BAWA, in Swahili means wing or bat, but it is derived from popobawa, which has some remarkable meanings, usually associated with darkness. BAWA typically visits homesteads at night. Its simple assault, or Poltergeist-

like phenomena, might attack all households. BAWA does not refer to form of spirit. It is liable to change.

Well, the art market is in a free fall, but my man Obama says that we are on the road to bigger Big Macs. It doesn’t bother me, or thousands of artists. Somehow we survive. What really worries me is the state of art in these United States. If one looks at all the MFA’s coming out of the universities and art schools, there is a lot of, oh well, bad art out there. ( Photo: Finnish artist, Tea Makpaa, “My life as a Reindeer.” Photograph, Vesa Ranta.) Simply put, “Where’s the beef?” It’s as if these newly minted artists don’t give a damn–just roll it out. There is hardly any creative effort that I can see. Maybe I am just an OG(old gangster) ready for the old artist’s dung heap. There are some worth while conceptual artists out there, but isn’t all art conceptual? What’s next? The artists hanging themselves on hooks in the gallery, and waiting to be spoon fed by the art dealers? Sooner or later, one reaches the blank canvas(This has been done too.), and has to put something on it. There are some creative individuals out there like Willie Cole, Phoenix Savage, and a few old heads like Martin Puryear and Richard Hunt. Keep on pushin’ because the ‘younguns’ seemed to have abandoned it all. Jerry Harris, ed.

BAWA WRITERS. We will have a very eclectic group of writers and guest journalists. Our aim is to present the most up-to-date writing about the contemporary art scene in the world, not just America. There will be art, music, performance, and hip reviews of everything connected with the multi cultural world  that we live in today. To start with, I have chosen three very different writers. John Haber is an independent art critic based it New York City. Wim Roefs is Director of the if art Gallery in Columbia, South Carolina. He is a Dutchman who is also a professor of African American History at the University of South Carolina. These writers will be appearing shortly.

Photo: John Haber

Marlene Dumas

by

John Haber

In the winter of 2009, three shows make clear what can go wrong with political art. With Marlene Dumas, its message becomes too simple, refusing even to admit controversy. Dumas, naturally, would insist that you start with her. So repeat after me. Nobody is innocent, not even a child–or an artist. No, not even you, and definitely not a white artist from South Africa. For all that, she does believe that no one is innocent. Her children–when not already dead look sullen, even sinister. In a room lined with nearly one hundred of their faces on paper, one has morphed into an insect’s head. A naked infant stands like a street fighter. Dumas has painted an icy blue and his left hand red, as if covered with blood. For a moment, one could remember how Amy Wilson shocked The Daily News by juxtaposing blonde little girls with the hooded figure of Abu Ghraib.

Dumas embraced her own responsibility as well, including the responsibility for the blue and red overpainting. She titles that portrait of an infant The Painter. Perhaps she is responsible for the suffering as well. With its rail-thin body and outstretched arms, a dancer could be you. As the painting is titled here, you could be Measuring Your Own Grave. In this earnest concentration of political art, even ambiguity need spelling out. Dumas paints from photographs. She paints, too, as if nothing, however gorgeous or horrific, can speak for itself. A comfortable museum-goer like you has to accept guilt along with the artist. And you had better know just who is guilty–and of what.

Losers and no winners

The retrospective spans two floors by theme rather than chronologically, but Dumas hardly seem to have evolved. She has lived in Amsterdam for thirty years, and she has a far greater reputation in Europe than in America. The grays link her to hard reserve of Luc Tuymans, but without his cool literalism. The smear link her to Francis Bacon, but without his transformation of sitter into dead meat. The basis in photography links her to Gerhard Richter, but without the allure of evil. She wants something much,much plainer.

Like arbitrary titles, her technique insists on the subject’s anonymity. Sometimes Dumas adds a rectangle in black or white, in imitation of a censor’s mask. One woman’s nipple appear to have migrated upward. Imagine some kind of plastic stick-on, like a police marker on a corpse. Elsewhere, a reduction in gray scale and a thickening of the black outline gives her sleepers their aura of death.

