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0000017c-60f7-de77-ad7e-f3f739cf0000Arts & More airs Fridays at 7:50 a.m. and 4:20 p.m.Theme music: "Like A Beginner Again" by Dan Barry of Seas of Jupiter

Common Ground: Three Centuries Through The Eyes of African American Artists

James Marcellus Watkins, Victims, ca. 1986, oil on board. Collection of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts;  Director's Choice Purchase Award, 1991 Kalamazoo Area Artist Show.
Kalamazoo Institute of Arts

Common Ground is a multi-city exhibit that shows African American art through the ages, stretching all the way back to the 19th century. Kalamazoo is the exhibit’s last stop in the state after showing in Flint and Muskegon.  The opening reception is August 21st at 5:30 p.m.

TraceeGlab is the curator of collections and exhibitions at the Flint Institute of Arts. She says the three-city exhibit was something the directors of the museums thought up as a way to save money by pooling what each one had in their collections.

“We also are very sensitive to our communities and that we have an African American population. And we wanted to do an exhibition of African American art in all three areas and really highlight what we have in our own collections,” she says. 

Glab says each museum has something rare to offer. Muskegon has some of the earliest works, like portraits from Joshua Johnson—considered to be the first African American to make a living as a painter in the United States. Flint has work from modern greats like Chakaia Booker, Richard Hunt, and Willie Cole.

Kalamazoo’s collection has photography from artists like Gordon Parks—the director of the original Shaft film—as well as photojournalist Ernest Withers. Glab says Withers captured rare photos of civil rights event like the Montgomery bus boycott and the Memphis sanitation workers strike.

“He was really often the only photographer to record the scene, because at that time—the early part of the movement—most mainstream press were not interested in going to these locations and taking photographs," says Glab. 

Kalamazoo artist James Watkins' contribution is called “Victims.” It depicts a scene from Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” as the two children wait for the bus alone to take them to Stamps, Arkansas to live with their grandmother.

“And then I got this imaginary thing at the bottom—a strip of heads, African American heads or heads of color, and they got tape painted over their mouths. So the idea is that they are victims as well as the people at the bottom of the strip. The kids are victims, they don’t have a name on their name tag. They were moving to Stamps, Arkansas. And Maya Angelou, I remember, she said she didn’t speak for about a year or two because she was raped at age 8. So you know she didn’t speak for about a year or so.”

The exhibit takes you through five historical themes. The first shows the work of early black American artists who were lucky enough to get access to fine art schools in Europe. Glab says these artists were most interested in making art that would sell.

“They were focusing on the same subject that other artists were showing such as landscapes, portraits, biblical scenes,” explains Glab.

But in the next theme, African American artists start to show their culture in their work, during the Harlem Renaissance era.

“They’re creating images that depict their daily lives, they’re showing their own history, their own experiences,” Glab says.

James Watkins stands by his painting "Peace, Love, and Joy." At the top of the painting are likenesses of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela.
Credit Rebecca Thiele, WMUK
James Watkins stands by his painting "Peace, Love, and Joy." At the top of the painting are likenesses of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela.

The third and fourth themes are combined to show black Americans’ struggle to gain equality after the civil rights movement.

“To bring awareness to other people outside of their race that these things were happening,” says Glab.

Glab says the last theme kind of gets out of chronological order. It’s about African American artists embracing abstraction.

“Some artists like Felrath Hines just did not want to be identified as an African American artist. He just wanted to be identified as an artist," she says. "So he was doing very abstract work because to him he wanted the viewer just to see his work.”

Glab says the point of this exhibit is not really to show the similarities in African American art, but the differences.

“We called it Common Ground because we were, you know, playing on the idea of that…what our three museums have in common. Also what African American art has in common," she says. "But to me I think what you see is diversity. You see the artists being united in a cause but yet doing it in their own individual way.”

You can see the Common Ground exhibit August 22nd through November 15th at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. The opening reception is August 21st at 5:30 p.m.

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