LISA MYERS BULMASH in The Seattle Times

This artist was chosen to represent Seattle in a docuseries on art in America

March 17, 2021 at 6:00 am Updated March 18, 2021 at 11:15 am

Artist Lisa Myers Bulmash works on an altered book in 2015 during Everett’s Fresh Paint Festival of Artists at Work. (Darrell Scattergood)

By Crystal Paul Seattle Times features reporter

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. 

Available Artwork by LISA MYERS BULMASH

Morton Fine Art

52 O St NW #302

Washington, DC 20001

(202) 628-2787 (call or text)

info@mortonfineart.com

http://www.mortonfineart.com

LISA MYERS BULMASH “The Home Inside My Head” reviewed in The Washington Post

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.

Click HERE to read the review in full.

On view by appointment at Morton Fine Art through January 6th, 2021. Located at 52 O St NW #302, Washington, DC 20001.

(202) 628-2787 (text or call)

info@mortonfineart.com

http://www.mortonfineart.com

Available Artwork by LISA MYERS BULMASH

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Virtual exhibition and artist narration of LISA MYERS BULMASH’s solo exhibition “The Home Inside My Head” at Morton Fine Art

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.

Video credit: Jarrett Hendrix

Contact the gallery for private viewing by appointment, price list and acquisition. (202) 628-2787 (text or call) info@mortonfineart.com http://www.mortonfineart.com

“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

Delicate, Declarative: Artist Maya Freelon’s Ephemeral Work in Walter

Delicate, Declarative: Artist Maya Freelon’s Ephemeral Work

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! 

Ethiopian artist MERON ENGIDA’s debut U.S. solo exhibition “Solidarity” at Morton Fine Art in DC

 

 

Virtual tour and artist talk of MERON ENGIDA’s debut U.S. solo exhibition, Solidarity. Launching on Morton Fine Art’s YouTube channel.  Contact the gallery for private viewing appointments, price list and acquisition. Visit our Website  ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ MERON ENGIDA’s solo exhibition Solidarity and artist talk at Morton Fine Art, Washington, DC. Video credit: Jarrett Hendriix Solidarity A solo exhibition of paintings by MERON ENGIDA September 22nd – October 28th, 2020 VIRTUAL TOUR and ARTIST TALK On Morton Fine Art’s YouTube Channel TODAY Contact the gallery for private viewing appointment, price list, additional information and acquisition. (202) 628-2787 (call or text) mortonfineart@gmail.com (email) Available artwork by MERON ENGIDA MERON ENGIDA, Solidarity 3, 2020, 33″x35.5″, acrylic on canvas About Solidarity My art has been my language to express myself and my voice. My work explores personal experiences and my Ethiopian cultural heritage. Oftentimes my subject matter reflects my life as a mother in a multiracial family. My figures are diverse and often huddled together, with wide eyes. Children and lambs are the visual vocabulary I use to express innocence and forgiveness. I intend to create dialogue about diversity and women – for example, a face with open mouth represents women freely exploring and expressing themselves. Women also hold in more pain than they let out and hold each other demonstrating resilience. My most recent series addresses challenges of race and identity. One painting depicts figures from all of the Ethiopian tribes together, celebrating each other’s uniqueness. My inner feelings and values call for the love, embrace and celebration of humanity, transcending past and present, despite our differences. – MERON ENGIDA, 2020 MERON ENGIDA, See the Love, 2020 36″x36″, acrylic on canvas MERON ENGIDA, Solidarity 11, 2020, 36″x36″, acrylic on canvas About MERON ENGIDA Born in Ethiopia, MERON ENGIDA received her degree from Addis Ababa University School of Fine Arts and Design in 2007. She has exhibited her paintings extensively in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia including at the National Art Gallery. Solidarity marks her inaugural U.S. solo exhibition at Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC. She notes, “When I start a painting, there are no rules. Sometimes I work from pictures but most of the time I create from imagination. Sometimes I start with a drawing and other times with acrylic paint on canvas which I layer with tones, symbols, and a motif. The figures emerge with expressive features, emotions, and texture. I work on the paintings with trusting mark-making, not knowing where I’m going. My creative process continues until I am surprised and content and then I revisit later to see if it is indeed finished.” She is represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC. MERON ENGIDA, Solidarity 5, 2020, 30.5″x76.5″, acrylic on canvas MERON ENGIDA, Solidarity 9, 2020, 33.5″x32″, acrylic on canvas Available artwork by MERON ENGIDA About Morton Fine Art Founded in 2010 in Washington, DC by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice. Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African Diaspora. Morton Fine Art 52 O St NW #302 Washington, DC 20001 COVID-19 protocol: By appointment. Mask required. Contact the gallery for supplementary artwork documentation such as detail images and short videos. Safe, no contact door to door delivery available. Shipping nationally and internationally.

