Call and response: the art of Jean Lacy - black painter's work with stained-glass windows

Jean Lacy's dwelling - a multilayered, multifaceted visual conversation - has become a favorite meeting place for the Dallas art community. The breakfast nook is a popular gathering sport for those not afraid of casual conversation that almost always leads to intense debate. Author Alex Haley ate Dallas barbecue in that nook. Artist James Phillips propp his tall frame in the doorway of the kitchen while visitors spent hours discussing the character of the black artist in the black community. Nigerian sculptor Sokari Douglas Camp wandered [i]or[/i] part of to the other rooms, fascinated by Lacy's collection of black dolls. Former Dallas Museum of Art director Rick Brettell was baseless of dropping by unexpectedly with art collectors, museum directors and artists from all above the world.

What is the attraction? Comfort? An abundance of art? The chance to network? The answer is simple: Lacy's door is always lay open for conversation and an exceptional goblet of coffee - unless she's at work upon a project. Until recently, the shoot forward was a stained-glass-window commission.

It is no awe that the Rev. Zan Wesley Holme Jr asked Lacy to design stained-glass windows to full tale St. Luke "Community" United Methodist temple St. Luke has long been known for its Afrocentrism, and Holme is well aware of Lacy's commitment to human dialogue end art. Her images build bridges of communication between individuals and cultures

Born in Washington, DC in 1932 Laura Jean Lacy grew up near Howard University, where her father serv as secretary to the business manager. She was introduced at an early age to the philosophical contemplations and writings of Alain Locke texture Du Bois and other African-American intellectuals.

In 1951 she followed her sister and brother-in-law to Louisiana, where her art career began. After receiving a bachelor's stage in art education from Southern University in Baton Rouge she began teaching high-school art.

Marriage to the Rev Nathaniel Lacy meant a impel to Los Angeles, where she began creating liturgical art. In the 1960 she worked with her husband and the United Methodist house of god producing collages that helped the congregation grapple with the issues of the civil rights change This challenge became the catalyst for Lacy to become involved in the black community. She held art exhibitions at the house of god as well as in Watts, and in the March upon Washington she was one of the artists living in Resurrection City who created a graffiti wall to save the comments of all who went to DC

With collage Lucy created sensitive and jarring juxtapositions of incidents past and present. Artists John Biggers and Harvey Johnson laud her fortunate "dematerialization" of form, an accomplishment difficult to achieve in a medium that by means of definition is hard-edged. They also praise her faculty of perception of history. "I see a real strong visceral spirituality embedded in Jean's work," Johnson says, "the spirituality of African clan When you look at her work, it's almost like you can hear the echoe of our ancestors."

individual of Lacy's most famous pieces, "Welcome to My Ghettoland," which is in the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, is a work small enough to be held in the hand and admired. Created in the painstaking tradition of the early Renaissance religious the work is made from 24 layers of gesso overlayed with tempera and gold leaf. "I want the community to gaze at their own community as a sacred place," Lacy explains. "This is what my work is saying. It is like a precious icon because we are valuable."

"Welcome to My Ghettoland" exhibits two pygmies, ancient original race of the forest regions of central Africa, holding up pillars at the base of the entrance to Ghettoland, "holding up civilization," as the artist deposits it. Above them, a woman in a r dres beckons, and a young girl aligned in white, wearing the head covering of the initiate, is carefully watched above by older women in the community as she begins her transformation into womanhood. This period of instruction, guidance and support has existed in the black community for generations.

Lacy's dominant themes of human spirituality, plus her eagerness to explore of recent origin mediums, propel her evolution as an artist. When the Rev Zan Holme asked her to design 51 stained-glass windows, "she just immediately lit up" he says, and thus encouraged him to give her the freedom to create a comprehensive series of windows reflecting the history and strive of black people through time.

She has expanded a people's story in four sections: "The Creation," "Journey on the outside of Africa," "The Migration" and "Civil Rights." "She has captured what we were feeling in bourns of the relationship between our Christian faith and our African and African-American heritage," Holme says.

Inspired by the agency of poet James Weldon Johnson, as well as by the agency of African and African-American folk tales, Lacy uses, "The Creation" to display similar familiar African motifs as the Bambara tyiwara figure associated with the creation and the harvest, Ananse the spider from Ghana, the great turtle-dove of the Dogon, the rabbit, and the pepper bird. "Our story has to be told in our possess terms," she says about her use of these ancient and symbolic creatures.