THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 2, 1994 TAG: 9410010043
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 90 lines
POLKA-DOTTED HOUSES and houses without windows or doors. Houses atop staircases, and covered over in bottle caps.
Sometimes it's home sweet home. Other times, home sour home.
Home is a recurring image in ``Sharing the Dream,'' an exuberantly wild - not domesticized - exhibit of the work of 11 top African-American artists at Hampton University Museum.
The names should be familiar to any fan of contemporary art - John Biggers, Robert Colescott, Faith Ringgold, Beverly Buchanan. Most of these artists have been presented in Hampton Roads at various venues over the years.
For anyone inclined to stereotype ``black art,'' this group show illustrates a diversity of styles and themes. Yet, some common threads exist.
Like the house image. In dream language, a house represents the self. That's a universal given, at least among Jungian followers.
Shacks - those humble, rickety structures hand-built by residents to suit their land and means - are the subject of Buchanan's art. She makes lush, oil stick drawings depicting them. She also builds little shacks.
Her ``Bottle Cap Shack, Camp Baskerville'' is a collage of tin and wood castoffs, covered over with bottle caps. Buchanan has taken pains to collect caps from many countries: Poland Spring, New Zealand's Steinlager, the tartan McEwan's.
If a growing respect for multicultural expression is allowing Buchanan a greater exposure, she is generously sharing that limelight with other cultures. Perhaps she's also suggesting that shacks are found all over the world, wherever there is economic stress.
By the way, don't be fooled by Buchanan's naive style into thinking she is unschooled. The Atlanta artist studied at the Art Students League in New York and has earned two master's degrees from Columbia University - in parasitology and in public health.
Numerous works on view involve a collage of imagery. As a visual strategy, it makes sense if you're trying to express life in an increasingly diverse culture.
Tarleton Blackwell's two mural-scale paintings are tour de force collages of painting styles and imagery. They are allegories, with critters as stand-ins for types of people.
His ``Hog Series LXIX: Butcher's Shop I'' has a wolf in general's uniform at center. So, in this world, the victimizer is in power.
Flanking the wolf are two cartoony dotted houses - a dog house from which a snarling wolf emerges and another house opening to a burning hearth, to which a pig has backed up to warm its tail end. Not knowing, it seems, that the hearth could be the end of his tale.
Is the image, then, about innocent people unwittingly letting themselves be victimized?
So much is happening in this painting. A viewer could be entertained for some time trying to make sense of connecting images. In one of many ironic pairings, a female nude is painted next to a lineup of slaughtered hogs hanging by their legs, altering our usual reactions to both.
A surreal addition is the collection of giant false teeth that clatter throughout the composition - an ominous and funny note. Biting satire, perhaps? The self-portrait of Blackwell at far left would reinforce that idea; with his handlebar moustache and wryly humorous expression, this South Carolina funeral director-turned-artist is a virtuosic conveyer of dark comedy.
New Yorker Colin Chase's sculpture ``House of Many Stories no. 2'' is mysterious and spiritual in feeling. A stairway rises from a dirt-filled coffin form; a house with no windows or doors is on the top step. The steps are held up by a shovel with a porcupine surface of nails hammered all over its handle.
Chase suggests rising to another spiritual plane after death. Dirt, coffin and shovel likely represent earthly things. The nails suggest certain African sculptures, encouraging an Afrocentric interpretation.
Washington, D.C., artist Renee Stout also works with African imagery. Her attraction to spiritual societies, including voodooism, is evident in her work. Her sculptures have a primal, fetishistic appearance. These objects look authentic, as if they might have been used for healing or other purposes.
Stout's ``Elegba at the Crossroads'' is a mandala form - a cross over a circle, dividing a world into four realms. Pouches dangle from the cross, suggesting the sorts of pouches that would contain herbs and other medicinal objects.
``What stimulates my imagination is not actually knowing. Because there is a mystery, there are no rules set,'' the artist writes. And her interest in spiritual matters? ``It seems like a means of survival in a world that you can't always understand.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
LEWALLEN GALLERY
Renee Stout's ``Elegba at the Crossroads,'' which divides the world
into four realms, is on view at the Hampton University Museum.
by CNB