The same newborn appears in two different works, as Cupid and, with black skin, as Reinhardt’s Daughter. Of course, Dumas has smeared its flesh with black. The title once again alludes to the artist’s culpability. It also marks her inheritance of black oil from Ad Reinhardt. Still, with their flat style and placement outside the exhibition’s entrance, one could easily mistake both works for reproductions.

Americans tend to prefer the immediacy of the headlines to existential crises, at least in art since 9/11. They also tend to let irony and the viewer’s culpability permeate the top most layer of oil. Dumas goes back to an older ideal–a unity of content and form in which content clearly takes the lead. As with Leon Golub, art documents torture by torturing the painted surface. The formalists who mocked that ideal as “mere illustration” may have departed long ago, including Reinhardt. Yet she cannot top arguing with them.

At its most elaborate, a sheet of color escapes and half eradicates its outlines. It appears dragged across the figure with a dry, thinly loaded brush. It shows how much more she can achieve, as an artist and as her own subject. Yet it shows, too, her temptation to smother possibilities. She understands that political art inhabits that strange domain between public and private spaces. Somehow, though, Dumas art always breaks down along sharp lines of gender, races, and culture.

From time to time, the clipped brushstrokes and poster colors have an eager, even comic frankness. In a self-portrait, they exaggerate her bushy hair, and lend a welcome glint of light to her eyes. For once, she forgets to paint her subject as a victim. Elsewhere, she could never, as in late Goya, plunge head first into the abyss whole laughing. In this war between an artist and her subject matter, no one is a winner. Other Dumas work is on BAWA’s main pages, ed. Link to this article, http://www.haberarts.com/dumas.htm

Jen, by Marlene Dumas(2005)

What is Black Art

by

Jerry Harris

I have always had a problem with classifications. Today we hear about black art, women’s art, gay art, et al. For me the question has always been, is it art? Classifications put you into a corner, and I don’t like corners. Sure, each artist brings his or her cultural, sexual, and political mindset to their work, but I will take art every time. The Europeans looked at African art for many years as “primitive art,” yet the moderns, Picasso, Henry Moore, Giacometti, and countless others embraced African art. The most striking thing about so-called primitive art was its intense vitality: The sense of living form was so strong.

Now, one must not get trapped in anything. I remember a few years ago, while lecturing at the University of Oregon, Eugene, there was an African American female sculpture student. For four years, her professors encouraged her to just concentrate on African art, and when she graduated and applied for Grad school, she was denied–wasn’t post-post modern enough, I suppose. So, let’s keep it open and pursue great art, not black art, etc. And this then! This art blog? Why call it Black Art World America? Well, It’s a celebration. We’ve got to have some heroes too.

NO LIFT OFF AT APOLLO

BY Jerry Harris

This article was first published in 1999 in Philadelphia City Paper

Artist: Lester Kern

When someone suggested that I go and see the black art show at the Apollo of Temple, I didn’t know what to expect. I was new in Philly, and I thought that this might be the local version of the famed Apollo theatre in Harlem where our best and worst got a chance to perform. I called my sister’s boyfriend for directions. “Is it far from me?” “No, it’s located in the ghetto surrounding Temple University, but the school doesn’t broadcast that.” Ah! Race is such a factor in this city–really there is no escape.

It’s billed as the “14th Annual October Gallery Philadelphia Art Expo in Celebration of an American Phenomenon—Whew! The title didn’t suggest an awareness of minimal art, and it put a dent in my allotted 650 words. Anyway, what’s so phenomenal about African-American art? We’ve had African-American artists as far back as Pittsburgh, Pa. born Henry O. Tanner—hatched in 1859. Tanner’s work even begs the question: What is black art? His work is indistinguishable from that of his white contemporaries–pre-modern portraitists and landscape artists.

Cooking up labels is as American as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans.  We have feminist art, hispanic art, and even elephant dung art, which  is being shown at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York City, and has made Mayor Rudy rude. It is all Chinese to me. Certainly each artist brings his or her temperament to a work of art, but at the end of the game, art is the winner.

