art Workshop and to lectures on black culture and art at the 135th Street Public Library.
            Soon he was painting series about the lives of black pioneers such Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. It was his 1940-41 series on “The Migration of the Negro” that made its mark on art history, however. He planned the series of 60 small-panel paintings as a whole, numbering each one and giving each episode a caption. Across the panels he used the same sold colors and built his compositions around angular forms and contrasts of dark and light.
            The series struck a chord in popular culture. In 1941, Fortune magazine published 26 of the panels. Eventually the series was pursued by large collections and museums. Today, the 60 panels are divided between the Phillips Collection here and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The Phillips owns the odd-number panels (MOMA the even). At the Phillips, they are on permanent display—just across town from Amtrak and the King Memorial.
            The Phillips panels and Amtrak’s display at Gate D tell parallel stories. Panel 1 is perhaps the best known. Lawrence shows a crowded train station with the gates named “Chicago,” “New York,” and “St. Louis.” Panel 23 says, “The Migration Spread.” The Amtrak exhibit offers data on increased rail traffic and the dollar amounts. Panel 39 illustrates that, “Railroad platforms were piled high with luggage.” The Amtrak exhibit photos show the piles. Lawrence painted how the men went first and sent money home to bring wives and children. Amtrak gives some of that data.
            What only Lawrence could convey, however, was the social reality in the North. As another panel shows, the North offered opportunities, but also discrimination of “a different kind.” Lawrence eventually moved to Seattle, where he died in 2000. To suit the times, he renamed the series “The Great Migration” and adjusted his original captions. He wrote in 1992 that the series showed “what human beings can endure and survive.”
            As a painter, Lawrence had a naïve and charming style. Given the 1940s rage for Abstract painting, he went against the grain by using narrative illustration. For the history of African Americans, narrative seems to be the artistic mode.
            The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is narrative. The sculptor, who is Chinese, based the design on King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, when he said, “Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope.” The two-part sculpture, carved from granite, is a mountain entrance and, across a plaza, a thirty-foot-tall King emerging from a stone.
            Last month, narrative art on black history was given the premier spot in the hallway outside the Oval Office at the White House. President Obama chose Normal Rockwell’s 1964 oil painting, “The Problem We All Live With,” to hang there for a given period. The painting shows U.S. marshals escorting six-year-old, pig-tailed Ruby Bridges into a New Orleans elementary school in 1960.
            Bridges asked the White House to choose the painting, since the 1960 event had “a lot to do with this particular president,” Bridges told Politico. The Sunday dedication of the King Memorial was cancelled because of the approaching hurricane. Even so, the artistic metaphors of mountains, stones, railroads, and schoolgirls have all contributed to this moment of reflection on black history.

Galleries Plan for the December Art Explosion in Florida

Goya Contemporary Includes Miami in a Full Slate of “Art Fairs” this Year

BALTIMORE—Like hundreds of art galleries around the world, Goya Contemporary is thinking about the big “art fair” week that opens in Miami on the cusp of December. For six days, Goya will trade its white cube gallery in this leafy Baltimore neighborhood for a white tent pavilion in the Florida sun.

