BLACK ART NEWS TODAY

Museums & Galleries

Museuems & Galleries
•	Chicago: Destination for the Great Migration
•	Dyana Williams: Collector
•	Art Works! Mural Arts in Philadelphia
•	Lucien Crump Art Gallery
•	Cultural Connections Arthur Dixon Elemetary
•	Kerry James Marshall One True Thing: Meditations on Black Aesthetics
•	Black Panthers, 1968: Photographs by Ruth Marion Baruch and Pirkle Jones
•	Huntington Museum of Art Presents: Willie Cole
•	Jamming with the Man: An Allen Stringfellow Retrospective
•	Art on 38: Promoting Art & Culture
•	The Majesty of African Motherhood
•	African American Art & Culture Complex
•	The Grant Hill Collection of African American Art
•	The African American Museum in Cleveland
•	Dr. Carter Godwin Woodson (1875-1950)
•	The Hewitt Collection
•	The DuSable Museum of African American History
•	Heard Native American Museum
•	Studio Musuem in Harlem
•	Mandela Museum
•	El Museo del Barrio
•	Civil Rights Museum

Jamming with The Man: An Allen Stringfellow Retrospective

By Nathaniel McLin

Space is the Place: Sun Ra

Allen Stringfellow, 81, made his transition on June 22,2004. Being a graduate from both the University of Illinois and the Milwaukee Art Institute, he was blessed to see his hometown give his work the critical attention it deserves before his death. Jamming with the Man is a retrospective of Stringfellow’ s work, organized by the University of Illinois’ Krannert Art Museum and presented in Chicago’s famous DuSable Museum. Chicago’s African American Bronzeville community and Champaign, Illinois are where Stringfellow found subjects and built institutions. He had a successful hat-designing practice where he created hats for celebrities like Billy Holiday and Ebony’s, Eunice Johnson. In Chicago he initiated the nationally important Old Town Art Fair. He was the first African American to own a gallery in the exclusive upscale Chicago neighborhood. There he organized art fairs for a multicultural group of artists, an event that covered blocks, drawing patrons from around the world. Perhaps it was Stringfellow’s success and his outlandish theatrical red suits that obscured his recognition as a serious artist.

Curator Phoebe Wolfskill chose to explore Allen Stringfellow’s collage paintings, paper mache sculptures, and Post-Impressionist innovations to the processes of collage painting. She also chronicles his spiritual pictography of African American culture. Throughout the year private tributes will be appearing around the country. Nicole’s Gallery in Chicago has dedicated a permanent exhibition room to Stringfellow’s work. Prices and popularity for the Stringfellow flavor have tripled since his death, with demand coming from Boston, New Orleans, Atlanta and even South Africa.

Allen Stringfellow grew up in a world of spectacle and performance. His mother took him to open air baptisms and Sunday outdoor church picnics. His father was the manager of the infamous Bronzeville Chicago nightspot, Club DeLisa, where Stringfellow worked as a costume and hat designer for performers and as assistance stage manager. As a young man, even circus companies sought his design expertise. Speaking of his art in American Visions, Stringfellow said “when I was coming up church and nightclubs were our complete society. With my work, I try to capture the movement, the rhythm, the happiness, the glamour of the times.” Stringfellow, with his deep love of spectacle, created a style of collage and watercolor that emphasized group memory and participatory experience. His is an art of the big subject and social truths of church, club and the energy generated at public performances. Stringfellow “captured the happiness …of the times” by inviting his viewers to project his/her features by making his colored figure’s faces blank and painting them in brown tonalities. He recreated the “glamour of the times” with his palette of glossy paper and ornate fabrics. He used rich textures to remind his patrons of the outrageous fashions of club life, the solemnity of church ceremonies, and the jazzy elegance of African American home design. Stringfellow’s picture space is like a chessboard, where the design elements of the picture plane provide a context for the positions of the figures. Variations of color, form and gesture can be contrasted against the overall design, and other figures within the picture can be compared with each other. In the Stringfellow oeuvre, dramatically positioned gamesmen provide the entrance to a magical remembrance of those sacred spaces where God spoke, Jazz swung, and for a moment Black men ruled the world.

