“Dr. Nova,” by Eto Otitigbe, in the exhibit “Materiel Remains: Consider This a Blueprint, a Series of Blueprints.” (Eto Otitigbe)
At first glance, the Eto Otitigbe paintings at Morton Fine Art don’t seem to have much connection with his best known ventures, which are public sculptures. But the swirling, inky facades of the artist’s “Materiel Remains: Consider This a Blueprint, a Series of Blueprints” are inscribed with intricate designs that have an architectural quality. These half-hidden forms do suggest blueprints, albeit for purely theoretical structures.
Otitigbe, who teaches sculpture at Brooklyn College, generally paints on valchromat, a variety of colored plywood introduced about 25 years ago. The artist buries the substance’s bright hues under mostly black paint, which contrasts the lines engraved by a computer-controlled process. The cleanly cut patterns are as precise as the applied pigment is loose and smeary.
The artist is a member of the design team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, and his paintings do allude indirectly to hidden African American history. But they can also be seen as embodying the hidden structures that underlie a seemingly disordered universe. Trained as an engineer at MIT and Stanford, Otitigbe imposes structure even as he indulges painterly intuition.
Eto Otitigbe: Materiel Remains: Consider This a Blueprint, a Series of Blueprints Through June 28 at Morton Fine Art, 52 O St. NW, No. 302. Open by appointment.
Morton Fine Art (52 O Street NW #302, Washington, DC) is pleased to present Veil, a solo presentation of new works on paper by artist Michael Booker, on view from November 6 – December 4, 2021.
Rendered on paper and Yupo, Booker’s latest body of work depicts surreal scenes evocative of the artist’s psychological journey through tumult and towards inner peace. In Booker’s compositions, portraits are partially shielded by swaths of color, and views are intercepted by lush organic forms. Joining geometric designs with figuration, Booker’s large-scale drawings are rich in dynamism and detail, the artist acting as a conductor of a broad symphony of colors and tones. Owing to the drawing practice itself as a healing mechanism, Veil documents the emotional terrains crossed by the artist amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and concurrent instances of social injustice. The exhibition’s title gestures towards the strategies of emotional self-protection harnessed by the artist during periods of vulnerability and contemplation, barriers made visible in the layered effects captured by the drawings themselves.
Despite the complexity of Booker’s compositions, each line and brushstroke remains visible, the artist using a wide range of materials and instruments, including fine liner pen, colored pencil, watercolor, and alcohol ink. Booker’s mastery of his tools is evidenced by his ability to create dense fields of light, shadow, and texture through the careful application of fine lines, resulting in superimposed tableaus reminiscent of collage or digital manipulation. Reverberating with the work’s themes, the meticulous process by which such depth and emotion is rendered echoes the strained experiences of self-reflection, growth, and reconciliation experienced by the artist during the course of these drawings’ creations.
“This exhibition chronicles a personal and emotional journey caused by the effects of a prolonged pandemic and moments of social injustice,” said artist Michael Booker. “Volatile social interactions became commonplace in both media and amongst friends. Over time, a realization of resiliency set in, as these drawings became a form of cathartic therapy to search for a nuanced visual reflection of the turmoil that lingered within.”
Though invested with fraught emotions, the cohesion and harmony of the resulting works ultimately foreground hope and optimism. Capturing individuals immersed in solitary contemplation as well as in embrace, Booker’s drawings suggest resilience and reconciliation amidst societal and interpersonal volatility, demonstrating a multiplicity of pathways toward new light.
Morton Fine Art is pleased to announce the much-anticipated arrival of three new fine liner pen drawings by artist MICHAEL ANDREW BOOKER. He continues to push his medium forward integrating layers of watercolor, ink and hand stitching. Among some influences he has cited is W.E.B. DuBois’ “Double Consciousness” theory where BOOKER “highlights a space of vulnerability that exists like a flickering candlelight in the wind, fighting for survival.”
Please be in touch regarding viewing by appointment or additional supplementary images or short videos.
