ArtScope: Review - Out of The Fire
The African American Master Artists in Residence Program at Northeastern University (AAMARP) has been a dynamic and unique nexus for artists of the African diaspora for 50 years, according to its current director, Dr. Reginald Jackson, himself a collagist, photographer, filmmaker, professor emeritus at Simmons college, and one of AAMARP’s original practitioners.
Some of the artists that AAMARP has fostered include John Wilson, who created the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Capitol Rotunda, and Theresa-India Young, celebrated in part for her multicultural weavings. Jackson said the program is unique in that it allows resident artists to stay as long as they want, “as they develop their craft, engage in community and mentor younger artists.” They’re provided with studio space and three large, beautiful galleries to exhibit in. Its distinguished artists interact with the Boston, Jamaica Plain and Roxbury communities, bringing drumming, Kwanzaa celebrations, youth education, social justice actions, and of course art, to their neighborhoods. They’ve exhibited from Sudan and Ghana to London, New York, Cuba and the Caribbean — as a group and as individuals — constantly.
They are collected globally, and locally, by museums such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Smithsonian Institute. The facility and mission of AAMARP so impressed Ian Torney, the director of the Nesto Gallery at Milton Academy, as did Nesto’s solo exhibition of one of AAMARP’S artists, Marlon Forrester, that he decided to create an AAMARP Group Exhibit, with Forrester. “The prime mission,” Torney said, is student involvement, and to familiarize the community at large with AAMARP.
Curator Forrester’s intentions are similar. He said the exhibition, which he named “Out of the Fire,” is an opportunity for people to understand the rich cultural history and perspective of the Black community, as well as for AAMARP to rise like the phoenix out of adversity that it has faced, and to redefine itself not only as a springboard of great influence for other organizations, such as Northeastern University, and a bedrock of the community, but with different iterations of Black consciousness than those of the past.
Black artists have been woefully underrepresented in public institutions, and AAMARP can help ameliorate that. The exhibition at Milton Academy will help begin that discussion to further build cultural bridges. There are 13 artists being shown in “Out of the Fire,” each contributing a piece of sculpture, mixed media, photography, collage, digital art or painting.
Dr. Jackson’s film, “A Peculiar Freedom,” documenting free New England African Americans who achieved wonderful things from 1785 to 1885, will play throughout the exhibition. There’s fabric artist Susan Thompson, whose large quilt, “My Soul Reveals Itself,” reflects the vibrancy of Black urban life today with a nod to ancestral roots and influences. Radiant Jasmin, who is “intrigued by the way shapes fit together” presents “Tower of Color,” a kind of collage puzzle of a brightly painted stela.
Ricardo “Deme5” Gomez, whose outdoors supra-real/surreal spray painting of a train emerging over a fire escape perfectly captures an urban gestalt of the abandoned MBTA train yard beneath, has created a small print of this work for the exhibition. His work was featured in the recently concluded “AEROSOL: Boston’s Graffiti DNA, its Origin and Evolution” exhibition at ShowUp Gallery in Boston’s SoWa District. Self-taught Jeff Chandler crafted a totemic sculpture, “Faces of Akin Duro,” as an homage to his brother, Dana Chandler, the painter andactivist educator who founded AAMARP after his studio was vandalized.
There’s work by Gloretta Baynes, Hakim Raquib and Khalid Kodi, a Sudanese American painter using color and shape for magic realism and an organizer of participatory art events to create new rituals of cantharis for racism and genocide here and in Sudan. Sometimes reminiscent of ancient cave art, his work combines the personal with myth, with past, with present, in visionary dreamscapes whose characters, human and animal, morph into one another.
There is a dance of motion, color and story in so much of the work of these artists; I see the exhibition as an expression of vitality which has superseded oppression. And yes, the art has collective, cohesive, activist intentions. Dr. Jackson said, “We are also looking at the African diaspora. Many of us have travelled and we’ve experienced what I call African retentions that remain alive and well here in North America. “And so, wherever you find people of color, you find vestiges of African culture which is alive and well… through culture, and through religious expression and so forth; and so many of us work from that thread, from that thought, that we’re connected globally through the African diaspora, and that nurtures our artists. And we believe very deeply that art is not only the cure but it’s the balm that resolves much of the chaos and conflicts that exist in the world.”