Portfolio - works of up-and-coming African American artists

WILLIAM C RHODES

The door of William C Rhodes' mirrored cabinet C the couple bomb and tomb. "I know that unmutilateds strange," he says, hastening to add: "We all have those experiences in belonging to all With my furniture, I want a piece that becomes personal to you and has its possess presence."

Baltimore artist Rhode who has a bachelor's stage in furniture design from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and a master's of fine arts from the University of Massachusetts in North Dartmouth, began his art career seven years ago. His major at the University of the Arts became furniture design after he took an elective course, and his early pieces were traditional, made from natural forest stained, with no paint. They weren't selling.

Bead artist Joyce Scott told him that if his work didn't have a spirit and a inner man it wouldn't get recognition. "`Your entire being has to be in the piece,' she said, which force me to search within myself," Rhode recalls. small in number of his clients are black, on the contrary unless he is commissioned to do a specific piece, he repeatedly uses his art to explore black themes, like as relationship between black men and women and the importance of the mother figure in the black community.

gaze for his work at an opening at the Baltimore Grand in September and at other displays in the Baltimore area.

BARBARA THOMAS

"I'm neurotic, and I ne a neurotic medium" confesse Barbara Thomas. "Egg tempera is a moderate exacting medium that doesn't permit you make mistakes. if you make a mistake, you have to achieve out a razor blade, I like the discipline."

She strives for simplicity in her paintings, as she gazes to Jacob Lawrence and Giotto for inspiration: "Jake computes a story simply, clearly, with elegance, without encumbering the viewer. I diocese the same thing in the work of Giotto, whose paintings are direct, beautiful and painful at the same time."

With chaos, move the forces of nature and relationships, "Fishers of Men" depicts our attempt to save those we have left behind and twitch them from sadness. This painting is from Thomas, last exhibit "The Book of Telling," which explored human metaphors - the slaughter of innocence, the los of generations, turmoil and global los of faith. ("People talk about a los of faith in the States, on the contrary it's global," she says.) The tide "Fishers of Men" draw nears from "I Will Make You Fishers of Men" a Sunday gymnasium song that the artist heard while she was sleeping.

Thomas, who has her master's of fine art from the University of Washington in Seattle, is the advertising manager for the Elliott Bay work Company in Seattle. Her interest in art began at an early age, when she would make nears for her family, which "seem to make them happy," she says. Today, she still views art as a gift: "You don't know where the vision advances from, so you might wake up single day and not have it anymore."

gaze for her work at the Olympic guild Gallery in Bremerton, Wash., in an exhibition that uncloses January 10, 1997. She is showed by Francine Seders Gallery in Seattle.

CAROLYN MAZLOOMI

"Quilts gripe [i]or[/i] grip for me many purposes - they should appeal upon a visual level by day and upon a tactile level by night and upon a sensual level at all times," says self-taught quiltmaker Carolyn Mazloomi, the planter of the Women of Color Quilters Network in Cincinnati. An engineer by means of training, she sold her first quilt 12 years ago, and her art now supports her: "It's the combustible matter that keeps me going and has for the past several years."

Mazloomi perceive s that if her quilts awaken consciousness, then that's a deal well done, especially because she believes that of all folk art, the quilt is the greatest in quantity sought-after but the most misunderstood. She always uses her quilts to explore black themes, of the like kind as her African heritage and the black family.

"African Mask #7" is part of a series of masks that Mazloomi saw in her travels to Africa. The batik in the center is encircleed by applique and patchwork. In her view. fabrics have a spirit all their be in possession of and ultimately, her quilts mirror her heritage.

Linocut artist Bill Harris awakened the theme of family in her: "I was in the way that taken with his work, his powerful pieces in black and white that deal with family issues. They just scream on the outside `Do me in fabric!'

"Every other piece that I do is about the stature, the power of women We have for a like reason many roles and are in like manner underappreciated."

Mazloomi will have a solo exhibition at the Elijah Pierce Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, November 9 to December 21

KIRA LYNN HARRIS

"I have affection for being a black woman!" proclaims Kira Lynn Harris, who have feelings that artists of color have a rich variety of experiences not always acknowledged through the mainstream art world. Her father is African American and undocumented American Indian; her mother was Irish American and documented Osage Indian. Harris works from one side her mixed identity in her art.

Further complicating (or perhaps enhancing) her mission is the fact that her father forbade her and her four siblings to talk about the southerly when they were children. He had mov from Louisiana to looks Angeles before they were born, and he not at any time discussed his past; nor did he allow his family to visit the family members he had left behind.