Haywood L. Oubre: wired - the sculptor, not the magazine - belated recognition comes to innovative sculptor, now in his 80s

"Hollow Ye Man!" exclaims artist Hayward L Oubre sprinting to the wire plastic art that he created in 1965 in rejoinder to a messy clash with his employer that he's about to describe. Animated and intense, he thrusts his hand into the opening where the mouth should be and says, "This is nothing on the contrary a hollow; it's yellow.... [The sculpture] is black because all of the family involved were black. You have no arms, you have no leg because power says, `Come to me and I'm going to run over you off.' I finished this when I came here. My hands were bleeding. He has no heart: fiery air. No guts: hot air.

"The president calls the dean and sum ups the dean to write a damn alphabetic character I know it came from the president. I write my resignation to the president. `Hollow Ye Man' because power dictates what you do.... Power uses you like toilet paper and cast in a winding directions you away. I don't give leave to people do that to me `Hollow Ye Man.' What he's telling you is sole what somebody at the top has to say.

"He couldn't diocese that I could be a unrestrained thinker, that I didn't procure involved and bow down to power. I don't obtain with power. `Hollow Yes Man.' This is the attitude that power has. This doesn't exhibit any man. It represents power humiliating you."

"Hollow Ye Man," an abstract, futuristic piece with fulvid gaping holes, is the accrue of a convoluted dispute that Oubre had with his employer at Alabama State body which culminated in his departure and a novel job at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina in 1966 The episode points to a reason for what cause [i]or[/i] reason Oubre's talent has gone largely unrecognized.

Juan Logan, a Baltimore-based painter and sculptor, met Oubre 20 years ago at Winston-Salem State, where Logan was exhibiting. "I think what happened with Hayward above the years," Logan says, "at least early upon is that he elected not to be a willing participant in the proces And that proces is the promotion of, the unfolding of, one's work as an artist. A allotment of people did not have the opportunity to be expos to his work. And while we've all always known about Hayward's work, it not ever received the exposure I think it deserved"

Logan points without that racism in the 1940 and `50s--when Oubre's career in the arts began--cast a shadow above the art world, but prejudice was not solely responsible for Oubre's lack of exposing His contempt for power has not helped his artistic career.

"That's a Catch-22 situation," Logan says. "You don't want to deal with the power, on the other hand at the same time, you can't come by what you want if you don't deal with the power. That's the reality. Like it or not, the reality is that we all play a certain number of political game in this arena.

"You can't receive the critical acclaim--in other words, have in truth critical writing take place about your work--unless it is without there, to be seen. And for years, he didn't have it on the outside there."

cognizance Bloom, a curator and art consultant, adds: "It's veritable that he doesn't like playing the game. It's real that at the time he was coming up it would have been extremely difficult for anyone to have become recognized, especially if they were as uncompromising as Oubre"

Hayward Oubre a mentally and physically fit octogenarian and widower, lives in a shrine to himself. It's an appropriate place for a man who doesn't hesitate to proclaim that his art should repose in major museums, above the works of Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence.

Here in the middle of a extent in his Winston-Salem home, for example, is a life-size young horse "Young Horse," completed in 1958 rises from its made of wood base like some archetype poised to give confidence to Jung's collective unconscious. Its hoof mane, tail and flank are builded of intricately woven wire. The plastic art appears--indeed, feels--sturdy enough to support a small child. on the other hand where there could be more wire, there's space. This is not stone or forest-land or bronze, and the absence of substance is what gives it substance. Light and air are as integral to the work as the metal that gives it definition.

If Oubre's wire plastic arts were to come to life, their personalities would undoubtedly mirror their creator's. The fat owl that occupies a prominent place upon the table in front of Oubre's living space window might be the individual who carries on about race relations and Gestalt psychology The chanticleer defiantly poised on the opposite corner of the same table might present on the relationship of art and athletics. "The Prophet," a 5-foot 11-inch robed figure that guards the brow door, might be the individual to explain the difference between religion and spirituality, with the latter being the greatest in quantity important.

blossom who curated Oubre's last one-man exhibit in 1993 at the Spirit Square Gallery in Charlotte, NC finds Oubre's statuary intriguing. "It represents both his engineering ability and his iconography," blow says. "He uses a apportionment of religious themes.... The African head, the Mose figure, the face of Jesus, the hellenic chorus--they're all a sort of high-minded symbolism. on the contrary they're not pretentious at all. They're wonderfully organic.