            In Miami, they call it Art Week. But in today’s global art markets, the first days of December there will mark one of the world’s largest art fairs, the kind of venue where, over the past decade, art galleries have been doing much of their business.
            “Though it is exhausting and it’s long hours, when you go to the fairs, you are among the best,” says Amy Eva Raehse, director and curator of Goya, which has specialized in prints, paintings, and sculpture since 1996. “You see colleagues from around the world.”
            The hub of the Miami event will be Art Basel Miami Beach (Dec. 1-4), an offshoot of the world’s largest annual art fair (Art Basel in Switzerland). It occupies the vast Miami Beach Convention Center and features 250 galleries exhibiting work by 2,000 artists. Goya Contemporary, a middling gallery, for the past four years has signed up at a smaller venue, Art Miami, which holds its showcase in a pavilion across the waterway in Miami’s Wynwood Arts District. “We had a great year last year, so we filled out our contract [for this year] quite early,” Raehse says.
            The art fair is as old as the European marketplace. Since the late 1990s, however, the phenomenon has mushroomed. There were 55 relatively major art fairs in the world in 2001 and that increased to 205 in 2008. In their home towns, Art Basel and Art Miami are two of the old timers. The number of newcomers at Miami’s art week has grown, with about fifteen “satellite fairs” set for pavilions and other venues.
            As to a pecking order, Art Basel Miami Beach is top of the line. Galleries from around the world pay a high fee to exhibit there. Art Miami, which will feature Goya and 100 other exhibitors, ranks second, and thus booth space costs less. Other satellite fairs—Red Dot, Pulse, and Design Miami, for example—rank down the line in costs and fame of the artists. Whatever the rank, Miami becomes a giant art magnet: everyone benefits from the tens of thousands of potential art buyers.
            Soon enough, Goya will be packing the ninety works it will have on hand for exhibiting over the six days of public viewing. The fairs draw professional collectors and newcomers who may not know the difference between a museum and gallery when it comes to contemporary art. Says Raehse: “Some people have asked, ‘Is anything for sale?’” For neophytes, in fact, the Miami experience may be a conversion to contemporary art and to an interest in its gallery systems and trends.
            “Do people buy works for above their sofa?” Raehse says. “They do.” However, the core of visitors at the Miami venues tends to be serious collectors. Some art buyers “collect deep,” she says. “They follow a particular artist, support that artist.” They also are interested in art history, concepts, and techniques. These are the collectors that Goya and other galleries love. Indeed, at Art Basel Miami Beach, ordinary tourists can brush shoulders in the exhibition hallways with some of the biggest jet-setting collectors in the world.
            While Goya will have a range of works, both on the primary and secondary market (that is, directly from the artist, or re-sale of past works of brand-name artists), it will feature six in particular, among them the Baltimore African American artist Joyce J. Scott.
            In October, Scott will be among 27 artists invited to exhibit in at “Prospect.2,” an international biennial of contemporary art held in New Orleans. As Scott’s representative, Goya gallery has been busy helping to present the 35 works and a large outdoor installation. “It’s a great honor for Baltimore,” Raehse says. It also illustrates how much a gallery such as Goya can spend on the road.
            The gallery tries to go to five fairs a year, rotating around the country to build contacts and see the art market at work. The staff went to Art Basel in Switzerland this summer for “research.” Goya, which began as a fine prints gallery (etchings and lithography), will show some community spirit this fall by displaying at the Baltimore Museum of Arts “print fair.” It will also attend the big one in New York City: the International Fine Print Dealers Association fair in November.
            “We never like to dilute ourselves too much,” Raehse says of what might look like a grueling out-of-town schedule. But art fairs are the way of the future, the veritable shopping mall for local and global collectors. At the Baltimore gallery, each show can draw several hundred visitors, especially at an opening. At the fairs, however, thousands wander by the booth, and many of them are deeply into discussing art.
            Naturally, Raehse says, “We always keep the fairs in mind.”

New England’s Big and Small Art Schools Reflect Country

Students Plan for Different Art Years at RISD and Lyme Academy
 

PROVIDENCE, RI—On a stretch of New England coastline, two very different kinds of art colleges are preparing for the new school year. To the north is the very large Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and 60 miles down the rural freeway is the very small Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, Connecticut.

            They are like the bookends of American art schools.
            Founded in the 1877, RISD today is a behemoth of art education with 2,400 students and a long tradition of commercial design. Having expanded to about 40 buildings, the school seems to blanket the riverside edge of College Hill, named for Brown University, which stands higher on the slope.
            By comparison, Lyme Academy in rural Connecticut is a newcomer. It was founded in 1976 to provide classic art training, since, as it says, “representational art and the traditional education of artists were disappearing in the Western world.” With its small enrollment—85 students—Lyme is unapologetic about its four-year college regimen of drawing, painting, and sculpting from nature and the human form.
            To fulfill this mission, Lyme does not need a large campus. Once you turn off the freeway, it’s a few blocks through the woods to a small complex of one-story buildings poised on a circular driveway. Although Lyme’s college degree requires a segment of liberal arts courses, the campus is designed to serve one purpose: to house studios with a practice-makes-perfect approach to drawing and painting.
            RISD also began small, but no more. Back in the 1960s, recalls one 1963 graduate, it was  a few brick buildings on its steep hill. Next door, the school was overshadowed by a white New England church with a tall steeple: the first Baptist church in America, founded by the Puritan “free thinker” Roger Williams. Fifty years ago, in other words, even RISD was small enough to be a congregation of sorts. “I loved the up and down [of the hills] and dramatic vistas,” says the 1963 graduate, a native of flat Louisiana. “When Providence was snowed in we’d come shooting down those hills on cafeteria trays.”
            In the years since then, RISD has expanded, edging across the river-side promenade and mingling with the urban district. This year, RISD and the city have received a National Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” grant of $200,000 to revitalize a downtown travel hub that’s seen better days. The effort is being called “creative placemaking”: drawing the public downtown to enjoy the arts. To fulfill its role, RISD has created a studio course from which students can spring to action.
            The school’s bid for urban renewal has not subtracted from its more jazzy reputation. Over this summer, the RISD Museum of Art showcased “Cocktail Culture,” a look at 60 years of glitzy fashion. On entering the exhibit, visitors were greeted by a large group photo of RISD’s fashionista students. Dressed to the hilt, they greet visitors with that studied magazine fashion look (no smiles).
            The RISD museum has become a magnet of art donations over the decades. Gift after gift, it has built up the tenth largest private museum collection in the country. It features Impressionists, American realists, Cubists, and Pop artists, but also harks back millennia to Persian mosaics. With 86,000 objects, the museum is a boon for art history students at RISD and at Brown University as well. The two schools share many courses, a co-op that is rare in U.S. higher education today.
            Fifty years ago at RISD, “The whole thing had a ‘family’ feel and seemed very manageable,” says the 1963 graduate. The college is now a high-stakes art institution with record costs, ambitious career goals, and seasoned faculty unions. RISD also is defining art as a digital-age vocation.
            Down the road at Lyme Academy, a family model still prevails. It follows the “atelier” tradition (a studio with a master-teacher). With its classical specialty, Lyme has enough clientele to pay the bills and endure. Naturally, its tuition and number of available courses are lower than at RISD ($25,248 compared to $39,482, not counting lodging). However, they both deliver the same degree, a bachelors of fine arts.
            For every large art college in America, usually there is a smaller academy in the region, typically on the atelier model. That model is rare at today's full-service art colleges, with the 330-student Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts being one exception. Otherwise, if there is an “atelier movement” afoot, its best examples continue in New York City, where traditional art methods hold sway at the New York Academy of Art, the Art Students League, the New York Studio School, and Grand Central Academy of Art.
            What makes Lyme unique is its status as an undergraduate, degree-granting college combined with the atelier spirit. What RISD has is everything else: size and scope and a strong urban presence. It is a nice contrast at either end of that 60-mile costal drive of New England.

