The Blue Lotus Artists’ Collective, devoted to Black artists, finally has its first official show. And the artists they have brought in are stellar: the widely celebrated Jacob Lawrence and the multi-talented Nikesha Breeze.
Both of them have created art around the African American experience. Lawrence (1917-2000) had a prolific career starting in the 1930s, with exhibits in the United States, Europe and Africa. For the Blue Lotus opening, his dramatic “Legacy of John Brown” tells the story of Brown’s violent insurrection against slavery in a series of 21 silk screen prints.
Breeze recently has created a massive piece for the soon-to-open Freedom Monument Sculpture Park in Montgomery, Alabama — 108 death masks, cast in bronze, to honor African lives lost in the slave trade. Gallery director Laura Pendleton-Miller said Breeze, “is ready for a breakout.” For the exhibition, Breeze has brought her piece, “Within this Skin,” a powerful installation with portraits of enslaved men, women and children, painted on large wooden panels hanging from the ceiling.
Breeze has been painting for seven years.
“I am not trained as a visual artist,” she said, “but I performed for over 20 years as a dancer.”
In 2016, she began to study her ancestral history and turned to painting. She had never drawn a picture, never even picked up a paintbrush. She found some old wooden doors that look like they could be from a slave cabin and pulled them into her house. On the first day she started painting, she had the feeling that an ancestor was watching. Breeze looked at the women and promised her that “there’s more to your story.”
Each of the panels has layers and layers of paint, cracked and chipped in places, so the backgrounds look like tree bark, the figures set in a forest. The “Grandfather” is a portrait of a white-haired old slave who has worked all his life. He has a bruise near his eye, his chest is bare, his pants in tatters. With all his troubles, still he has a kindly face. Breeze said she “is honoring these strong, beautiful Black men…who labor so hard and have been beaten and humiliated.”
In another painting, a woman named “Dinah,” shows her anger in a world where Black women were too often raped. She’s tall, with thick black hair and a defiant look on her face. She wears a white shift, pulling it down to cover her body from the gaze of predatory men. Breeze said, “the way Dinah is closing her legs, she has resistance and power.”
“Grandmother” is a midwife, who cares for laboring mothers so often that their blood stains her arms from wrists to elbows.
One of the most searing images is of a teenaged boy, the victim of a lynching, left alone, hanging from a tree in a dark forest. The boy’s yellow jacket is too big, showing how young he is. Another piece nearby in the gallery is a plank with a legion of haunting Ku Klux Klansmen, threatening still another Black child. He’s in the foreground, naked and defenseless.
In “The Boys,” young children crouch together, waiting for their future. Pendleton-Miller said, this “is a particularly impactful piece. It shows the innocence of the children, making you wonder how anybody could do the things to them that were done to boys their age in slavery.”
Blue Lotus is lucky to have been able to bring “Legacy of John Brown” to Tucson. The UA Museum of Art owns one of Jacob Lawrence’s paintings, “The 1920s…The Migrants Arrive and Cast their Ballots,” but this may be the first large exhibition of his work to come to the Old Pueblo.
Lawrence was an extraordinary artist. He was born in Atlantic City in 1917 of parents who migrated from the South. When his mother moved the children to Harlem, he started arts classes after school at the Utopia Children’s House. At the ripe old age of 15, he was invited to study at the WPA-funded Harlem Art Workshop, where he met luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance. Starting when he was 20, Lawrence built an astonishing body of work on historic Black men and women at a pace that defies belief. These works told the stories of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Toussaint L’Ouverture.
In 1941, “The Migration of the American Negro,” was so sought after that the Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., each vied for his whole series. They finally agreed to split the 60 paintings and Lawrence became the first African American painter in MOMA’s permanent collection.
Just before completing “The Migration” series, Lawrence began his “Legend of John Brown.” This piece tells the extraordinary true story of a white man who was going to do whatever he could to end slavery.
Lawrence made 22 remarkable paintings and he wrote lengthy captions for each one. The way to see the show is to follow the pictures in order and read the text as you go. The colors and compositions throughout are characteristic of Lawrence’s larger body of work: pure color, little fine detail, abstract but also figurative.
The story begins with an image of Jesus on the cross, with Brown at his feet: “No.1: John Brown had a fanatical belief that he was chosen by God to overthrow Black slavery in America.” It ends with Brown on the gallows: “No. 22: John Brown was found ‘Guilty of treason and murder in the first degree and was hanged in Charles Town, Virginia on Dec. 2, 1859.’”
In between, Lawrence paints and writes of the key events in Brown’s movement. Brown went with his sons in 1855 to fight in Kansas during a bloody struggle over slaveholding. In May, they killed five men. Lawrence painted the massacre, No. 10, in woeful colors of brown and black.
Three years later, Brown was in Canada recruiting rebels for a raid on Harper’s Ferry. In No. 17, 11 men stand in long coats in the cold ready to fight and perhaps to die. The battle at Harper’s Ferry is shown in No. 20. The figures look like medieval knights with shields below a dark cloudy sky. At long last, Brown is captured. In No. 21, he’s shown in defeat, seated with a crucifix in his hands, long white hair covering his face. In the final picture, No. 22, he’s dead, hanging from a rope, a long thin man against a clear blue sky, almost as if he was ascending to heaven.
After serving in the Coast Guard during World War II, Lawrence was invited by Josef Albers to teach at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Albers was a visual artist who influenced Lawrence’s use of bold primary colors and simple compositions. Then, in the 1960s, he spent time in Nigeria.
In 1971, Lawrence moved on to teach art at the University of Washington. He was busy with new work on the civil rights movement and other subjects, but in 1977 “Legend of John Brown” came back to him. The original gouache paintings, held by the Detroit Institute of Arts, were now too fragile to be shown. Lawrence took on a commission to remake the series on silk screen prints, which can now be seen at several museums around the country. The Permanent Collection of the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Altoona, Pennsylvania has lent their prints to Blue Lotus for this show.
Later in Lawrence’s life, he was asked his thoughts about John Brown. “He was a very special person in our history,” he said, and I don’t think he gets credit for that… He was just inspiring. I had never done anything prior to that time of non-black figure. He gave his life for what he believed in.”
Jacob Lawrence and Nikesha Breeze
WHEN: Various times through Wednesday, Jan. 31
WHERE: Blue Lotus Artists’ Collective, 15 E. Pennington Street, Tucson
COST: Free admission
INFO:
www.bluelotusartistscollective.com