Morton Fine Art, 52 O St NW #302, Washington, DC 20001
Michael Andrew Booker Hunting Party, 2020 Fineliner pen, watercolor, and ink on paper 30 x 22 in
Michael Andrew Booker Acknowledgment, 2020 Fine liner pen and watercolor on paper 31 x 25 inMichael Andrew Booker Unwritten, 2020 Fineliner Pen, Watercolor, Doily, and Hand Stitching on Paper and Yupo 34 x 25 in
After a monthlong social media contest run by the Northwest African American Museum to select a local Black artist to represent Seattle in a docuseries, the museum announced the winner Monday: Seattle-based visual artist Lisa Myers Bulmash.
Seattle community members nominated over 40 local Black artists to participate in the contest and voted for their favorites on social media.
For the series, titled “The Story of Art in America,” Pierre Gervois, show creator and CEO and executive producer of Legit Productions, will visit 10 different U.S. cities with his team, highlighting artists and museums in each locale. Each episode features one city. The series currently has a release date of late 2021 or early 2022, on networks to be announced.
“I’m pretty floored honestly,” said Myers Bulmash, still giddy a few hours after hearing that she won.
A collage and assemblage artist, Myers Bulmash has lived in Seattle for 23 years and says her work is about making sure the stories and experiences of Black people are seen and heard, and showing the many connections between our past and present.
We caught up with Myers Bulmash to learn more about the artist, how she feels about representing Seattle, and her own “story of art.”
Detail view of “2,100 Miles Away” niche: The niche layers an image of a Victorian-era home beneath a transparency of a child… (Bellevue Fine Art Reproduction)
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you come to be doing the kind of work you’re doing?
I really started taking my work seriously sometime after Trayvon Martin was killed and then again after Tamir Rice was killed, because they were both very young. It’s hard to say which one hurt me more. The reason why was because I really started connecting these things to my own life. I have two sons — one just turned 16 and one is 12, which was the age that Tamir Rice was when he was shot. My husband and I used to joke that people who might hate us would have multiple reasons to hate our kids, because my husband is Jewish and I’m Black. Around 2012 and 2014, when Tamir was killed, was when it really settled into the pit of my stomach that my children were at risk just by being who they were. That got me thinking more seriously about the vulnerability of Black bodies. It got me thinking more seriously about my family history and genealogy and the stories that I’ve learned from that.
What is the purpose of art right now, when people are experiencing loss and trauma?
My reasons for making art especially in this time are primarily two things. One, to let people who look like me, people who have a history like me, people who are marginalized, know that they’re not alone, because for the last four years, it’s felt like that was about all we could do is say, “I’m still here. Are you still here? Yes, I’m still here.”
The other reason is partly representation. I don’t really think of me making work as part of a grand crusade to right the wrongs and uplift the downtrodden, but it’s important for people to be seen, to feel seen, to be heard, and a lot of the things I’m interested in showing in my work have to do with that. I also just want to throw a little of the unusual or magical into somebody’s life. The last four years, a lot of us have just been putting one foot in front of the other. As a kid, I was always really big on the idea of there being magic just around the corner.
How did little Lisa first get into art? What were the magical moments that made you believe that “magic was just around the corner”?
I remember asking for an oil painting kit for my birthday when I was a kid, maybe 12 years old. It was after I had gone through the encyclopedia — you know, those things we had before the internet — and just being wowed by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci and so many others. I said, “Oh, I want to learn how to paint with oil paints!” My folks got me that for my birthday and I was really excited. I didn’t know a thing about it, so, of course, everything came out brownish gray. [Laughs.] So that was a big disappointment. But one of the things I love about collage is that even if I can’t draw like da Vinci, I can borrow his art to create something. I think I’m most excited when somebody connects with a piece of my work and wants to dig around and find more, wants to talk to me about some of the inspirations behind it or the processes I used. But mostly asking more about the images and why I use them.
How are you drawing those communication lines between past and present?