Morton Fine Art | 52 O St NW #302, Washington, DC 20001 www.mortonfineart.com

Introducing Morton Fine Art’s new artist LISA MYERS BULMASH

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.

Available artwork of LISA MYER BULMASH

Morton Fine Art

52 O St NW #302

Washington, DC 20001

(202) 628-2787 (call or text)

mortonfineart@gmail.com

http://www.mortonfineart.com

Two New Small Drawings by MICHAEL ANDREW BOOKER

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

Click here to view available artworks by MICHAEL ANDREW BOOKER.

 

Morton Fine Art

52 O St NW #302

Washington, DC 20001

(202) 628-2787 (call or text)

http://www.mortonfineart.com

mortonfineart@gmail.com

NATHANIEL DONNETT’s “Acknowledgement: The Historic Polyrhythm of Being(s)” installation at Contemporary Art Museum Houston

ART & EXHIBITS
A Houston artist sends a coded message with his new work for CAMH
Nathaniel Donnett has filled the construction walls around the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston with backpacks that contain photographs, found objects and lights that blink in Morse code.

Molly Glentzer July 23, 2020

Updated: July 24, 2020, 11:19 am

A detail of Nathaniel Donnett’s “Acknowledgement: The Historic Polyrhythm of Being(s),” a public artwork made with LED lights, photographs and the used backpacks of youth in Third, Fourth and Fifth Wards, installed along 120 feet of construction fencing around the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston  Photo: Andrew Buckler / Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

People passing by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston have an eyeful right now with Nathaniel Donnett’s engaging and challenging new public art installation.

“Acknowledgement: The Historic Polyrhythm of Being(s)” occupies 120 feet of construction fence around the building, which is being renovated.

During the day, a long, unbroken line of block letters may spin heads first. They’re a tight mashup of imagined words and phrases common to residents of the city’s Third, Fourth and Fifth Ward neighborhoods. You might have to study it a while to break them apart, but the string becomes a kind of stream-of-consciousness chant: “PSYCHOSLABACKNOWLEDGMAYNEHOLUPBLACKSPATIALISTIC.”

Dozens backpacks hung on the fence bookend the sign, glowing and blinking mysteriously at night. The lights convey a message too — in Morse code.

Donnett’s commission both dresses up the construction site and launches Beyond CAMH, a museum initiative to create community-based work that positions artists as change-makers in society. He gathered some of his materials by collaborating with youth from Jack Yates High School, Kashmere Gardens Elementary, the Re-Education Project, SHAPE Community Center and Change Happens! Through those schools and organizations, dozens of students from Third, Fourth and Fifth Wards traded in their old backpacks for new ones.

The exchanges took place outside the museum during some of this summer’s hottest days, when the temperature was at 100 degrees or more. Donnett, his team and the participants wore masks, and he sanitized all the backpacks as a precaution against the spread of COVID-19.

He filled the old backpacks with LED lights. Some also hold photographs taken by the artist and objects collected from the neighborhoods that reference Congolese Nkisi power figures and ideas about being simultaneously present and absent. Through Morse code, the LEDs pulse out culturally significant lyrics and text: The phrase “Love Supreme” from John Coltrane’s composition “Acknowledgement,” an excerpt from James Baldwin’s essay “The Uses of the Blues” and a verse from Solange’s song “Mad.”

All that may be useful information, but a viewer doesn’t have to decipher any of it to be pulled in. It’s kind of a shame there isn’t a bench across the street where people could just sit and contemplate it for a while. Although the constant, frenetic movement around the fence — cars, walkers and bikers coming and going wherever they are going — seems fitting.

‘Movement and displacement’
“Acknowledgement” is partly informed by the writer and philosopher Fred Moten’s ideas about “fugitive blackness.” African Americans have had to navigate their environment for centuries, since they first arrived in the U.S. as slaves, Donnett explains. “There’s always movement and displacement.”

The families of Third, Fourth and Fifth Wards have experienced gentrification, cultural erasure, income disparities and unjust state and municipal policies. Yet this is no victim’s wall. Donnett’s work expresses power in many forms — the power of direct action, social exchange, language, and the strength and resources of Houston’s Black community.

“It is about memory and history but also about collective exchange, and the use of a type of familiar language and transformation,” he says. “And lastly, everyday aesthetics and Black social life.” The word ‘Being(s)’ in the installation’s title is important, he adds, because “now is a time where people limit Blackness to one thing or another and not the multiple of a being.”

