Spreading the word

A lecturer champions African-American art

By Christine Temin, Globe Staff, 10/15/2003

The title of Richard Powell's lecture at the Museum of Fine Arts this Sunday is telling: "Interiors in African American Painting (with Respect to Vermeer and Ellington)."

Museums -- even "encyclopedic" ones such as the MFA -- generally herd all modern and contemporary African-American art into its own corner, not tying it to work from other countries and centuries. It's the introductory 101 course, not the specialized seminar. The MFA has been guilty of this approach, in, for instance, a 1988 survey of work by African-American artists who live in Massachusetts. Race and residence were all they had in common, and the result was a show so scattered that it made little sense.

Powell's talk, which will connect different continents, eras, and media, will be a wake-up call. "Most museums," the Duke University art historian says by phone, "still operate under the old notions of geography and chronology, and it's difficult to think outside that box. Those of us in academe have to urge museums to broaden their vistas."

"Fine" arts museums, as opposed to ethnographic ones, have been slow to recognize African-American work. The National Gallery's current Romare Bearden exhibition is the first major look in over a decade at the man who's probably the best-known black painter the United States has produced.

Powell is part of a movement to expand the public's understanding of the richness and diversity of African-American art. If his name sounds familiar to Bostonians, it'sbecause he was co-curator of the brilliant and ambitious 1999 exhibition "To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities." The project, co-organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover and the Studio Museum in Harlem, sent massive amounts of art to the Williamstown Art Conservation Center for treatment and then sent the show on a two-year tour that included the Addison.

What brings Powell to Boston again is an invitation to deliver the first Axelrod Lecture, funded by a grant from John Axelrod, an MFA overseer and a collector and champion of African-American art, the focus of this lecture series.

Axelrod's epiphany came a decade ago, at a show in New York's Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. "I thought I had a great eye in 20th-century American art," he recalls, "but then I saw all this stuff from the period and country I specialize in, and I didn't recognize any of the names. I decided I couldn't have a great collection without including work by these artists."

He's funded the lectures through the next five years to share his discovery. "Exposure leads to recognition, and recognition leads to acquisitions," he says.

Axelrod has encouraged museums not to pigeonhole 20th-century art by African-Americans. Of the dozen objects he lent to the "Art Deco" exhibition that began at London's Victoria & Albert Museum and ends at the MFA next year, one was a copper mask by African-American artist Sargent Johnson, who borrowed not only from African tradition but from that tradition as filtered through Picasso.

"To see that mask not in an African context, but the context of Art Deco, tweaked the minds and imaginations of all involved," Powell says.

"The MFA wanted a very broad talk," he adds on the subject of his pending visit. His topic certainly qualifies: It's hard to think of another case of Vermeer and Ellington being discussed together, and in terms of box office, both have name recognition, big-time.

"This will please the museum," Powell says, "but also please me, in thinking about interiors in terms of Vermeer, Delft, and conspicuous consumption in 17th-century Holland." The timelessness, serenity, detailed decors, and that exquisite soft light in Vermeer's paintings is a suitable point of departure for discussing almost any other depictions of interiors. But Duke Ellington?

"He's thought of as an entertainer," Powell says, "but he was a musical poet, and his work is filled with visualization and imagery."

Powell's current project is a book about African-American portraiture from the 18th century onward. Portraiture also figures strongly in the small selection of African-American works on paper now hanging in the Lower Rotunda of the MFA, all from the museum's permanent collection. Alan Rohan Crite, Joseph Norman, Martin Puryear, John Wilson and Richard Yarde are the artists. The show isn't billed as a big deal, so it's unfair to criticize it for not being one. The Rotunda, though, seems to have become a catch-all space for hanging the overflow from shows in adjacent galleries or work by the midcareer Massachusetts women who win the museum's Maud Morgan Prize.

Wilson's 1972 black crayon study for the sculpture "Eternal Presence" is a giant, iconic head that fills the paper top to bottom. Staccato, stitch-like marks run over the face, while crisp zigzags define the hair. The variations of texture and touch that Wilson coaxes out of this simplest of media is powerful.

Yarde works in watercolor, defying all the pastel prettiness that medium suggests. His portrait of boxer Jack Johnson is in his signature style, an irregular patchwork of paint: The patterning suggests mosaics and quilting. Here the frontal figure stands against a golden ground, wearing an elaborate red dressing gown. With hands in his pockets, his face stares out as if he's curious about who's looking back.

Johnson was the first black boxer to become a world heavyweight champion. A flamboyant figure, he fought his way into a white world. That fight that could equally stand as a metaphor for what it takes for black artists to get their work hung in major museums when it's not Black History month -- and to have it discussed in the widest possible cultural context, as Powell will do this Sunday.