"Contemporary Visual Expressions" is a spirited exhibition to inaugurate the Anacostia Museum's new building -- it contains recent works by four accomplished, midcareer black artists whose takes on art and the world are self-confidently individualistic.
"Avatar" consists of seven gray-painted, plasterboard steles, each about 11 feet high, set in a circle. Each side of each slab serves as a wall upon which are hung mask- or shield-like ceramic forms amidst spare, flat, off-center arrangements of decorative tiles. The central, circular floor is made of strong-colored ceramic tiles -- ordinary store-bought elements for the most part, broken into jagged-edged shards, but dotted with old crockery pieces and clay forms glazed and fired by the artist. A temporary partition, gracefully curved, painted a darker gray and minimally accented with tiny ceramic pieces, forms a sheltering background.
The piece is elegant, but it also is impassioned. The circular armature of plinths creates a strong sense of ceremony or ritual; the bits of broken cups introduce a poignant, autobiographical note; the tiny, glazed blocks scattered on floor and background wall are like atoms in a ceramic cosmos. The strongest individual elements are the "African" wall works. Each is a persuasive composition of irregular clay forms whose surfaces have been scraped or tinted and then adorned in countless ways with bits and pieces of glazed or unglazed clay. These, too, contribute to the ensemble, which is strikingly centered on a void. The artist's yearning for wholeness is palpable.
Jackson-Jarvis' piece is all suggestion -- the possible story lines are many and simultaneous. In Morrison's paintings the narratives are spelled out in detail and profusion. Morrison recently returned to figuration after a period of abstract painting, and in his new works he explores his complex cultural heritage -- Caribbean, Afro-American -- with a rich, imagistic inventiveness. This very variety gives the painter some problems; he's in dead-certain command of his subject matter, yet he seems to be casting about for an authoritative personal style. But it's strong stuff.
Political statements are given strength by simplification: the fearsomely exaggerated sunglasses shadowing scorpion and butterfly in "Ton-Ton Macoute," the human skeleton on a dinner plate in "Bones." Memories of a Jamaican boyhood are recalled, as in a dream or in folklore, in "Echo of a Scream," with a gray skeleton dancing in the mouth of a bloated fish-within-a-fish. The emotional and spiritual complexities of Afro-American Christianity are depicted in "Spirituals," with its solitary figure ecstatically positioned upon a giant, opened holy book surrounded by diverse African and American symbols.
"Ritual of Death is a Black Tie Affair" is a big, surrealistic, seriocomic, personalized history painting, with theatrically disembodied figures -- a tuxedoed skeleton, an elastic Janus-headed steed, an earth mother and a woman with a hilariously elongated, chartreuse-stockinged, high-heeled leg -- surrounding a tense confrontation between a strong-backed personification of death and a human being stuck with a death's head grin.
Gilliam and Williams are a contrasting pair of abstract painters. Gilliam is represented by a single work, aptly if ironically titled "Saga" -- there's no narrative thread but it is heroic in feeling: This painting is big and red and it commands a wall. It consists of five weighty vertical panels. The surface has been fiercely attacked -- stained, spattered, poured, scraped and thunderously brushed. The colors are strident -- yellows screech out of the dominant reds; splotches of purples, blues, greens play an exciting, unpredictable staccato. Driskell is right to say the work is the "equivalent in painted form to the myriad expressions of blues, gospel and jazz" -- among other things, Gilliam is the John Coltrane of painting.
Williams has four paintings in the show, two made in 1974 and two a decade later. The earlier paintings are superb minimalist statements. Each has a dominant, mysterious hue -- a silvered purple and a gilded purple, respectively -- and each consists of interlocked geometrical shapes. The surfaces have been controlled to the nth degree to catch light and shadow; if these icons are slow to attract the eye, they are riveting once it has been caught. By contrast, the surfaces of the later paintings, though also relatively subdued in color, are thick and active with pours and smears. The imprint of the artist's gloved, upraised hand is omnipresent. These paintings are no less controlled -- they're not flashy, but they are dense, rough and urban.
The exhibition opens tomorrow from 2 to 5 p.m. and continues through July 31. Regular hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. The museum's new address is 1901 Fort Place SE, in Fort Stanton Park.