Black Artists

In an article Sunday about the African-American art exhibition at Washington's Corcoran Gallery, I remarked that historically black colleges and universities were among the first to collect the work of African-American artists.However, it's also true that these institutions had significant holdings of works by white American and European artists. In fact, works by early American modernists like Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe constitute an important part of these collections.

Hearing the words of actor Ossie Davis alone would be enough to justify seeing "I'll Make Me a World: a Century of African-American Arts," starting tonight on PBS."Art was at one time the only voice we had to declare our humanity," says Davis, one of the first voices heard in this six-hour documentary series on the history of black artists in 20th century America."When we were described as barely above cattle, certainly not human, it was our art that we had to show the rest of the world that possibly we were humans.

The small collection of 41 pieces of art standing behind the glass doors of the Art Gallery of Howard Community College in Columbia is the first of its kind as far as the arts community can remember.Though the types of art represented -- oil paintings and watercolors, woodcarvings, acrylics and photographs of everyday subjects -- can be found at museums and galleries all over the county, the community college exhibit marks the first time African-American artists who live in Howard County have had their own show.

I WAS INTRIGUED by reports that black theater professionals met at Dartmouth College last week to continue the debate sparked by playwright August Wilson's 1996 call for a separate black theater. Wilson's idea strikes me as a little muddled, but it is interesting nevertheless.Wilson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," "The Piano Lesson" and other plays, shocked the theater establishment two years ago when he delivered an address at Princeton University denouncing what he called "cultural imperialists who seek to propagate their ideas about the world as the only valid ideas, and who see blacks as woefully deficient not only in arts and letters but in the abundant gifts of humanity."

In the 1920s, Harlem on New York's Upper West Side was the "Negro Capital of the World." The migration of hundreds of thousands of Southern rural blacks to Northern cities in the first decades of the century had made Harlem the largest black community in the nation.In the Roaring '20s it was the scene of an incredible outpouring of artistic, literary and musical creativity that would be remembered as the Harlem Renaissance.Black writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston and Countee Cullen produced plays, poems and novels celebrating the "New Negro" who was emerging in the city - urbane, politically aware and relentlessly modern.

Columbia residents Judith Pitt-Hunter and Lewis E. Andrews are helping to tend the flame of black culture in Howard County.She is the owner of the African-American Art Gallery in Columbia's Village of Owen Brown. He is the owner of the Original Man Bookstore. He has rented space in her two-story gallery on Cradlerock Way."There's nothing like it in Howard County," said Ms. Pitt-Hunter of the twin businesses catering to black interests in one location. "Usually, customers are pleasantly surprised that we are here."

If you didn't know that February is black history month, you would get a clue from the number of art shows dealing with the black experience currently on view.From the top floor of the Baltimore International Culinary College to the basement of the Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore is abloom. But all is not equal here -- a sampling of four of these shows revealed widely differing degrees of success.Angela Franklin, a Baltimore artist, had a good idea for "Abstract in Black" at School 33. It was to be a show of African-American artists who work in non-representative ways, because, says Franklin, "no longer can the responsibility of creating solely representational images which chronicle the 'black experience' be placed upon the backs of African-American artists."

The city's oldest museum devoted to African-American arts and culture stands staid, stoic and mostly ignored in two adjoining East Baltimore rowhouses.Each day, thousands of pedestrians and motorists come within a brush stroke of the museum on Carswell Street near Clifton Park, where more than 600 works by regional black artists are displayed. But few enter the museum, which is called "Baltimore's Only Black American Museum."Berkeley Thompson, a writer who founded the museum in 1968 and is its curator, said that although the museum struggles to stay open, it remains an important institution for the city's black community.

The first tour of its kind, "Black Paris, Plus . . ." follows the Harlem Renaissance trail into the haunts of America's expatriate black artists and writers."

It's not the easiest thing to build a show on the theme of criticizing the criticism of the art that's shown. That's what "The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism," at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, tries to do. It raises an important issue, but in the end it comes up short.The purpose of this traveling show, according to its curator, Charles Gaines, "is to reveal the strategies of marginalization in the critical writing about a group of contemporary black artists and to propose an alternative."

Artists and craftspeople from around the country will gather at the Baltimore Convention Center this weekend for the 14th annual Black Heritage Art Show, which celebrates African-American culture in a wide range of expressions. Since it began in the Fellowship Hall of Baltimore's New Psalmist Baptist Church in 1995, when six artists attracted several hundred patrons, the event has grown into a three-day event that draws thousands of visitors and showcases more than 100 visual, literary and performing artists, including musicians, poets, dancers and fashion designers.

The picture captures a refreshing image of tenderness. There's Barack Obama, moments after delivering his acceptance speech for president of the United States. His arm is wrapped around the waist of his wife, soon-to-be first lady Michelle. Their eyes are closed as he gently kisses the tip of her nose. Her smile brightens the profile shot of the two. Sadly, it's an image of a powerful and loving black couple that is rarely, if ever, seen in today's mainstream or black pop culture. In the past few days, there has been much talk about the overwhelming emotionality of Obama's historic win and the social and political changes it could bring.

In 1995, Glenda and Milton Boone took on a new mission: to promote art by African-Americans. They rented the basement of a local church in downtown Baltimore, displayed the work of six visual artists and drew a crowd of about 300. What was then a little-known, grass-roots effort has since ballooned into a large African-American celebratory event in the Mid-Atlantic during Black History Month, drawing 46,000 attendees, according to its founders....

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.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, whose large and varied body of work, including landscapes, portraits and atmospheric images of religious subjects, made him the first African-American artist to win an international reputation, inspired a generation of black artists to pursue professional careers. But the artists who took up Tanner's mantle did not necessarily adopt the master's painting style or his ideas about the artist's role in society. They were products of a new century, with a new outlook oriented toward modernity and the unprecedented social conditions it had created.

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.

Vivian and John Hewitt arrived in New York from Atlanta in the early 1950s and settled in Harlem. Like many middle-class African-American couples of modest means - she was a librarian, he a teacher - they had both loved art since childhood, and they purchased their first prints together while on their honeymoon. Soon, through friends and relatives, they established new friendships in Harlem's lively African-American artistic community, whose members then included such seminal figures as Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden and Hale Woodruff.

Romare Bearden was one of the most original, innovative and important figures in 20th-century American art, so The Art of Romare Bearden, the monumental retrospective exhibition of his work that opens tomorrow at Washington's National Gallery, is an altogether fitting - if, it must be said, overdue - acknowledgement of his achievement. Born in 1911, Bearden is the first African-American artist ever to be the subject of a major show at the National Gallery in the 62 years since it opened its doors to the public.

There is only one Elvis Presley - although, since the passing of The King, many have laid claim to his pop-culture throne. The latest entrant is bad-boy rapper Eminem. On his current album, The Eminem Show, he lays out his case: "No, I'm not the first king of controversy/I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley to do black music so selfishly/and use it to get myself wealthy," he raps in his hit "Without Me." In his manifesto "White America," he says, "Look at my sales/Let's do the math/If I was black, I woulda sold half."

WASHINGTON - You cannot libel a recording industry executive. At least, that's my humble opinion, based on the 18 years I spent reporting on the $14 billion-a-year business of pop music. I saw gall that would shame a TV preacher, greed that would make an Enron executive blush. So from where I sit, you can say pretty much any nasty thing about the industry and its leaders that your heart desires. Because, as your lawyer will tell you, it ain't libel if it's true. That's why I wasn't particularly mortified when Michael Jackson took a swipe at Sony Music Chairman Tommy Mottola during a rally at Sony's New York headquarters this month.