I pack a lot into my pieces. I have a friend who said this in the kindest way possible. She said, “Your work is sometimes too content-rich for the average bear.” That may be why most of my work is relatively intimately scaled as opposed to the big wall-sized paintings that you might see in a Mickalene Thomas painting. I think in most of my work I have a limited amount of time to reach the person who’s interested in it, and I’m probably talking about something they don’t really want to think about. So I need to get their attention, I need to hold it, and I need to sort of cut them off from everything else that might distract them in order to tell the story.
That’s a lot of pressure. [Laughs.]
Try being Black someday. [Laughs.] Look at the [artwork] “Bought and Paid For” — books that are mounted on antique washboards. With this triptych in particular I was thinking about a quote that’s been attributed to James Baldwin and Maya Angelou: “Your crown has been bought and paid for. Put it on and wear it.” When I was thinking about that quote, I was thinking about all the sacrifices and the difficult choices and the walking a tightrope that my parents and everybody before them have had to walk in order to get me where I am. [In the “Bought and Paid For” triptych], all of the altered books have a transparency image from my family archive of my brother running into the house we grew up in. I laid that image over various images of houses or things that aren’t anything like houses. The one on the far left is laid over a slave auction house, which obviously is not really a house. The center one is an altered version of the house my mother grew up in. The third one is the house that I started my family in.
This contest was pitched as: You will be representing “the soul and DNA of Black art in Seattle.” What does that mean to you? How do you feel about that?
When I saw that I was like, “Oh my god, you’ve got to be kidding me.” I’m not representing every last person, I’m not representing every last Black person, I’m not representing every last Black female artist. I’m not representing every last Black woman. It’s a lot to pack into one statement. So at first I was a little wary. Black people are not a monolith. I have to think about the DNA and soul of my Black art in Seattle.
And what is that?
One is, “Hey. Hey! HEY! We’re here! And we didn’t get here five minutes ago.” Partially representation. Partially trying to pull back and see how so many things that seem completely disconnected are actually connected either through history or art or perception. I actually had somebody say to me not too long ago that they liked my work but they didn’t understand why I was using old images to talk about contemporary issues. My response was, more or less, “Well, because all of those things are still happening, for one thing.”
What should people know about you and your work?
Some of the things I talk about are kind of hard to face, but I try to make work that allows people to face those things, yet still be able to live with my work. I guess my work is, um, living-room-friendly? [Laughs.] As for me, I’m just out here doing my thing and hoping I can convince some people to help me continue doing my thing.
Correction: This story has been updated. Due to incorrect information received by The Seattle Times, a previous version of this story contained erroneous information about the release date and network of the show.
Congratulations to LISA MYERS BULMASH for the rich review of her solo exhibition “The Home Inside My Head” in today’s print edition of The Washington Post by Mark Jenkins. (Arts & Style Section 12/27/20)
Lisa Myers Bulmash
Also spurred by pandemic-era exile from everyday life, Lisa Myers Bulmash conceived a Morton Fine Art show “The Home Inside My Head”. The Seattle artist combines found and personal objects into 3-D collages that conjure both African American history and her family’s own story. The pieces juggle the antiquarian and the immediate to express what Bulmash’s statement calls “a Black and female viewpoint”.
One series, “Rare & Exquisite,” places oversize models of endangered butterflies atop maps of regions of the United States collaged from Colonial-era (and thus not entirely reliable) charts. The effect is to correlate the threatened species — affixed with heavy railroad spikes that evoke hard labor –with Black people whose place in this country has always been at risk.
Examples of another antique tool, the wooden washboard, serve as frames in the “Bought and Paid For” series. The washboards hold books and ovals made of twine, which enclose overlapping transparencies of family photos. The pictures depict various old structures, including houses, and children at play. Again, Bulmash contrasts rough materials with fragile beings.
It seems apt that another piece is based on a torn piece of old sheet music repaired by kintsugi, the Japanese technique of using gold to both accentuate and exalt the cracks in a broken vessel. Bulmash’s assemblages can be seen as a bid to mend history.