On HoustonChronicle.com: ‘Soul of a Nation’ at MFAH

Donnett is no stranger to works this complex. His 2008 installation at Project Row Houses incorporated a book exchange for Ryan Middle School, and he organized a 2015 project in Milwaukee that involved people of all ages. “Acknowledgement” is the first to reach across three neighborhoods, although he knows them well. Donnett grew up in Third Ward and has always had relatives in Fourth and Fifth Wards.

“Acknowledgement” is a piece of a larger pie, rolled into other work he is producing through a 2020 Dean’s Critical Practice Research Grant from Yale University, where he is a 2021 MFA candidate, and a 2020 Art and Social Justice Initiative Grant.

The Beyond CAMH initiative has another dimension, too.

A ‘vocal portrait’
Unrelated to Donnett’s piece, the museum has opened up a phone line to help create a Houston edition of Texas-born artist their native languages. Anyone can participate by calling 281-248-8730 or visiting camh.org/beyond. A separate time-lapse video to document the work’s evolution will feature people who participated during the project’s first 100 days (through Nov. 2).

Ekene Ijeoma’s national project “A Counting.” That one aims to gather a “vocal portrait” of the city and address the under-counting of marginalized communities in the U.S. census.

Ijeoma, who founded the group Poetic Justice at Boston’s MIT Media Lab, is gathering the voices of Houstonians as they count to 100 in “A Counting” is “a meditation on what a truly united country would sound like,” Ijeoma says. “Houston has reached majority-minority status ahead of the curve across the country.”

CAMH director Hesse McGraw hopes Beyond CAMH will help the museum reach new audiences, embrace “unexpected contexts” and directly impact civic life. While the museum’s doors remain closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, “we’ve had time to think,” he says.

“To be quarantined and disconnected from daily, in-person contact with artists and audience is disorienting for a museum that exists solely for that purpose. Yet … we’re working to reimagine the ethic and practice of a more porous museum — one that spills onto the street, engages in long-term collaborations with artists, meets audiences where they are and serves our communities’ most urgent needs.”

molly.glentzer@chron.com

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Michael Booker’s 360 interactive virtual tour and artist talk for his solo “Godspeed”

360 interactive virtual tour with artist talk for MICHAEL BOOKER’s long awaited solo exhibition, Godspeed. Launching on Morton Fine Art’s YouTube channel. Navigate around the video with your touchscreen, touch pad or mouse. Contact the gallery for price list and acquisition.

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MICHAEL BOOKER’s solo exhibition Godspeed and 8 minute artist talk at Morton Fine Art, Washington, DC. Navigate around the video with your touchscreen, touch pad or mouse.

Video credit: Jarrett Hendrix

Godspeed 

A solo exhibition of artwork by MICHAEL BOOKER

June 1st – June 24th, 2020

360 INTERACTIVE VIRTUAL TOUR

On Morton Fine Art’s YouTube Channel TODAY

Artist Talk included

Contact the gallery for price list, additional information and acquisition.

(202) 628-2787 (call or text)

mortonfineart@gmail.com (email)

Available artwork by MICHAEL BOOKER

Fruit of My Fruits, 2020, 40″x30″, fine liner pen, watercolor and collage on paper

About Godspeed
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

 

30 second video of MICHAEL BOOKER’s fine liner pen and watercolor artworks featured in his solo exhibition Godspeed

 

Installation image of Fruit of My Fruits and In Due Time

Photo credit: Jarrett Hendrix

About MICHAEL BOOKER

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 is represented by Morton Fine Art in Washington, DC.

Sunkissed Child, 2020, 14.25″x10.5″, fine liner pen, watercolor and marker on paper

 

About Morton Fine Art

Founded in 2010 in Washington, DC by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine art gallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA’s mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice. Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African Diaspora.

Morton Fine Art
52 O St NW #302
Washington, DC 20001

COVID-19 protocol: Contact the gallery for supplementary artwork documentation such as detail images and short videos. Safe, no contact door to door delivery available. Shipping nationally and internationally. Upcoming: by appointment only. Mask required.

Huffington Post’s Black Artists: 30 Contemporary Art Makers Under 40 You Should Know – MAYA FREELON ASANTE

Maya Freelon Asante, Boom, 53”x35”, tissue ink monoprint

Morton Fine Art’s MAYA FREELON ASANTE – Image #17 !

Posted 2/26/13

As Black History Month comes to a close, we’ve picked 30 young black artists who are contributing to the ongoing conversation of race and representation in contemporary art. Whether through sculpture, photography, video or performance, each artist illuminates the complexity of the self with a unique and bold vision.

From Kalup Linzy’s soap opera shorts to Kehinde Wiley’s traditional portraits updated with black models, the following young artists show there is no single way to address race in contemporary culture. Playful or meditative, sarcastic or somber, the following artists tackle the subject with a ferocious curiosity, passion and vulnerability.

Congratulations, Maya!

To view available work by the artist, please click HERE