Something to Say the Mcnay Presents 100 Years of African American Art
From the beginning, family was at the middle of why Harriet and Harmon Kelley began collecting African-American fine art 30 years ago.
As curatorial counselor Lowery Stokes Sims notes in her catalogue essay for Something to Say: The McNay Presents 100 Years of African American Art at the McNay Fine art Museum, part of the Kelleys' reasoning was to use the "bare walls of [their] newly congenital home" to introduce their daughters to art.
Today, the work of Harmon's niece, Lauren Kelley, greets visitors to Something to Say as they enter the exhibition. Her Pickin' digital photograph from 1999 shows the artist wearing an "afro" of molded hair picks she designed, their handles shaped like the raised fist of the 1960s Blackness Power movement.
Lauren Kelley studied video art at the School of the Fine art Institute of Chicago, Harriet said during a walking tour of the exhibition. British video artist Isaac Julien is also represented on the same wall past a still photograph of an urbane blackness adult female sporting a neat afro on a Baltimore street.
Something to Say brings together 57 artworks, joining the Kelley collection with works from other local collections and work past African-American artists collected by the McNay over the past several years. The show is a featured Tricentennial partner result.
A concurrent exhibition, 30 Americans, has toured widely and comes to the McNay equally a pick from the larger original exhibition by Rene Paul Barilleaux, McNay head of curatorial diplomacy.
Barilleaux said his pick was based in part on spanning generations of artists – from Robert Colescott, built-in in 1925 (died 2009), to Aaron Fowler, built-in in 1988. xxx Americans will run alongside Something to Say, every bit will a suite of screen prints of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Fifty'Ouverture past Jacob Lawrence.
These special African-American themed exhibitions open up Thursday, Feb. 8 and run through May half-dozen.
For Harriet Kelley, Something to Say is the continuation of a conversation about black artists in the United states that began in Texas 42 years ago. Two Centuries of Blackness American Art was a "groundbreaking" 1976 survey exhibition, Stokes Sims said, ane that toured to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts on the occasion of the national Bicentennial.
That exhibition's curator, David C. Driskell, might agree with the titles and concepts behind both McNay exhibitions, one of which employs the term "African American," and the other which refers to its black artists every bit only "Americans."
Quoted in a 1977 New York Times commodity, Driskell said "We don't go effectually saying white art, only I think it's very important for us to go along saying blackness fine art until information technology becomes recognized as American art."
In a synopsis of the original Rubell Family Collection exhibition catalogue, the conclusion to remove race specificity from the 30 Americans title was made "because nationality is a statement of fact, while racial identity is a question each artist answers in his or her own way, or not at all."
1 of the largest and virtually elaborate works in the Something to Say exhibition is Procession, a 2005 shadowbox painting by Radcliffe Bailey. A number of oars and trees break the surface of a body of water, creating multicolor ripples, and collaged images of African tribal fine art are interspersed against modernist colour blocks. Grotesque anglers swim among goldfish and koi, and a blackness hand grasping a newspaper laurel reaches toward a line of numbered nautical flags overhanging the water, and a spiderous net at left.
Procession evokes the end of the treacherous Middle Passage, the stream-trails of the underground railroad, and other markers of the journey of Africans who became Americans against their volition.
Every bit a whole, the paintings, photographs, and sculptures of African-American artists in Something to Say and 30 Americans display the complexity of personality, identity, and feel of the past 100 years and across.
The exhibitions open Thursday during regular museum hours. Complimentary H-East-B Thursday nights run four-9 p.m., but annotation that a $x fee still applies to the special exhibitions, though the rest of the museum is accessible to visitors during gratuitous hours.
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Source: https://sanantonioreport.org/concurrent-exhibitions-of-african-american-art-open-at-the-mcnay/
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