Prizm Art Fair gives a platform to African Diasporic perspectives
Coinciding with Miami Art Week, Prizm Art Fair is championing and examining the intersections of African cinema traditions and visual art
Sthenjwa Luthuli, Reaching For Stars (2020)
In spite of widespread coronavirus-related hurdles, 2020 has offered glimmers of hope for the art world, particularly in the steps taken to highlight, and rectify the lack of diversity across the industry.
One art fair, Prizm, has been spotlighting diverse voices in contemporary visual art since 2013, with a core mission to widen the scope of international contemporary art from Africa and the African Diaspora.
By carving out a space for cross-cultural exchange in Miami and beyond, the fair seeks to address socio-political and cultural issues pertinent to people of African descent, while educating and nurturing the city’s inhabitants.
Victor Ekpuk, Mother Series #1 (2019) as seen at Prizm Art Fair. Image courtesy of Morton Fine Art
‘African Diasporic communities have attempted repeatedly to blanket themselves from a host of incessant obstacles – systemic injustice, racism, economic disparity, gender inequality – while the goal post of progress stretched farther away with each giant leap made towards it,’ says Mikhaile Solomon, founder and director of Prizm.
For its eighth edition, coinciding with an unsurprisingly scaled-down Miami Art Week, the fair’s online programme will feature 47 artists in ‘Noir, Noir: Meditations on African Cinema and its Influence on Visual Art’, an exhibition curated and organised by Solomon and interdisciplinary artist William Cordova. Noir, Noir references the African avant-garde film tradition and encourages a deeper understanding of global African identities through the intersection of cinema and contemporary visual art. Elsewhere, highlights include a programme of film screenings and talks led by leaders in Diasporic Visual arts.
Share your email to receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories from around the worldSIGN UP
John Baloyi, Lititha 4 (2020). Courtesy of Dyman Gallery
Participating galleries hail from eleven countries including the United States, Caribbean and the African continent including Barbados, Ethiopia, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Saint Maarten, South Africa and Trinidad. Featured artists include Victor Ekpuk, Yanira Collado, Sthenjwa Luthuli, Alicia Piller, Justice Mukheli, Versia Harris and Milena Carranza Valcárcel. Prizm will also spotlight emerging Miami-based artists who engage in socio-political issues pertinent to people of African descent, and in the city’s growth as a cultural hub.
Peter Wayne Lewis, Suite in Grey # 13 (2010)
Yanira Collado, Untitled (2020)
Justice Mukheli, Departure (2019). Courtesy of Dyman Gallery
Francisco Maso, Obtuse Exercises for Dissenting Bodies (2018 – ongoing)
Milena Carranza Valcárcel, Serie ’Afroperuvian Eggun’ (2010)
Prizm Art Fair will be accessible online until 21 December 2020. prizmartfair.com
Virtual tour and artist narration of LISA MYERS BULMASH’s first east coast solo exhibition, “The Home Inside My Head” at Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC.
“For most of this year, we’ve had to make a home inside our heads — because a virus was blocking the way out to “normal” life. That was fine by me at first: home is my castle and retreat. But there’s no vacation from yourself, or the deepest fears for your children’s future. Even a rich interior life becomes over-stuffed with emotions, memories and uncomfortable truths. The works in “The Home Inside My Head” reflect this ambivalence. The “Bought and Paid For” series was born from the love and deep gratitude for my ancestors’ struggles to give me greater opportunities. But even during my sheltered childhood, I recognized not every house feels like home as I experienced it. Not every parent prepares their child for ugly realities like institutional racism. As a 21st century Black woman, I need to make work that explores my disillusionments as well as my hopes for America. Collages like “One Nation, Under Reconstruction” are my attempts to name these experiences as truthfully as I can. I center a Black and female viewpoint in my work, as examples of a specific story illuminating the general human condition. But there’s something else. We can’t continue to tell each other the same stories featuring the same old heroes. Those icons accomplished amazing things everywhere but at home. We need to imagine our next home before we can live in it: this is the place where we build new narratives.” – LISA MYERS BULMASH, 2020
North Carolina visual artist Maya Freelon balances strength and fragility in her massive water-stained tissue paper installations. by Liza Roberts | photography by Chris Charles
Maya Freelon’s tissue paper sculptures are abstract, a confluence of kaleidoscopic color and organic shape. They move with a breeze, the passing of a person, the opening of a door. They make powerful, lasting statements with impermanent, inexpensive materials. Most of all, they are inquisitive. What is art? they ask. What’s it made of? Who gets to make it? Who decides?