Space Color Magic: The Stringfellow Stage

Stringfellow experimented with, but rejected both the eye-dazzling, cinematic, rapid-cutting photomontage of Bearden’s variations, and the comic, fragmented scat rhythms of Motley’s dance scenes. These methods are typical to African American and European Jazz influenced Surrealist painting and photomontage, in which the guide path created for the eye breaks up a performance into pictorial intervals as a music video does.

Rather the Stringfellow space utilizes stylized poses, shaped paper collage elements, and techniques used by Cézanne, Renoir and the Post-Impressionists to simulate a grand panoramic view – as Jimmy Stewart possessed in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, an overhead perspective allowing the viewer to distinguish how sections or players complete the composition. For Stringfellow there is only one technical artistic problem; How to give his flat, static, piecemeal clothe and paper figures the illusion of life.

In Jamming With the Man and About Miss Hattie’s Porch, Stringfellow uses a high horizon line, thus broadening the whole pictorial scene. He also uses contrasting colors to vary the sensation of near and far. The converging diagonals of furniture and bodily gestures pointing from opposite sides of the picture force the eye to rotate. Our gaze is now forced to dance through the variations of form. In About Miss Hattie’s Porch, a reworked image of the impressionist Pierre Auguste Renoir’s’ The Luncheon of the Boating Party, curator Phoebe Wolfskill explains how Stringfellow, building on techniques developed by Cézanne and Manet, rotates our vision by creating figures that are both two and three dimensional. Therefore in our imagination we create a spinning color wheel, a theater in the round, for his characters’ performances.

In his famous Red Umbrellas religious series, recreating shore church baptisms, Stringfellow plays stage director. Imagine a park or forest next to a lake or river, and a procession of devotees dressed in white baptismal gowns approaching the shoreline. Within the heart of the procession is a minister or priest carrying a giant red umbrella, looking like a god, a presence that draws our gaze to the center of this parade, much like the grand processions of the mighty Oba chiefs of Africa. The contrast between the green background, the red umbrellas and white gowns thrusts the featureless figures forward, dominating the natural setting and thus highlighting their regal and divine presence.

In the Bearden-influenced Jazz has Come A Long Way (1995) Stringfellow sociologically delineates the contrast between the class of Jazz musicians whose identities were formed in the White-patronized Cotton Club and the Black-patronized Apollo. The bottom of the picture features exotic Black performers, their costumes reflecting the mixture of buffoonery, sensuality and awe that Black artists occupy in many White American imaginations. Looming over them is the image of the Cotton Club repeated larger and larger, a financial giant built on the labor of the exotic and racially alienated, who weren’t even allowed to sit at the Cotton Club tables. However, pressed in the right side corner of the picture stands the Apollo, and emerging from it is a Dapperly clad Jazz band (a horn section, a base and a drummer) – not as exotics, but elegantly dressed sophisticates, their faces collaged Bearden style with phantasms of civil rights workers and activists. Even the drum’s body bears a hip African motif, while simultaneously a spotlight like a strip of fabric extends from the Apollo’s corner, down to the ancestral, faceless artists below. Again Stringfellow uses space to differentiate between the products of cultural workers in the White-patronized entertainment world, exoticism and institutional wealth, and the cultural products of workers in the Black-patronized world, ethnic pride and democratic inclusion.

While giants like Locke, Tanner, and Bearden searched the history of European painting, African fabric and African textiles for monumental models of the African American experience, Stringfellow’s similar explorations were tempered by the question – “Where and how did these people present their stories?” Stringfellow in his wisdom realizes that for Black folks the monumental can’t lie in some static picture, but in the Black man’s capacity to create happenings, spectacles of beauty, moments that for a time oppose a hostile environment of pain and squalor. Stringfellow demonstrates this spiritual capacity of a people to create joy in the heart of suffering. This is a reality that can only be alluded to by the foolishness of pictures. Stringfellow draws upon Jazz rhythm, the circus arena, impressionism and the cinema to create a zone where Black possibilities could live and imaginations soar.

Jamming with the Man runs through March 18, 2005
DuSable Museum of African American History
Chicago IL.

2004, Nathaniel McLin All rights reserved.