A week before the show, I listened to Mercer Redcross, owner of the October Gallery, and promoter of the exhibition. He was guest on a local black radio station. “The mainstream media has never given much space to the event,” he said.  I couldn’t confirm that, but I certainly was going to go and support my brothers and sisters. Two of the participants were on the show with Mr. Redcross. One painted children’s pictures, and the other artist, a former technocrat, said that he liked to paint boxers who never fought each other—Muhammad Ali bumping off Joe Louis. Well, LeRoy Neiman, the society painter, has made millions painting boxers and other celebs, so why not this guy?

Friday art night arrived and I emerged from the Cecil B. Moore station, and got my first look at Temple University—a row of rather uninspired buildings. I entered the Apollo of Temple (weird name) and was greeted by two beauties. Philly must have the greatest concentration of beautiful black women on the East Coast. There was a fairly good crowd of African Americans walking about, looking and talking to the artists who had their wares on display. The work was a 50-50 split between art and crafts. All of it, with the exception of a few, emphasized African-America themes: family, roots, children and society—nothing wrong with that, but most of it was commercial flimflam from the velvet school of art.

Now (using the words of our low-esteemed Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas) “high-tech lynch” me if you will, but there was a lot of bad art at the Apollo, and if this show was likened to the famed Apollo shows in Harlem, a lot of tomatoes would have been tossed at the participants.

Where were our leading African-American artists? I mean critically acclaimed artists, such as Martin Puryear, Richard Hunt, Sam Gilliam, Betye Saar, and Lorna Simpson? Mr. Redcross would have served the white and black community much better by having a crafts show and a separate professional exhibition at his October Gallery. Well, arty-tarty, I left and went over to Baltimore Avenue, ordered a pizza and a well-deserved beer. The waitress asked a long-haired customer what he was painting these days. “Oh, just a still life with a coca-cola bottle,” a perfect description of my night at the Apollo.

Jerry Harris is a sculptor, writer/social critic, and visual artist. He studied sculpture under professor James Lee Hansen, a widely known Pacific Northwest sculptor who taught at Portland State University, Portland, Oregon. Harris was later accepted into the international sculptor’s program at St. Martins School of Art, London, England, and did special studies in bronze casting, under Henry Abercrombie, at the Central School of Art and Design, London. His teachers at St. Martins were the international sculptors, Sir Anthony Caro and Philip King. He spent time in the studio of the English sculptor Keneith Armitage. He is represented by the if (international fine arts) gallery, Columbia, South Carolina, and is a member of ARS, Artists Rights Society, New York, New York.

Harris has written for Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s national newspaper, Sweden Now magazine, Philadelphia City Paper, Pittsburgh City Paper, International Herald Tribune, Paris, France, Register Guard, Eugene, Oregon, Ishmael Reed’s Konch magazine, and was contributing writer for Eugene Weekly, Eugene, Oregon.

Harris moved to Stockholm, Sweden, where he was elected into the Swedish Sculptors Association. He lived in Sweden for 20 years, returning to the United States in 1998. He is a pass member of the Associated Artists Of Pittsburgh, Pa., the nation’s second oldest artist’s association. He now lives in Chico, California, and works in San Francisco. He has exhibited nationally and internationally.

George DeFreeze Murphy, Stockholm/New York

Dear new readers, fellow artists, curators, galleries, and all people who are interested in contemporary African American, Latino, and Asian art. BAWA, short for Black American World Art, will soon be bringing to these pages, news from the African American, and “Third World” art scene. And what news it will be! In the past 25 years “colored people” in the visual arts have exploded on the international art landscape. We have Martin Puryear, Richard Hunt, Kara Walker, Willie Cole, Thad Mosely, Howard McCalebb, Lorna Simpson, Phoenix Savage, and yours truly. There are many more, as you will experience in the coming issues.

