Advocates create the landmark BLAC gallery

In late March, on a beautiful spring night in Downtown Tucson at Pennington and Scott, a huge crowd of art lovers gathered.

Why? A new gallery has opened, The Blue Lotus Artists’ Collective (BLAC). And it’s a big deal, likely the first gallery in Tucson dedicated to Black artists.

Most of the Downtown galleries have left over the last few years, pushed out by expensive new development. Blue Lotus brings art back to the center of downtown in one of the city’s most historic buildings, the old Pioneer Hotel, no less.

We can thank a feisty band of local artists and arts advocates, led by board president, Laura Pendleton-Miller, for getting the gallery up and running. “We want to expose the community to Black art and to provide much needed exhibition space for Black artists,” Pendleton-Miller said.

“We also want to provide a safe community space for education and conversation about the contributions of Black folks to our culture.”

In the future, she and her partners hope to bring in Black artists from all around the United States and elsewhere. They’ve already scouted galleries in Oaxaca, Mexico, to tap into the region’s long but little-known history of Black visual artists. Local artist, Willie Bonner, suggested Blue Lotus for the gallery’s name. A plant native to Africa, the water lily rises from the mud to create great beauty.

The first show has eight artists, most from Arizona, some quite young and others quite venerable. Here’s the run-down in no particular order.

Allison Miller (no relation to Laura) is a young Tucson artist who had a marvelous show at the Louis Bernal Gallery in 2021. She got a lot of attention for her portrait of Eartha Kitt. Miller likes to look at old films and photographs of notable Black performing artists and redo them as paintings. One of her pieces at Blue Lotus is a gorgeous acrylic titled “Carmen Jones,” taken from a scene in a 1954 musical. It shows a joyful party of Black women and men — the film’s star-studded cast of musicians and singers — beautifully dressed and laughing together. In her work, she says, she likes “to transform racial trauma into Black joy.”

In fact, all the works in this show reflect on Black identity and culture. Papay Solomon was born in Guinea, Africa, and spent most of his childhood in a refugee camp. He came to the US at age 14 and eventually went to college at ASU. His talent was recognized immediately and while still in school he won a spot in the Tucson Museum of Art 2018 Biennial.

Solomon often does self-portraits and at Blue Lotus has a piece titled “Here There Everywhere, Somehow.” The painting has four very different pictures of his face, with varied expressions, from serious to amused to angry.

Marita Dingus, Joe Willie Smith and Amber Doe are mixed-media artists. Dingus, who describes herself as an African American feminist, has two figures conjuring traditional African folk art that are made of cloth and other repurposed materials. Joe Willie Smith, a Phoenix-based artist and musician also works with found-objects. His piece, “Sonic Sculpture,” is made from industrial paper, steel, waxed linen and electronics.

Doe, a Black woman with Indigenous roots, uses cotton rope, fabric, dried yucca, and plant dyes to create pieces that evoke the past. For “American Flag,” her grandmother’s old linen provides the canvas, with coloring from blueberry and indigo dyes. One of her creations is titled, “We are Here Because You Were There,” a statement that defines all her work.

Casimir Batiano, born in Ivory Coast, has lived in many places in Africa and Europe, including Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Morocco. He has described his life as nomadic and his paintings as “universal and always in motion.” Batiano’s four large acrylics at Blue Lotus mixes images of human faces and animals in a style and choice of colors that echo the modern art of the 1920s as well as traditional African folk art.

Willie Bonner is well-known to Tucson art-goers, especially for his great show at the Tucson Museum of Art in 2021, a personal favorite. That show had brilliantly colored paintings, beautiful to behold, but unnerving and sad. His work draws on Black history, from slavery and the cotton plantation to urban jazz clubs. For the current show, one of his works, “They Say Its Wonderful,” places postage stamp images of important Black Americans on a board against a shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Five other works are delightful ink-on-paper drawings that Bonner sketched during live shows in jazz clubs in New York.

George R. Welch, a beloved retired art teacher at Pima College, has three pieces in the show, including an early acrylic canvas from 1989. That piece, “Distant Relations,” swirls with the bright colors of Africa. Two paintings from 2022 evoke the beauties of Tucson. “Aqua Flow” is a lush rendering of cascading waters and “Part Vision,” honors the glorious blue skies.

Blue Lotus Artists’ Collective (BLAC)

15 E. Pennington Street in the Pioneer Hotel Building

By appointment only

520-400-4701

info@bluelotusartistscollective.com

This article appears in Apr 6-12, 2023.