Debt Ceiling Deal Gives Arts Funding Hope

The Tiny National Endowment for the Arts May Survive the Bigger Battle

This week, the good news for federal arts funding in the epic battle to raise the U.S. debt ceiling is that, unlike defense or Medicare, it will not “automatically” be eviscerated if the U.S. government fails to get spending under control.
            The bad news is this, however: In the next months Congress still must cut $21 billion from the 2012 budget and, once again, arts funding is in play. What is more, there is always at least one member of Congress who will introduce a wild card amendment to cut all arts funding.
            So far, the survival of arts funding looks pretty good for 2012, according to the main arts lobbying group, Americans for the Arts. Last week, the House passed a budget that preserved $135 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), escaping a Republican amendment to cut it further. Still, the approved amount is $20 million lower than last year, though no serious attempts to shut down the NEA are currently on the horizon.
            When this column looked at 2011 NEA funding in the last budget cycle (see “Those Crazy Art Dollars,” Feb. 24, 2011), the U.S. government was nearly five months late on passing the annual budget. (It was using stop-gap measures to fund everything as Congress wrangled over final numbers). That five-month overlap explains why it seems that, only yesterday, annual arts funding had been in the news.
            As of this week, the 2012 arts funding battle may have only begun. It may run into next year, depending on how the new debt ceiling agreement quickens the 2012 budget votes. As art advocate groups are saying at the present, “Here we go again.”
            In the debt ceiling deal this week, Congress and the White House agreed to raise the legal ceiling on how much the U.S. government can be in debt. Meanwhile, the Congress must also produce a ten-year plan to dramatically cut government’s titanic over-spending and over-borrowing, which threatens the nation’s economic health. This moment may look painful, but next year (the 2013 budget) will be worse. Next year, if Congress does not pass its ten-year deficit reduction plan, an automatic guillotine will make draconian cuts in defense, Medicare, and much else.
            One advantage of arts funding, despite the “culture war” rhetoric that can make it controversial, is its small, exclusive domain. Essentially, the NEA is the single arts entity: to lose it would be like the extinction of a rare species. Still, the NEA has been pruned back most years for nearly two decades. As Americans for the Arts says, even with the good early signs on the 2012 arts budget, it involved the “deepest [cut] to the NEA in 16 years.” It could have been far worse, the group says, if not for supporters sending 35,000 “messages” to Capitol Hill last month.
            The messages typically are e-mails. In their shotgun effect, they are part of a vigilant system set up by Americans for the Arts and other groups in the “creative industry,” a name chosen to suggest its power to create jobs and generate revenue. Arts votes always go by a slim margin, so the message system will surely be working overtime in the months ahead.
            Back in the early 1990s, the NEA budge went as high as $190 million. In those days it also gave out grants to individual artists. After protests over taxpayer funding of the “obscene” art done by some individual artists, the NEA restricted its grants to community arts groups and arts panels. This avoids direct funding to maverick artists who, frankly, do enjoy scandalizing the public.
            According to the bipartisan Congressional Arts Caucus, under the current proposed 2012 House budget, the NEA will be able to give out about 2,400 grants for the arts. In a nation of 2 million artists (according to the Census), that is not a lot of federal arts funding. The fine arts are also supported through tax exemptions for philanthropic giving to the arts. In truth, philanthropy makes up the lion’s share of the non-profit fine arts funding in the United States.
            For the Republicans, tax cuts and private support for the arts are the way to go. For the Democrats, public funding is the best guarantor of the arts in our culture. Fortunately, the smallness of public funding for the arts has earned enough sympathy—like a fawn in the woods—that neither the Republicans nor Democrats want to be responsible for making it extinct.
            However, that arts budget battle still looms on the horizon. I will take weeks and months to know exactly where the NEA comes out. Meanwhile, there’s no reason for the nation’s artists to stop what they are doing. They can hope for the best at this time of “shared sacrifice,” as the saying goes on Capitol Hill.