The work is about “challenging norms—social norms, economic norms and art norms—by turning tissue paper into a fine work of art,” says Freelon. “It’s about the fragility of life, and transformation, and the ability to see beauty in a lot of different things.”
Often made in collaboration with groups of people, her work celebrates “the communal aspect… the ancestral heritage, the connection to quilt-making in my family and the African-American tradition of making a way out of no way.” Metaphorically and literally, Freelon’s work is a manifestation of its maker: beautiful and forthright, vulnerable but unflinching; lithe, elegant and defiantly individual.
RETURN TO THE TRIANGLE
This month, Freelon’s massive water-stained tissue paper quilts, including pieces made by as many as 100 far-flung community collaborators, will hang from the walls and ceilings of Raleigh’s Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) as part of the Durham artist’s first solo museum exhibition in North Carolina. Also on view will be her tissue ink monoprints, images of streaking color and motion that capture the dripping ink of saturated tissue paper through a process Freelon patented. Some of these include archival family photos, some are on traditional rectangular canvases, some have been crafted in asymmetric shapes and coated in a thick epoxy glaze. Even if the museum can’t open for the public to view these works in person, the show will be installed and shared virtually, says CAM director Gab Smith.
Freelon’s fans around the country and the globe will be glad to hear it. At Miami Art Week last year, she was named one of five young artists to watch. In 2018, she installed massive, wafting tissue paper stalactites at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building in Washington, D.C. She’s lived and worked in Madagascar, Eswatini and Italy as part of the U.S. State Department’s Art in Embassies program. She’s collaborated with Google and Cadillac, and her work is in the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the University of Maryland and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, among others.
Back here in Raleigh, locals helped Freelon use torn tissue and glue sticks to make quilts to hang from the trees outside the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) to celebrate the museum’s expanded African art gallery in September of 2017. NCMA chief curator Linda Dougherty commissioned Freelon’s “quilting bee” installation after seeing a sculpture she’d created for one of the embassies. “Maya had done this beautiful, suspended piece, and I was amazed,” Dougherty says. “I love the ephemeral nature of her materials… they’re meant to be there for the moment, intentionally. It gives her a freedom to experiment. I love that open-endedness.”
INHERITANCE
Freelon’s talent and expressive ability were apparent early on, and she comes by both naturally as the daughter of two renowned artists and the great-granddaughter of another. Her mother, the jazz singer Nnenna Freelon, is a six-time Grammy Award nominee. Her father was revered architect Phil Freelon, the architect of record of the African-American History and Culture Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C. His own grandfather was Allan Freelon, a noted Impressionist painter whose work was celebrated during the Harlem Renaissance. Her namesake and godmother was the poet Maya Angelou (“Auntie Maya”), a close friend of “Queen Mother” Frances Pierce, Freelon’s beloved grandmother. Angelou once described Freelon’s work, which she bought for her own collection, as “visualizing the truth about the vulnerability and power of the human being.”
Freelon was a precocious teenage talent at Williston Northampton School in Massachusetts, where she transferred to finish high school after two years at the Durham School of the Arts. There, she mostly painted portraits, but “she was always a colorist, very good with color,” says Marcia Reed, her painting instructor at the school, who says that even then, she possessed an impressive “energy and driving force.” By 2006, she was a graduate student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, living with her grandmother Pierce.
