African American Artists

It wasn't exactly the best time, with the art market staggering back from the recession. It wasn't exactly the best place, three smallish rooms in the Reservoir Hill rowhouse where she lives. But it was a compulsion that Sharon Stainback couldn't deny."It's something innate. The artist is compelled to make art; I'm compelled to do this," says Ms. Stainback.So about a year ago she opened Sula Contemporary Art, an art gallery she runs by herself at Park Avenue and Reservoir Street. "Sula," the title of a Toni Morrison novel, is a West African word meaning adventurous.

We're fortunately past the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, when artworks became proxies for the political agendas of groups on both the right and the left. Yet there are plenty of reminders that much contemporary art still has a sting to it. When art touches on deeply held beliefs, especially those regarding such sensitive subjects as race or religion, sparks are likely to fly. What, then, is one to make of the relative tranquillity surrounding the work of Kara Walker, an African-American woman artist whose signature silhouette figures -- one of which was recently acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art -- depict what appear to be almost lighthearted scenes of slavery and sexual perversion in the antebellum South?

If African-Americans don't buy artworks by African-American artists, who will? A decade ago, that question prompted a group of black collectors in Washington to join together to share their knowledge and experience. They wanted to create a forum where they could discuss African-American art, make group visits to artists' studios and find ways to support local artists, dealers and visual arts programs. The fruits of their efforts are on display this month in Holding Our Own, a lovely exhibition of African-American artworks owned by members of the Collectors Club of Washington at the University of Maryland University College in Adelphi.

As an exhibition, the Baltimore/Chicago Show on view in the Station Building at the Maryland Institute College of Art, is as interesting for what it reveals about the interests of its curator, Kerry James Marshall, as it is for its works. The Chicago-based Marshall, whose painting, sculpture, photography and video are currently the subject of a major exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, was asked to curate the Baltimore/Chicago Show by the organizers of Artscape, the citys annual outdoor festival of the arts.

The Joshua Johnson Council at the Baltimore Museum of Art is one of the country's oldest support groups dedicated to helping museums reach out to African-American audiences. This year, the council celebrates its 20th anniversary with a gift to the BMA of a painting by Beverly McIver, whose self-posed images of sad-faced clowns and housemaids are painted parables of the tribulations endured by generations of African-American domestic workers. The JJC painting, entitled A Woman's Work, depicts the artist in her trademark maid's outfit stoically starching and steaming clothes on an ironing board.

As a youngster, Kerry James Marshall spent hours in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art looking at the Old Master paintings, wondering what it would be like to make pictures worthy of hanging beside them. But as an African-American child from a modest household in South Central, he had few role models. There were no black artists on the museum's walls or in the art history books he pored over in the city's public libraries. One day he came across James A. Porter's landmark 1943 book, The Negro Artist, the first comprehensive study of African-American art. It was a revelation: Here was a rich tradition of artmaking he hadn't known existed -- of black artists creating works for and about black people, their hopes, joys and sorrows.

It's impossible to think of a better pairing of artists than Elizabeth Catlett and Faith Ringgold. Two separate one-person shows of their work opened side by side at the Baltimore Museum of Art last week, and they have a chemistry that comes from dealing with the same subject matter in strikingly different but equally impressive ways.Seeing the two of them together is like listening to two great voices sing a duet in which the words are different but the melody unites them. The melody in this case is that both are African-American women whose work deals with being African-American and a woman but, at the same time, has a breadth of appeal that knows no boundaries.

If film in 1997 will be remembered for anything other than the Big Boat, it might be remembered as a year when films by, about and starring African-Americans made some quiet strides.Consider such breakout hits as "Soul Food," a family drama starring some of the hottest African-American actors in Hollywood, and "Eve's Bayou," the most commercially successful independent film of 1997. Consider the broadening of themes in such films as "Rosewood," "Hoodlum" and "Love Jones." Consider a year that started out with "Booty Call" and "B.A.

Anderson Jackson "Andy" Pigatt Sr., a noted African-American sculptor whose work reflected his African heritage and the struggles experienced by African-Americans, died Saturday at the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center of complications from a fall earlier this year. He was 81. Born in Raeford, N.C., the son of a steel worker, he moved to East Baltimore in 1930 when his father went to work for Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point. He was a 1946 graduate of Dunbar High School and served in the Army in the early 1950s.

In February 1939, Baltimoreans witnessed something unprecedented: An exhibition of painting and sculpture by African-American artists at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Entitled Contemporary Negro Art, the show presented more than 100 works by black artists such as Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley, Hale Woodruff, Dox Thrash and James Wells. ART EXHIBIT / / The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture / / 830 E. Pratt St. / / 443-263-1800