BAWA will be presenting this eclectic group of artists from across the United States, and the world, and it will not be limited to stuffy old New York City. This will definitely be a multi cultural (Whites too) art magazine, but the emphasis will be on black, brown, and yellow artists. Work, words, music, and people will have exciting things to say. Controversies welcomed. And you dear audience, please feel free to throw in your three cents too. BAWA BAWA. (Below, Jerry Harris with sculpture Dogon Mother and Child) harrisculptor.com

CONTENTS

1. Sidebar. Art news updates

2. New Artists on the block

3. Art Today. BAWA writers and editorials

4. Scroll for more contemporary artists     Picture: Sculptor Jerry Harris

NEW ARTISTS ON THE BLOCK

Here we will be presenting new artists on the block. Some of them are not so new for people in the art world, but that world is so small, and needs to be opened up to larger audiences.

WILLIE COLE

Willie Cole is new to me. I have lived 20 years in the frozen world of Sweden, and now, home again, I am discovering the warmth, humor, and creativity of artists like Mr. Cole. Expatriation is good, but one day one must come home.

Willie Cole’s Speedster tji wara, 2002(L)

HAROLD HOY

Harold Hoy is a respected Pacific Northwest sculptor, based in Eugene, Oregon. He is a Chinese American who taught sculpture at Lane Community College for many years. His works have centered on complex relationships between mankind, and the natural world. Hoy’s current body of work is constructed of galvanized steel and pipe hanger material, and is based partly on an erector set. He uses the child’s toy as a platform to work around larger issues of man’s predilections for claiming ownership of the natural world, and our desire to manipulate and re-form it.

Harold Hoy, Balloon Dog (below)

CHAKAIA BOOKER (below)

Chakaia Booker was born in 1958 in Newark, N.J. She is an assembled and richly layered individual, creating wearable sculpture. She uses rubber tires in a lot of her work. (Urban

Butter, Chakaia Booker)

HOWARDENA PENDELL (b.1943, Philadelphia, Pa.)

Howardena Pendell is a painter, mixed media artist, curator, and educator. She has taught at major universities, including Yale. Ms. Pendell is known for the wide variety of techniques and materials used in her art work. She creates abstract paintings, collages, “video drawings,” and “process art.”

MICHAEL D. HARRIS

Michael D. Harris is an artist, professor, scholar and curator. He presently lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Mr. Harris is a nationally known multi media artist.

Michael D. Harris, We are you.

JERRY HARRIS CONSTRUCTION

THE NIGHTMARE AT 4 A.M.

HOMAGE TO GIACOMETTI’S THE PALACE AT 4.A.M.

harrisculptor.com

WANGECHI MUTU(b. 1972)

Kenyan-born Wangechi Mutu has trained both as a sculptor and anthropologist. Her work explores the contradiction of female and cultural identity. Drawing from traditional crafts, science fiction, and funkadellia.

Mutu-Untitled.

FERNANDO BOTERO (B. 1932)

Fernando Botero was born in Medelin, Columbia. The artist lives in Paris, France. His Abu Ghraib series presents a nightmarish and sadistic world at this infamous prison, which can best be described as Dachau moves to the Middle East. The images of Iraqi prisoners show the sordid  reality of these atrocities.

Jean-Michael Basquiat

EXXON OIL KING (below)

By Jerry Harris

The oil barons with their money tap constantly turned on and bleeding the consumers. It is never turned off. Forged iron, copper, fiberglass, found objects, and wood.

Head Shot-2

Midnight Golfer, Eugene Martin

Humberto Castro (b.1957)

Humberto Castro(bottom) was born in Havana, Cuba in 1957. He emigrated to the United States from Paris in 1999. He has received numerous international awards, and his work is acclaimed and shown in renowned museums and private collections. This is a recent installation of his.

New Sculpture by Martin Puryear from his 2009 MOMA show.

Yinka Shonibarre MBE (b. 1962. UK) Shonibare’s artwork explores contemporary African Identity and its relationship to European colonialism through painting, sculpture, installation, and  the moving image. His work is best known for his visual symbols. He is one of the UK’s most artistic creators.

Black Gold, by Yinka Shonibare (2006)