It was there that she came upon a stack of multicolored tissue paper in the basement of the house. The paper had most likely been in the same spot for fifty years. Drips from a leaky pipe had mottled the stack over time, moving the color from piece to piece, turning the sheets into gossamer rainbows. Freelon was transfixed, and soon consumed with turning the water-stained tissue paper into art, and using water herself to mark and alter tissue paper, intent on “making something out of nothing.” That discovery, borne out of her connection to her family, became her signature medium.
“Often, artists think they need to work with precious materials,” says Allan Edmunds, founder and director of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives in Philadelphia, where Freelon completed a residency years ago. Her use of tissue paper to make art both sets her apart and connects her to ingenious forebears, says Edmunds. “It’s in the tradition of working with what is available to you and being even more creative because you’ve created a challenge for yourself. I put her in league with El Anatsui.” Coincidentally, it is work by this Ghanaian artist—glittering, undulating woven fabric of found bottle caps—that’s a centerpiece of the NCMA’s permanent collection in the newly-renovated African art gallery that Freelon helped celebrate with her collaborative tissue quilts.
Making something out of nothing is part of the inspiration for the title of Freelon’s exhibit at CAM: Greater Than or Equal To. Freelon also sees the title as an inquiry: “As an artist, as a Black person, as a female, I am constantly raising this question to myself,” she says. How is value—of a person, a life, a work of art—determined, and who determines it? “If we don’t value lives, if we don’t value making this world equal, then we end up having a situation where certain people’s lives mean more than others.” Her use of the symbol ≥ “is to remind folks that it’s a constant question…an opportunity for you to be aware of your judgement and where you’re placing your value.”
She knows where her revered grandmother Pierce would have placed that value. “I think of a quote from my grandmother, which is that we come from a family of sharecroppers who never got their fair share,” she says. Grandmother Pierce’s grandchildren and “every Black person making the world a better place” were “our ancestors’ wildest dreams,” she also said. Freelon considers: “To have survived what it took to get here, and then slavery, and then segregation and racism—we’re living within it, and we’re still existing, and now we have a chance to thrive.”
Personally, Freelon says she’s more than thriving. “I’ve never felt prouder, or better or more grateful that I took the leap, that all of my focus goes to making art and sharing it with the world… I feel like I’m just getting started.”
USING HER VOICE
As Freelon grows in her art, she’s aware of her growing platform, as well. In a video posted on social media on Juneteenth, she says: “My artwork is about using accessible materials to challenge racist paradigms that have been set forth and perpetuated by the white art world.” The video shows her setting fire to her art; an effort to seize attention in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and to make her message heard. “It’s about creating my own currency and value, and it’s about making space for and inspiring the next generation of Black artists.” In social media and in conversation, Freelon encourages her fellow Black artists to stand up for themselves, to challenge structures that don’t work for them and to know the value of their work.
One day in late June, the day before her birthday and not long before the first anniversary of the death of her father, Freelon is reflective. She is at Vanhook Farm in Hillsborough, a bucolic place where she and her children spend a lot of time. The farm–Black-owned, Freelon points out—has long been in the family of her partner of two years, Jess Vanhook. The location is both a solace and a symbol for Freelon. “I’ve thought about our ancestors and how for them, possessing the land means that you are taking control of your own future,” she says. “You’re asking the earth to produce something for you that has value. I realized that I was doing that as an artist, cultivating something that’s made by my own hands, determining my own value and worth.”
Even as Freelon watches over her nine-year-old son Aion, her three-year old daughter Nova, and Vanhook’s five-year-old nephew Prince, she’s focused on her art and what’s pressing on her mind. That includes supporting and mentoring younger Black artists, telling them the things she wished she’d known earlier on, both practical and philosophical: “Make sure you have an emergency fund. Make sure you apply to at least five grants a year. Be prepared to apply for art residencies that offer free studio space. Reach out to artists you admire, look at their CVs.” In a July Instagram post, she asked followers for the names of Black women artists she can pass on to museums and curators. She wants them to believe in themselves, wants them to “know that their power is their work.”
Freelon says she had to learn all of that “on the fly.” If somebody had told her earlier, she says, “I could have made better choices, more informed choices. We need more community and connection between artists.”
If Freelon sounds older than her 38 years, it could be because she experienced a lot early on. She has been married and wrenchingly divorced, and experienced tragedy with the death of a newborn baby, a three-day-old son named Wonderful. She connects her work directly with that experience. “There are just so many complexities to life, the fragility of it. And back to the artwork: it’s tissue paper. If it gets wet, it will break into a million pieces, but when it is dry, it has power and strength. When you unify those elements, it becomes a force to be reckoned with.”
Art has taught her, despite the challenges she has faced, that everything she needs is within her. “Nobody can determine your future,” she says. As a younger woman, “I think I felt like I needed my parents, or I needed my husband, or I needed things or people to help push me to where I need to be, where in actuality, when everything was stripped away from me, and it was just me left, that’s all I had. That’s when I realized the drive and the energy and the purpose that’s inside.”
And that’s what her art brings her. In her work, Freelon says, “I find peace. I find sanity. I find my purpose. I find—in working with my hands—I find community.
“I find love.”
JOIN WALTER FOR AN IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE CELEBRATING DIVERSITY, COMMUNITY AND ART. NORTH CAROLINA NATIVE AND NATIONALLY RECOGNIZED ARTIST MAYA FREELON WILL DISCUSS HER NEW EXHIBIT, GREATER THAN OR EQUAL TO, AND OFFER GUESTS A LOOK INTO HER CREATIVE PROCESS. CLICK HERE TO JOIN!
Get to know the wall mounted sculpture creations of MFA’s newest artist partner, Seattle based LISA MYERS BULMASH, and her “Bought and Paid For” series.
“This triptych of altered books is mounted on antique washboards, exploring the American Dream as filtered through a Black and female lens. The series centers on the heart of that complicated dream: owning a home of one’s own.
A repeating image in the center niche unites the three books: a family photo of the artist’s brother, running into their childhood home. This image is layered over other buildings significant in the African American experience. The first shows a slave auction “house”; the second shows the childhood home of the artist’s mother; the third depicts the artist’s first home in the Northwest.”
Featured here “Bought and Paid For 1 (triptych)”, 24″x40″, altered books mounted on antique washboards. Scroll for details. Contact Morton Fine Art for additional information on Lisa Myers Bulmash and her powerful sculptural creations.
Lisa Myers Bulmash, Bought and Paid For #1 (triptych), 2020, 24″x40″, altered books mounted on antique washboards
(Detail)
Sculpture 1 of 3
Sculpture 2 of 3
Sculpture 3 of 3
Contact the gallery for additional information about LISA MYERS BULMASH.
Just off the easel – two new small drawings by DC based artist MICHAEL ANDREW BOOKER.
Michael Andrew Booker
Pocket Rockets (PPE 1), 2020
Fine liner pen and watercolor on paper
14 x 11 in
Michael Andrew Booker
Untitled (PPE 2), 2020
Fineliner pen and watercolor on paper
14 x 11 in
Influenced by quilts used during the Underground Railroad to send hidden messages to the traveling slaves, the drawings in Godspeed document a journey of escapism for travelers in search of a better life, for themselves and for generations to come. Quilts are used as sign markers, shields, portals, and gateways to help secure safe passage towards an “Afrotopia.” Hip Hop music, African wax fabrics, and the quilts of Gee’s Bend give form and guidance to the figures and patterns, encompassing African American history, culture, and mysticism.– MICHAEL A. BOOKER, 2020
Michael Booker is a mixed media artist originally from Jackson, Mississippi who currently resides in Maryland. He received his BFA in Studio Art – Painting from Mississippi State University in 2008, and received his MFA in Studio Art from University of Maryland in 2012. He has exhibited in various galleries across Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, Maine, Maryland, Virginia, and Washington DC. His work has been acquired by the David C. Driskell Center in College Park, MD. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Art at Montgomery College Takoma Park/Silver Spring. Booker has been represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC since 2019
Morton Fine Art: curator's notes 